character without a plot finds a plot
This short story got an end recently:)
It takes a certain resilience to grow up in the wet. The consistency of which brings to mind trench foot and toadstools and muddy soil. It takes some spine to breathe in water and push it back out again and slurp your boots out of the muck and go forth-- creeping or with gusto-- but go forth nonetheless.
Sometimes when the wet is soft and the clouds turn purple and black against the hay fields the drama sucks you in. You breathe in moist peat and exhale saltwater and sky. But mostly the wet is gray; broken up by red cedar bark and deep blue fir, pressing downwards and sideways and sometimes just sedentary in the air. Closing in all around, pushing you out anyway into the still.
When spring arrives, it does so literally. Bubbling out of the ground, running down hills, clearing the roads of baby tree frogs and winter decay in one big gulp. The reeds are thick with blackbirds, the air pierced by the screaming of their young. Whether they cry in the fear of falling or in the ecstasy of flight, Ez could never tell.
Ez was born to a quiet woman, so he grew up quiet too. He mowed lawns in the summer, chopped wood in the winter and in spring, he raised tadpoles into frogs in a terrarium outside the basement window. The house was never finished - it ran down with the endless rain and forgotten plans. But the deck provided good shade for the basement and the marshier the pond got, the easier it was for Ez to fish the jello-like orbs out of the water and escort them to their new glass abode. At school, he kept his hood pulled over bright orange hair, and wore his pants long to cover the frogs on his socks but at home he became obsessed with the possibility of metamorphosis.
Each March afternoon, the bus dropped Ez off on the side of the highway, next to the marshy bit where one can never be sure where solid ground ends and mud begins. He always kept an orange in his backpack for the walk home. Each day, he ate it in the same way, dropping pieces of peel behind him like orange breadcrumbs marking the path between two worlds. He was meticulous in his peeling, he liked the way the smell of citrus stayed under his fingernails and the texture of the juice vesicles under his tongue. He knew that an orange almost always has ten segments, and that orange seeds are called “pips.” Knowing things like that kept Ez organized and helped him focus and while he appreciated the consistency of the average supermarket fruit, he was always on the lookout for a 7-segment orange. Sevens were Ez’s lucky numbers. You really shouldn’t mess with them, he thought.
Walking through the bog in March, Ez almost couldn’t think for all the racket. Everything was squelching and moving and birthing and being born-- he had to go slowly. More often than not when his orange was done, he’d take out his magnifying glass and his copy of Flora and Fauna of the Pacific Northwest: 3rd Edition Illustrated and find something interesting to look at. By the time Ez was 11, he had mastered the life cycle of honeybees and walked about spelling out taraxacum officinale and narcissus in his head. Knowing things kept Ez organized. Mostly he liked spring because in spring, everything changed. Eggs into birds, seeds into plants, caterpillars into butterflies, roe into salmon, and most importantly, jello into tadpoles into frogs.
Noun: metamorphosis; plural noun: metamorphoses
(in an insect or amphibian) the process of transformation from an immature form to an adult form in two or more distinct stages.
A change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one
Meta: change (Greek)
Morphe: form (Greek)
Ez knew the taxonomy of a dragonfly, and he could ruminate for hours in the marsh chewing names of grasses and wildflowers under his tongue like cud. But at 11 years old, Ez couldn’t speak. Wouldn’t or couldn’t-- an important distinction to make, and one neither his mother nor teacher nor great aunt nor playground bullies could figure out. It was a bit of both, really. Words crunched on his tongue. He’d remained quiet for so long, they felt jagged and morphed gurgling out of his throat. Once out, what Ez hated most about words was their tendency to fly away from him. Try as he might to contain them, on the occasions when sounds did escape his lips they seemed instantly swaddled in wind and swept beyond his reach, dispersed, disruptive, dangerous. So Ez stayed quiet.
Ez wanted not for friends. He felt he had plenty in the crickets and owls and mice-- they left messages for him with tunnels in deep grass and pellets filled with tiny bones. Decidedly tangible messages, Ez thought, much preferred to the uncertainty of the spoken word. When he needed something important, he simply wrote it down, and he needed little. Only open space, his beloved field books, his oranges, his tadpoles, and his marsh. As Ez grew older, he grew quieter too. At first his mother worried, her ears aching in the silence born from the absence of her sons’ infant laughs and hiccups. Yet she felt she could not push him, and so he grew and grew and grew from babe to boy to man, wordless and content. Ez, for his part, still considered metamorphosis.
Like men, seasons in the northwest change slowly, and then all at once. Summer bursts into flame in August. Smoke hangs thick in late August air, both urgent in its sting and lazy in its stillness. Life rests suspended over dry grass, space disappears into haze over hills turned blue in the light and the smoldering orb of the sun hangs low, so low, that you feel as though you could reach out and wrap it in your arms. But suddenly, amongst all this smoking and smoldering, you look around and realize in a day it is not the flame of August but the crisp light of fall and not fire but fluorescent, red maple leaves dancing in the sky. And fall, the crisp, bright, poignant kind, that is, lasts no more than a week before the rain sets in. The rain permeates. It has no mercy, it leaves no victim untouched. It turns lowlands into lakes and streets into streams, and mudrooms learn the meaning of their own names. Most trees are coniferous; evergreens. They stand watch through the torrents, rivulets of water pouring from their needles at the slightest disturbance, say, made by a young man walking underneath. It takes resilience to grow up in such wet.
Ez lived away from town, away from the elementary school he felt no great love for, a few miles’ walk from the marsh he’d explored so deeply as a boy. He was strong, if slightly unkempt, kind, although nobody knew it. In adulthood, he still kept a terrarium under his porch, and his collection of field guides grew to include his own meticulous notes and observations collected and penned over the years. Although he didn’t speak, Ez saw himself as a sort of translator. “The rain does not speak with words” he thought, “nor does the tadpole, hawk, swan, or snail, yet they communicate incessantly.” “Why should I be any different?” His life was simple: not lonely, not fearful, but contained. As years went on, his collections of observations grew to cover the four walls of his one room house, then the floor, then the porch outside, neatly scratched into the wood with a penknife. He was writing a manifesto of sorts. Perhaps despite his oddities, he, too, harbored a deep craving to be known.
In January, the rain in the northwest often turns to sleet. They are the shortest days that stretch the longest, the color of the sky changing only slightly from black to gray to blue to inky night once again. Ez liked the consistency of January, as he liked the consistency of everything. If it was to be dismal, at least it was predictably so. And he was not bothered by the rain. It drummed music, the only music he listened to, onto his corrugated roof and dripped into the barrels under the gutters with a rather satisfying Plink. Plink. Plink. As Januarys came and went, Ez found it more and more difficult to chop firewood for his woodstove. He covered his ceiling in notes, searching for a perfection in his study he could not grasp despite his years of toil and observation. The wind he felt might steal his phrases in his youth now seemed to taunt his efforts, tearing paper off his walls when he forgot to shut his windows and leaving ridiculous gaps in his lifelong pursuit of some tangible narrative. I don’t know how.. he often thought to himself, pouring over words from 20 years before. How can I transcribe what I hear and see and feel so clearly, when the very air seems to mock me at every turn? He could not remember what he’d written, what he’d thought, how he thought. Alone in his house, looking back at his life, he felt untethered, his life work still indecipherable even in the mind of its own creator.
At 77 years old, Ez could not recall the sound of his own voice. The longer he went without speaking, the more unsettled he felt about the runaway nature of conversation. He had of course learned to take care of himself, he continued to eat an orange each day on his morning walk and he now had many spots to sit and converse silently with the field mice on the walk he took like clockwork each afternoon. But if words to Ez felt crunchy at 11 and dangerous as a young man, they felt now like shards of the sharpest glass in his throat. The thought of producing his own sound, after so many years of listening, caused him such distress he felt the breeze no longer just threatening blow away his words, but reaching down his throat and twisting its fingers into his very psyche.
In March of his 77th year, Ez made his annual pilgrimage to the marsh. His collections had become obsessive. He counted each embryo suspended visibly in each ball of jello, made notes on their size, shape, location, weight, and color. He tried to predict which would hatch, which tadpoles would eat their siblings to fuel their taxing morph into frogs, which would succumb. As the eggs hatched, he noted the dates and times, assigning each tadpole a number. He spent hours each day sitting under his deck, peering into his collection of glass tanks, squinting in his efforts to see the moment back leg began protruding from tail in each specimen.
Ez became so enraptured in this process, in fact, he failed to collect his usual plethora of outside observations. He did not notice, for example, the particular wetness of that spring. And oh, was it wet. It rained every day for two months straight. Buckets and buckets poured through the slats of the wooden deck above his head, until Ez’s chair became a small island, perched alone in a small sea, facing inward towards the house. Ez directed his attention to his tadpoles. This must be it. he thought. There must be some moment I am missing, when this change occurs, when one thing becomes another... He refused to miss it this year.
Instead, he missed the scent of mold wafting gently down from the old boards above his head. He missed the gnawing termites, usually one of nature’s only creations he felt were extinguishable, on the wooden post to his left, escaping the pond on the ground as they chewed higher and higher through the old cedar boards. He missed the slow transition of grass to dirt to mud occurring in the ground under his very feet, the hillside below him sliding off in bits and pieces, and one morning he woke to discover that despite his best efforts to observe, he had missed yet another tadpole lose it’s tail in favor of sticky, tiny, feet. This last, he decided, could not happen again.
Wrapped in his rain poncho, Ez and chair and notebook determined to sit through the night under one small umbrella to watch. March, in the northwest, is fickle. The rain can change from drab mist to turbulent downpour in hours, and the wind, Ez’s lifelong opponent, can begin softly, and then be whipping water into your eyes in a matter of moments. This day, clouds all afternoon dropped lower, impregnated with moisture gathered from the Pacific miles away. As the sun set, the moon rose concealed behind a fortress of rich darkness. The clouds gave birth.
All night, Ez squinted and squeezed. He propped a flashlight over his last tank, drops of the downpour pelting the surface made it difficult for him to make out even the shapes in the water let alone an already near imperceptible change, but as with all things in his life, Ez committed fully. He blinked. Another tiny claw had crept out from bulging body. Another blink, another revelation lost. Ez felt frustration he’d never before encountered. A despair crept through his bones with the chill as the rain, as it does with all things, permeated his flimsy umbrella and dripped tauntingly down his neck. Of the hundreds of embryos he’d collected, only 87 remained, most turned to frogs nearly ready to escape their glass prisons. At 5:43 am, only number 17 remained without one front leg. Ez was immobile, immersed, oblivious to the outside world when the world came crashing down.
Ez, chair, umbrella, notebook, glass, poncho, pen, and frog were swept up in a wave of water and rotten cedar. The hillside his deck once looked over became a slip’n’slide, as the old wood finally gave out, and as the sun rose, Ez found himself squarely deposited in the mud. Fickle March. As slivers of light crept over the disaster, Ez sat up amongst the glass shards of his obsession and saw frogs. Everywhere. 87, to be precise, as Ez always was, dragging useless tails downhill as they tested fresh legs for the first time. Hunched there in the nascent, muddy, dawn, Ez felt something creeping up his throat. He couldn’t name it, couldn’t place it, couldn’t tamp it down. Clawing, squirming, sliding, squelching, hiccuping, it slid over the back of his tongue and against his front teeth and with an unmistakable push, unapologetically let itself out the door of his lips. Ez began to laugh.
