Patricia Q. Bidar
In the Back Yard
It's five o’clock and already chilling up. I started the sprinkler after lunch, and then forgot. I half-hear the water streaming through the pipes, registering it more as a charge in the atmosphere than as an actual sound.
I get the sourdough toast going and spray the omelet pan with coconut oil. The smell of warming bread imparts normalcy and calm. I crack two brown eggs into the yellow bowl, then whisk in cubes of Swiss cheese and a little chopped spinach. When everything's done, I place a tea towel over my forearm and head outside.
Before he moved to the back yard and became a jacaranda tree, I was the one who spotted the blood on my husband Peter’s t-shirts. The doctor told me Peter had to have ignored for months the lumps under his left nipple.
Peter engaged with the doctor during the visit, nodding and taking down notes about the possibility of hormone treatment, chemo, targeted therapy. It's just that he refused to keep the next appointment. And the next. By the end of the month, he'd moved outside. A week later, his toes had spread and inserted themselves into earth. His body became a lithe trunk. Soon, it darkened. Broadened.
I kick off my clogs, balancing the plate and glass of guava juice. The fork, I jam vertically into my bra. The food is for me. Peter is watered, not fed.
Biodegradable urns exist that convert you into a tree after you die. Epidermodysplasia verruciformis is an extremely rare skin condition that can cause bark-like growths.
This is not either of those things.
I step carefully, holding the plate aloft. The mud is cold under my bare feet. At the back of the yard stands the man I married. The sprinkler has created a silver pool at his base. The spray holds the light in a pale prism.
We’re having a cold snap. This is following a long warm spell which tricked crocuses and daffodils into rising and opening too early.
I set the plate on the child-size bench. I sit down and eat my dinner. Then I open my blouse and bare my clavicle, my shoulders. This is how far things have come.
There was a time when Peter’s kisses rubbed my face raw. When his marine smell comforted me in bed. The homey buzz of his snoring would lull me as I drifted off.
Across the yard our home’s windows begin to yellow. The water moves through the pipes, making its keening sound.
A breeze comes and I believe I smell my husband’s marine scent again. The green onion of his underarms. I trace his bark, brown-gray and mature. Deep clefted. My own hands are grooved with age. I wrap my arms around him, press my soft trunk against his hardness. I raise my face and fill my eyes with the abundance of lavender blooms against the dark branches, the deepening sky.
I feel his humming life force as I believe he feels mine. I need to believe it. The fact is, ours was a lonely marriage. I’d execute small gambits to capture his attention. Connect. Would experience tiny griefs when those gambits failed. I dissipated, each time.
A frigid gust races through the wide-open arms of his branches. Lavender flowers issue and rain onto the lawn, my still-bared shoulders.
The tremor begins between my thighs and grows until I’m clutching his trunk, legs weak. I say his name. Say it again, my voice ragged.
Right now it is enough; it is everything.
Patricia Q. Bidar is a California native, raised in the Port of Los Angeles area. Her stories have been published in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Pithead Chapel, and Atticus Review, among other wonderful places. She serves on the staffs of Smokelong Quarterly and Barren Magazine. Her flash piece, Over There, will appear in the Flash Fiction America anthology (W.W. Norton, March 2023). She lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family and their dog.