As the early morning sun intrudes into her dreams of dark, seductive forests, she wakes, opening first one eye and then the other and as her vision adjusts to the weak morning light filtering through the drawn fabric blinds of her bedroom, she sees the leaf; small, dark, waxy, and insistent, it lies beside her on the pillow on which she rests her head. A frown sketches a line between her brows as she lies staring at it like a question, until the insistent scratch scratch scratch of her phone’s alarm forces her to move her hand to the side locker on which it sits and cease its whining with her fingers. Her languid morning movement knocks the leaf from its resting place, and it drifts down to be lost amongst the dust and detritus beneath the marital bed. She thinks nothing more of it. The man she calls her husband’s hand lies across her breast, heavier than the leaf, heavier than a stone, and she lifts it off her as she sits up, pushing her duvet away and rising from her bed, planting her feet onto the cold wooden floor. For a moment, she stands, stretches her naked arms towards the bedroom ceiling, and looks down at the tops of her feet, silhouetted against the dark boards. She listens to her husband's animal breathing and the silence, soon to be broken, of the house.
Quietly, in the hope of neither waking the man in her bed nor the two children who sleep in the bedroom adjacent, and to prolong that delicious morning moment when she is for a brief, precious time alone, she crosses the floor of the bedroom to the en-suite bathroom, where, in the sepulchral light her hand reaches out, searching for her toothbrush. Having found it and completed the morning ritual of squeezing pink, pliant toothpaste across its bristles, she puts the brush to her mouth and starts to scrub the night from her teeth. While brushing, still looking down into the white porcelain of the sink, another leaf, nearly identical to the one she had seen on her pillow, falls to lie stark against the whiteness. Slowly lifting her head to look into the bathroom mirror for the first time, she sees that a small sapling is growing from the right-hand side of her head. Its stem has pushed her hair aside, which now drapes itself elegantly around its base. She reaches up gingerly to touch the leaves that are growing from its thin branches. Her fingers tentatively grasp the fibrous stem of the plant and pull upwards, but with a grimace, she quickly puts an end to her weeding as the plant stays firmly in its place. For a moment, she stares at her reflection in resignation and not a little wonder, and with a barely perceptible shrug of her shoulders, she turns and leaves the room to begin her day.
Now fully dressed in an inexpensive and ill-fitting business suit, the woman sits at the kitchen table, scrolling through the phone that is propped against an empty vase in its center. She is eating a slice of strawberry jam-covered toast and drinking a cup of coffee before getting up to leave for work. Her husband, unshaven and still in his faded, purple dressing gown, and their two small children, two girls both dressed in identical uniforms and ready for school, stare at their wife and mother and her new appendage from across the table. Without registering any recognition of her family’s consternation, she stands up and takes her plate and her cup to the kitchen’s steel sink and rinses both. Leaving her breakfast things on the draining board, she gathers up her phone, puts it into her pocket, and leaves her husband, her children, and the kitchen. Collecting her coat and her handbag from where they hang at the end of the stairs, she takes a moment to look at the family’s black and white cat, which lies luxuriously on the sitting room sofa, its legs stretched behind it, eyes closed against the light, a gentle wheeze rhythmically escaping its nose. She walks to the front door of their house, takes her keys from the bowl that sits on the stand at its side, and opens it. With a small duck of her knees, she bobs under the frame of the door so as to be careful not to disturb the plant growing from her head and exits into the day.
She looks around at her fellow commuters as they stand in a ragged crowd, waiting for the bus that will take them to their places of work, a bus that is inevitably late. Expressions of frustration cloud their faces as they each, in turn, look at the phone in their hand as if it were some magic carpet that would transport them to their destination. Unconcerned, she watches the crowded road as the cars, vans, bicycles, and scooters shuffle along the black, potholed tarmac, a river of minor commerce, each a universe unto itself. A light drizzle starts to fall from the grey clouds that sit pregnant in the sky, dusting the standing crowd with a dampness that compounds their collective misery. She looks on as they en masse retreat to the graffiti-covered grey shelter behind them, huddling together away from the falling drizzle. Not moving, she stands alone on the grey pavement and turns her face up toward the sky, letting the falling rain wet her face, her hair, her clothes, and the leaves and branches of the plant that is growing from her scalp. The rain in gentle rivulets carves a slow cascade down across the landscape of her face, over her closed eyelids, her flushed cheeks, her soft lips. Behind her, the crowd continues to look at their phones under the shelter until, with a bustle of fabric, they move forward almost as one when they see that the bus that they have been waiting for is finally approaching, naturally forming into an unruly queue that has no head and has no tail. When the bus stops and opens its doors with a pneumatic hiss, she waits, letting those behind her enter in front of her until, the last to board, she steps onto the grey, wet floor and presents her card with a beep. None of her fellow commuters gives her a second glance. Gripping the metal post with one hand, she braces her body as the bus moves off with a lurch, the plant that now grows from her head gently swaying with the movement of the vehicle as it navigates the busy road.
In an anonymous and enormous glass and steel building, in an anonymous and enormous industrial estate, at the edge of the city, she sits in her cubicle, separated from her fellow workers by a series of large, beige partitions. Each cell of the open-plan office has been personalised by its inhabitants as much as possible within the confines of what is allowable. Photographs of her daughters and of her husband sit on the desk facing her, and a small house plant in a green earthenware pot has been placed discreetly at the far corner of the workspace. Resting on the top of her computer screen is a small, plastic, yellow duck, taken from her bathroom to remind her of home. Staring at her screen with an expression of incomprehension and apathy, she inputs random numbers into the spreadsheet that is displayed on the flat, insensate screen in front of her. Occasionally, her hand reaches up to her head to absentmindedly caress the soft leaves of the plant that can be seen jutting over the top of the cubicle from which she works. A small cup of coffee steams at her elbow, waiting to be drunk, but as she reaches for it, her manager, an older woman dressed in an expensive, bespoke black office suit, appears at her side and asks her to come to her office for a moment. Startled, her fingers clumsily fail to grasp the cup's handle, and they knock it off its balance, brown liquid quickly spilling and spreading over her desk, soaking the papers that lie unorganised across it. Mouthing an expletive, she rises and runs to the toilet to retrieve some tissue to mop up the spillage, briskly telling her superior that she will be with her in a minute. As she runs through the door of the toilet, the leaves of the plant that is growing from her head brush its lintel, leaving a subtle, green tint on the white gloss like a memory.
The woman takes a seat at her manager's desk, her aspect defiant, and her manager takes a seat opposite her, a sheaf of printed papers in her hand. The Manager's office is separated from the cubicles by a glass wall, and the other office workers crane their gaze towards it as surreptitiously as possible to watch the unfolding drama. The two women, sitting opposite each other, engage in what appears to be an increasingly agitated conversation, their body language and gestures becoming more aggressively exaggerated as the dialogue between them grows, until, standing up and pushing her chair backward, the younger woman takes the papers from her manager's hand and angrily throws them at her, sending a cascade of white paper across the desk to float silently to the floor. Both women look at each other shock and unbowable contempt. Turning on her heel, the woman leaves the windowed office, pushing the door open with an angry shove. As she does so, her fellow workers turn quickly back to their flat screens and their flat worlds. She walks to the desk to collect her coat, her bag, her Tupperware-encased lunch of salad and sandwiches, and the photographs of her family. She takes down the little yellow duck and puts it into her pocket. Looking at the house plant at the corner of her desk, for a brief moment, a wave of abject hatred wipes across her face. She leaves it where it sits. As she walks to the exit door, she turns to one of her now ex-colleagues, who is seated on her own swivel chair and is pointedly pretending not to notice the commotion that has played out in the office and hisses, in an angry whisper, “It’s not about the plant, Janice.” Her now ex-colleague continues to stare at the words that reflect from her screen onto her glasses as if a ghost had whispered in her ear, but she had not heard it.
Pushing the office door that leads to the corridor that leads to the exit of the enormous concrete and glass building in which she has worked for many years, the small leaves and delicate branches of her woody appendage rustle sibilantly as she shakes her head in anger and despair. She tries to slam the door on her way out, but the door will only close softly behind her. A gentle click marks her final departure.
Standing at the sink in the kitchen of the family home, now wearing a blue, sleeveless vest and some old cartoon-covered pajama bottoms, faded and bobbled after years of use, that hang loose about her hips, she fills a pink IKEA watering jug with water from the cold tap. With her left hand braced against the edge of the sink she raises the plastic jug up above her shoulder and, dipping her head over the sink to ensure that the water will not, as much as possible, spill across the kitchen floor, she pours the water over the base and leaves of the plant, lifting her arm as high as she is able to, letting the water cascade over the wooden fibers and strong waxy leaves of the plant that now seems much stronger and more luxuriant, more firmly and permanently affixed to her skull. The cold water runs through her hair and down across her skin, over her closed eyelids, her cheeks, her lips, and her chin, to fall dripping onto the metal basin of the sink below. Some of the water inevitably runs down her neck to meet the fabric of her vest, spreading in a dark capillary stain across her breast. From the doorway, her daughter watches silently, framed in the light cast by the chattering television behind her. Putting the empty jug on the counter next to the sink, she places both her hands on the curved edge of it and rests her weight, her head turned upwards as she looks out through the kitchen window to the garden behind it. Here she stays, motionless, her breath moving her shoulders and chest like the movement of the sea, for the longest time, until her daughter retreats away to her distractions once again, and twilight falls to dusk.
After some time standing at the kitchen sink, watching the fall of the night, she turns to see that her husband has replaced her daughter in the doorway of their kitchen, the light from the living room etching his outline like scissored paper, the kitchen table between them. He, too, looks disheveled, with a stubble-grazed chin and rheumy, red-glazed eyes that stare at her with an agitated incomprehension and a barely concealed rage. He, too, is dressed in pajamas, checked, brown, and comfortable, open to his navel, and his faded purple dressing gown hangs from his shoulders, open and untied. Gripped in his hands, he holds a pair of garden shears by their wooden handles, worn with much use, the blades dully reflecting the ambient light of the house. He holds them before him like an offering, like a sacrifice, as if ready to cut all the horror and pain from the world. The woman looks at him, looks through him, as water seeps through her vest and drips from her wet hair onto the floor. Raising her arm, she holds the palm of one hand out to him like a wall and says, “fuck off, Colin. Like seriously, just fuck off”. Defeated, he drops his arms and lets the shears slip from his hands, where they fall with a clatter onto the tiled floor. One of the dull blades grazes his feet as it falls, and a small pool of blood forms forlornly on the floor beneath him. His wife turns and walks unshod to the door that opens from the kitchen onto the small suburban garden of their house, which is fenced off from its neighbors by wooden walls on either side. Turning the handle of the door and opening it, she walks through but hits the plant off the lintel and staggers two steps backward. “For fuck sake”, she mutters, and dipping down, heads out into the cold night air.
That night, in the house’s small sitting room, the family is gathered around the low table in its center and faces towards the flat-screen television that is mounted on the wall opposite. On the screen, two dancers in garish costumes move in ungainly unison across a well-lit dancefloor as the television audience claps in delight. The two children sit on their haunches at either end of the table, dolls in hand, and they are having whispered, agitated conversations with their plastic companions. Their father, glum and defeated, watches the television with an obdurate concentration, a sticking plaster spread across the top of his right foot, and their mother, sitting with her legs tucked under her with a sinewy ease, simply looks at a spot on the wall above the screen.
Her feet are dirty. Mud is wedged between her toes, and her nails are blackened and broken. The ends of her pajama bottoms are wet and flecked with mud, grass, and leaves. Her skin has a strange, almost imperceptibly green hue and on her face and shoulders, what looks like the traces of roots are growing under her skin in place of veins The plant that is growing from her skull is now bigger, and stronger; it looks more assured of its own existence, with a finger-thick stem and healthy, luxuriant, dark green leaves hanging from its branches.
The woman reaches up again to caress the vegetation sprouting from her head, her fingers playing gently through the leaves. The television flickers, illuminating her face as she looks on at the dancing figures still twirling awkwardly across the screen. Her children, who continue to play quietly with their plastic companions, occasionally steal glances at their mother, shyly, as if they are afraid that she will catch them staring at her, but she pays them no notice. A loamy, earthen smell fills the room, not unpleasant, as if something long buried in the earth had been exhumed and brought to a place it had no right to enter.
She lifts her chin with a rustle of leaves and looks one last time around the room. “I’m going out”, she says, in a voice from far away. Her husband can only nod and look away into the corner as she makes her announcement. Standing, still dressed in her now ragged pajamas and vest, she walks to the door of the sitting room and exits into the kitchen, resolutely walking again to the back door that leads out to the garden. She pauses, as if thinking of the consequences of her resolutions, but then opens the door into the garden and steps out onto the grey gravel at the bottom of the exit. The cool evening air greets her, stirring the leaves above her to move with a hidden rhythm as she makes her way toward the bottom of the green garden. The sky is cloudless and a fathom blue, swept with stars, each one a faithless memory. She stands in the shadow of the trees that mark the boundary of their property and looks down at her feet as she had done before an eon ago in her bedroom, and spreads her toes, grinding her heels into the soil, wiggling her feet so as to push them as deep into the ground as they will go. As she looks down, she sees from her puckered, soil-dark skin small, fibrous roots emerge, but gently, not as wounds but as part of her being, part of her body. They grope blindly towards the ground beneath her feet, to burrow with a vespertine softness into the moon-dusted soil. She sighs a millennial sigh as these tendrils, her roots, enter the fastness of the earth and descend into moisture-sodden depths. Her body, each muscle and tendon, organ and fiber, gently relaxes into the shape that will remain hers until such time as her leaves will finally fall for the last time and her boughs and branches wither and break, although that will be an age away from now, long after her disappointed, disappointing husband has left, long after the daughters she loves but has to leave have grown and found their own way, long after this moment, this long longed-for return, in a suburban back garden, to a peace that has always been her destiny.
At a coastal distance, a train moans, a whale-like presence filled with Jonahs. Its passengers stare, each alone, wrapped in their own carapace, at the rippling sea that passes beside them, at adverts high and insistent above them, or at the well-trodden floor, the tracks of the train passing like night below.
James Kenny 2025