THE LIGHTNING MADE IT BLOSSOM
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Through the slanted light and heat, the vulture idles on thermals, wings level to the horizontal, riding the air.
When the young woman’s shift ended at noon, she went to the break room and fell asleep on the couch. Her skin was smooth and tan. There was a tattoo of a butterfly on her ankle. She wore a silver ring on her right index finger.
The nurse kicked her awake. “You can’t sleep in here,” the nurse said. “This is a break room.”
“I’m sorry,” the young woman said, bleary, sitting up. “I didn’t mean to sleep.”
“This isn’t a hotel,” the nurse said.
“No, I know. But I’ve been here for almost two weeks. I’m just so tired.”
“I’ve been here for thirteen years,” the nurse said. “You don’t know tired.”
The young woman nodded. She got up and smoothed her skirt and stepped out of the break room.
The nurse watched her.
“What’s your name?” the nurse said.
“Alice.”
“Alice what?”
“Alice Walpole.”
“Well, Alice Walpole, you can sleep in your car, if you want.”
“Okay,” Alice Walpole said. She stepped outside. It was a brilliant autumn day.
Alice folded her uniform and placed it on the passenger seat of her car. She sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine roared to life. She released the emergency brake and pulled out of the parking lot, tires crunching on the gravel. She went east out of the parking lot, then south along the highway. After a while she pulled off into a rest area. She parked in the shade of a tree and went to sleep.
She dreamed about a crabapple tree in her grandfather’s yard. She dreamed that the tree was in full bloom. The blossoms were white and pink. She walked to the tree and stood beneath it. Her grandfather was there.
“It’s pretty,” she said.
“Yes,” her grandfather said. “It got hit by lightning.”
“It didn’t die,” she said.
“No,” her grandfather said. “The lightning made it blossom.”
She looked at the blossoms again.
“I’ll pick you some,” her grandfather said.
She watched him walk to the tree. He reached up and plucked one blossom. He brought it to her. She took it. Its stem was warm and alive in her hand.
“I’ll pick you a branch,” her grandfather said.
“Don’t pick it all,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said. He went back to the tree and broke off a branch. He gave it to her.
“There’s a bird,” her grandfather said.
She looked at the tree. A cardinal was perched on a low-hanging branch nearby, preening its feathers.
She woke up. She looked at her phone. She had been asleep for six hours.
In the distance, she saw a man standing at the edge of the highway. He was wearing a baseball cap. He was holding a sign.
She put her phone away. She got out of her car and locked it. She walked toward the man. When she was closer, she saw that the sign was a piece of cardboard. The man had written on it in thick black marker. The writing was hard to read.
“What does it say?” Alice Walpole said.
“It says: ‘I will believe anything, if you show me.’”
She nodded. She looked at the man. He was tall, and his baseball cap made his face seem small. He was eating a Snickers bar.
“Do you believe in God?” Alice said.
“No,” the man said.
“Do you want to?” she said.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Come with me,” she said. She began walking toward her car.
Aztecs believed that Xipe Totec, the flayed god of agriculture, dwelt among the stars, with his skin spread across a silver mountain and his heart in his mouth. He was the god that gave them maize and the god that gave them war.
Alice Walpole drove the man to her house. She made him a ham sandwich with mustard and ketchup, and a glass of iced tea with lemon. She told him that when she was nineteen years old, she was in a car accident. She was thrown from a moving car when it crashed, and she shattered her pelvis and broke her back. She was in the hospital for four months, and she could not walk for a year. Her bones healed, but her nerves did not. She had been hurt inside in a way that could not be seen. Ever since then, she had felt a wave of pain sometimes, and she could not tell where it was coming from.
“Have you seen a doctor?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “If I break my leg, the doctor can set it right. If I get a bruise, he can make it go away. But I don’t have a broken bone, and I’m not bruised. I just hurt.”
“I know the feeling,” he said. “I was married once. We had a child. My wife died, and the child went away.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Until this moment, I didn’t believe anyone knew that pain,” he said. “Now I know someone else does.”
“That’s funny,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone knew that pain until now, either.”
They both looked at the table. Alice Walpole cleared her throat.
“Learn how to make kimchi,” she said. She took her tea glass and sipped.
“I’d love to,” he said. “But how?”
“I’ll teach you,” she said.
There is a boulder in Death Valley, California, held up by the boulders around it, that has survived more than a million years. One day there will be an earthquake that shifts the balance of its neighbors, and it will slide down the valley. Then the wind will come over the dunes and erase all trace of it.
Alice Walpole made a batch of kimchi. She taught the man to chop carrots, pile on scallions, grind ginger with a mortar and pestle, and layer cabbage and chiles under cold layers of sea salt. She sliced radishes and cucumbers, and she told him how the Koreans sliced vegetables in a particular way, so that their shapes and colors were not lost. She showed him how the red pepper could be grated and how the chile powder made a rougher texture than the red pepper alone. She told him how to press the puffed rice with her hands. He watched her measure, mix, and pour the brine. He fished through the salted vegetables to feel the fresh stems and leaves under his fingers. She boiled the cabbage so that the sunned polished leaves were dark and glossy.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “I never thought of food as something beautiful.”
“You see the colors?” she said. “You see what we did?”
“I do,” he said.
She took his hands in her own and kissed his palms.
“I’ve never been kissed on the palm of my hand,” he said.
“Mmm,” she said. “This is not a conventional story.”
“I don’t want a conventional story.”
She walked to the refrigerator. She took out a jar of kimchi. She gave it to him.
“Keep it,” she said. “When you start to feel lonely, eat it.”
Chinese mythology tells of a man named Yi, a man known as the Divine Archer. The Chinese believed that Yi was able to hit a target at one thousand paces, and that his arrows could split a hair. They told stories about how Yi used his arrows to perform miracles, and how he used them to defeat the enemies of the Chinese people.
The man was asleep in Alice Walpole’s bed. She went outside and took the garbage out to the dumpster. She closed the lid, and she heard something crunch under her foot. She looked down. Two feathers were stuck to the tread of her boot. She picked them up. They were the same dark red as the cardinal’s feathers.
Alice went back into her house. She stood over the man, who was sleeping on his side. She looked at the feathers for a long time. Finally, she put them in his hand.
When he closed his eyes at night, the man saw patterns in the dark. He thought of traffic and storms, and of the cold loneliness he had felt. When he met Alice Walpole, that loneliness was gone from him. When he was near her, a warmth took its place. He loved her, but he knew that he would someday be alone again. So the man prepared in his heart to leave her. He had seen lovers leave each other, walked behind them as they held each other in the street and wept. He knew that it was something that had to be done, that you could not ask to stay with a person forever, even if they wanted to stay with you.
When he had reached a point where he could make kimchi on his own, she made him a batch of her favorite recipe, and he made a batch of his.
“We each have our own secret ingredient,” she said, and he understood her.
Yi could shoot an arrow through an iron shield. He could shoot an arrow through the heart of a dragon. It was said in one story that Yi could shoot an arrow and cause an earthquake, and that the arrow would travel underground until it reached his enemy.
Alice Walpole found a kite among her brother’s things. It was made of yellow paper, with white tails that were tipped with red. When she opened the window, the kite lifted up into the air, as if it were alive.
“My brother died on a mountain,” she said. “He was seeking things that he could not find. He wanted to be free of the prison of his body. He wanted to know what he could not know. He wanted to know why he had to die and to be forever separated from what he loved.”
“His kite is beautiful,” said the man.
“This is not a conventional story,” said Alice. “This is not a conventional story at all.”
She took the kite and ran out of the house, down the street, and into the park where she let it go. The kite climbed up into the sky. It glided along and then it soared on the breeze. It climbed higher and higher.
“What is your secret ingredient?” he asked, as he looked up into the sky.
“It’s something that I can’t give away. I can’t tell you yet.”
That night, the man slept on the couch and dreamed that he was the kite.
They went to a diner on the corner. It was late, and the kitchen was closed, but they wanted to sit in the booth by the window and watch the people smoking cigarettes outside the doors. They ordered a couple of sodas, and they slurped them from their glasses as the neon signs flickered on and off.
“I like to look at people,” said Alice. She reached across the table and took the man’s hand. “I’m not looking at their faces, though. I’m looking at where their faces meet their necks, where their faces meet their bodies. I’m looking at their elbows, at where their legs bend, at their feet, where their ankles meet their calves, or at the way their hands meet their forearms. I like to see the difference between one part of the human body and another. I like to take all of these things and put them together, like a puzzle.”
The man looked out the window. A woman was smoking a cigarette.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he said.
She said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever felt a complete moment of happiness?”
“I have.”
“Tell me when it was.”
The man looked out the window again. He watched the woman pull on her cigarette.
“There was a moment when I was driving across Michigan,” he said. “I was driving through farming country. The crops were planted all in lines. There were crossroads, with signs for towns. The sun was setting. The fields were golden and pale. I was humming a song.”
“What was the song?”
“I think it had to do with corn.”
Alice leaned forward. “What was it? What was the song?”
“I don't know.” He looked at her. “I can't remember.”
“Would you recognize it if I hummed it now?”
“Maybe,” he said.
She started to hum, very softly, in the back of her throat. The man listened, and he thought of the thin lines in the fields, and of the sun setting, the color of the corn, the white spirals of the clouds, the darkening blue sky.
“That's it,” he said. “That’s the song.”
“It’s my favorite song,” she said.
He stared at her in silence. She took his hand and held it to her heart.
“You are the Divine Archer,” she said.
He felt the blood running in his veins. He listened to the hum of the traffic. He felt the whole world spinning in space, parts turning together as a whole, a whole turning back into itself. In that single moment, he could feel the world from beginning to end, and how there was death and there was change, but that there was something else, too, something bigger than death or change. He felt it, and for that moment he became truly alive, both part of the stillness and part of the spinning.
The woman had finished her cigarette. She put her foot on the ground and stamped it out with her heel.
The man looked at Alice.
“How is any of this possible?” he asked her.
She kissed his palm.
“This,” she said, “is not a conventional story.”