Vida
BY CORINNE RUSSELL
These onions are not yet grown, but already they are turning up shapely. A one Vidalia plows through earth as she swells. You would never call her frumpy, for all that smooth, shiny skin. You know that’s there, without having seen her stripped yourself. No one, as yet, has access to her adult naked body, though the matter isn’t really up to her. But it does concern her greatly. She wonders who the first will be to run their hands up around her sides. She knows this moment will hold some truth, but she’s thought about it so many times, turning it over and over, reducing it to a surfaceless thing, that she can’t imagine she hasn’t already grasped it herself. So for the present, she rocks in the dirt, experimenting with pressure and technique until she can build to something simple but immense. The rest of the time, she just looks around and gapes. She doesn’t really know what to do, so she just gets bigger. She has only faintly realized how neat her world is, how laid out, how weeded, and that her formlessness here is nearly criminal. Sure, she has a body, but what can be said of that thing that only ever reaches the corners of consciousness when something is wrong or something is needed. To say nothing of touch. She thinks she could evoke love, if only someone would ever pluck her up.
It doesn’t even smell here. There is only sky and sky, earth and earth. There isn’t ever any news coming in, and no need for revision, because it is all right here already, enshrined and distilled, as perfect as it will ever be. There is this garden and this shed with paint. There is a gate with a little spring mechanism. Does this deliver us from evil? The one Vidalia hasn’t arrived, but maybe this is her own fault, because she hasn’t kept up. Still, there’s only so much you can do within a maintenance of presentation. And it’s becoming more and more clear to her that this is what this is. There doesn’t even need to be striving, because it’s all done and planted. The rows remain, you’ve heard it all before, no tears. The onions grow.
And so she eats. She begins to realize that she is not so much pushing earth as it is holding her. She refuses to believe that this is any sort of embrace, for it is scratchy, and far from close. Her writhing grows more insistent, and this action is sustained more than all. But beyond that, she cannot understand how to make her constraint her freedom. She does not yet know how to come up with things after turning away, how to plait inside. She feels that she could burst, like the burps from the pond, if only she was given the chance. She realizes that to everyone else, it must look like she’s not doing much of anything, which she isn’t, and this thought, that everyone knows, just kills her, even more so than the not-doing. It is difficult, dredging up the interior until it is visible to all or one. How can she make anyone know what’s inside her, and then what if no one likes what is there? If only she could speak, she could be winsome and blithe, and it would never occur to her that some might not listen. But her mind is so empty. She is so stupid she thinks the cicadas are the sounds of heat. She is so nothing that she is one among and not at the same time. Without really cognizing, she has happened upon the idea that she is a pure contingency. She feels a present need to justify herself.
Fortunately, she’s sparked something of the narrative impulse in a boy. He loves to get his feet dirty and wear coarse flannel. He is her Savior. He sits in the grass, but it’s wet, so he sits in the gravel and the hair hangs out of his shorts. He is suddenly not content to look so he yanks her by the hair. Feast your eyes on this. She hung for a moment—suspended, cherub-like—over the rows and rows, before he sends her back to earth. It was almost as if she was not yet grown.