Two Beautiful Things, Entangled at the Joints

By Cherry Cheesman

The longest and thickest bunch of wisteria I had ever seen grew off of two trees in a West Florida bay. The wisteria was a little under half a mile from the bay’s boardwalk and had grown over half of the tree’s mass before it began to branch off, not attached to anything at all except itself. The trees grew almost out of the sand, roots hollowing around and into the beach. It was amazing, something I felt I didn't have the right to see. I had no sense of logic for how it existed at all. In the strong breeze, the wisteria crossed the thin line between grass and beach, until the flowers swung above the ocean, and the small groupings of the plant thrashed around harshly, begging to touch the water. There was a sense that maybe it could.

My best friend and I had noticed the trees when the boardwalk’s Ferris wheel stopped with us at the top, and there was suddenly very little to think about besides the fact that we had spent all of our money for the day by eleven in the morning. The trees were almost as tall as the peak of the wheel, and it was nice to have a distraction from the first drippings of regret. After, we pressed our faces against a wooden table to seek relief from the sweat-infused air. We faced the ocean, drawing upon the good graces of the wind.

Despite the wind, the thinness of the sand, the beach was still packed—with sunbathing wives whose ocean-washed children held down the edges of the family’s towels, fishermen in various shades of bright swim shorts, iridescent fishing line to match. The sun had drawn up every bit of color in the ocean to its surface, like bubbles of carbonation. It looked the part too—a fictional neon that colored blue raspberry soda.

Most people stayed away from the wisteria, the flail of flowers. People turned their heads to watch, but did not move. Parents beckoned the little ones back if they moved too close. As though the wisteria was an unpleasantness no one wanted to be struck by.

“Call your mom, or I’m making you pay for my aloe vera gel,” my best friend said. Her arms and thighs left an imprint of sweat on the well-bleached table, viscous and fragrant with the residue of her sunscreen. Her white tank top and its tightness revealed her lungs, heavy at work. There were pen doodles on her arm. She had once drawn everyday, and done it well, but now she had little time alone to work on her sketchbook. I think art used to make her more observant.

“Call your mom. Mine drove us here; she’s not using her lunch break to come get us.” The smell of fried fish coming from a vendor made me miss the cash that I’d blown on the claw machine. The hair closest to my scalp had started to stick to my skin in hard sheets, ones that would crunch when I worked water through them in the shower. The underside of my thick, brown wrist watch trapped salt that rubbed against my skin. The sweat that dripped down to my nose felt thick, like it could be seeping out the lavender in my hair that matched my best friend’s. Of course, my hair was not as vibrant as hers—I had only dyed it because she had bought a tub of hair dye, and still had some when she was done with her own hair—leftovers she had no use for.

“Mine can’t leave work for no reason.”

“Well, I just think mine is sick of having to do it all the time.”

We were old enough to have licenses ourselves, to get jobs that could pay for used cars. We were old enough that it was embarrassing we had neither of these things. But we had promised to get our licenses at the same time, and we hadn’t been able to find matching dates for the DMV, and then all we had were expired permits that we had no particular interest in renewing. Our mothers became accustomed to the fact that we had the ambition of stagnant water, and had long given up hope of us getting jobs. The longer we stayed like this, it felt like the stagnancy crept into more than just my will— like, with each passing week, it would be my raw ability that kept me from doing anything, not my lack of desire to do it.

“There’s no way that’s real. That has to be, like, magical. Or a dream. Or something.”

I realized she was talking about the wisteria. I didn’t like that she’d noticed it too. It cheapened the wonder of seeing something and thinking it was incredible.

“It looks like it’s going into the water. I didn’t think plants could do that.”

I didn’t want her to keep talking. I wanted to keep my thoughts to myself, and enjoy them without the burden of her own.

On weekends, after five concurrent weeknight evenings of each other’s company, we would go to parties together — dressed in clothing that was thin and tight. It twisted around us, was woven into patterns that clustered around what they needed to cover and gaped in the areas that we wanted to expose. We would crawl between houses, cringing away from too-harsh light, sucking spiked punch and any other nourishment from wherever we could find, bodies entangled in each other. We could never dance together well, the thorny bits of our bones cutting against the other’s soft flesh. But the other people at the parties would do little more than accept that we were there, understand that we could not be rid of. They did not get too close, and moved away when we approached them. So, we stayed around each other, as our dry skin cracked, snapped where our joints met. And then we’d go to one of our houses, always forgetting to change out of the clothes that stuck to us, like they’d set roots into our skin.

Washing myself after a night out was always an immense effort; most days, there was already a gross sense of unease I had to scrub off of myself like thick sap. My hungover hands did not help.

“I’m not going to sit here until five,” she protested again.

“Then you’d better start walking.” Her house was a mile away from the boardwalk. Mine was a mile and a half.

“You get up first. I’ll follow you.”

I looked back towards the beach, the wind that was my only protection from the ravaging sun.

The longer I had observed the wisteria, the sadder I had become. It was clear that the large mass of the flower had originally been two different plants, each section coming off of a different tree. But, at some point, as they grew away from where they began, instead of growing straight out and forward, they had grown into each other. For a while, they had been able to keep growing, had even been helped by having something to grow around. But then, they covered every square inch of the other. Their involvement with one another turned into constriction. I thought of me and my best friend on this boardwalk, close to entanglement despite the heat, the same pattern of thoughts no matter what we tried to think, with the knowledge we would be somewhere with each other at the same time next week, month, and for the foreseeable future after that. Now that the flowers were one, there was no telling where to make the first cut without the entire mass falling apart, how to tell where one started and one ended. No matter how hard they tried, they would never reach the ocean, because they could not move forward when they were so close together.

About the Writer...

Cherry Cheesman is a senior at South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where she studies creative writing. She is a fiction writer and poet who loves mixing the fantastical with the literary. She also loves crochet, indie horror games, indie music, and anything else new, creative, and beautiful.

About the Artist...

Born in Mississippi, yet raised just outside of New Orleans, Krislyn Fraser is an artist whose portfolio includes work specializing in pastel, dream-like atmospheres and imagery through 2D, 3D, digital, and photographic mediums.