Cold Coffee Chronicles

My husband drizzled fish fertilizer into our house plants as a harbinger for health. Like the tea I sip to restore my constitution, so we’d read the fish juice would bring verdant leaves and pillowy blossoms.

As he entered our home, a plant cemetery awaited his gaze while grey November creaked outside.

Fractured stems poked up like broken bones littered across the floor. Piles of odiferous soil stood like Indian burial grounds on the dining room hardwood.

I crossed the threshold; he shook with despair. Tears flowed as he cried for our disemboweled fiddle leaf fig. He mourned the bird of paradise he’d tended to like a pet. I held his body while he shivered for our snake plant as if our own cat had been struck by a car.

We scooped soil with our palms. Our skin stunk of a washed out tide. I kissed his wet face. Sometimes softness seeps into holes carved out by grief