Houseplants

This is a lie. A graveyard smells like dirt and pine sap and grass clippings, and Lucy’s apartment smells like nothing so pleasant. Lucy pulls back the curtain, heaves up the glass. A breeze sends scraps of human noise fluttering into the room. Engine, jackhammer, the highest strains of a woman greeting someone in the street.

“That’s the stuff,” says the venus flytrap, limbs aflutter.

“You hungry?” says Lucy.

“I could eat,” says the plant.

The kitchen buzzes with flies. Lucy zeroes in on one, rubbing its grubby hands together on the counter. She grabs a magazine from the coffee table and goes in for the kill.
  

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When production ended, Lucy flew home and discovered the delights of misanthropy. The daffodils sprouting in the feeble planter-box at the back of the apartment are friendly, it turns out. Not that that’s surprising—no one would suspect a daffodil of foul temperament. The jacaranda tree that spits violet all over the patio is another story entirely. She is breathtaking, and she knows it. Just like the girls on Paradise Island, settled in their perfectly postable skin by a lifetime of conventional appeal, the jacaranda’s beauty has gone to her head. When Lucy returned to the apartment at the end of summer, all bathing suit tan lines and shame, the jacaranda tossed her green-tassel leaves and sneered.

When she leaves the house these days, Lucy covers her face. She has three bandanas for this purpose—red, blue, and purple—which she cycles through in a lopsided rainbow. The red bandana is one she had used to tie up her hair back in high school, and when the fabric presses against her nose it still smells like her mother’s house. The blue one was once tossed into her hands from a parade float. The purple is stamped with green vines and blocky white text reading nuts for nature. It was a gift from an ex-boyfriend with a penchant for hiking and questionable taste in accessories. He was tall and improbably kind, that’s how she remembers him. Nowhere near as good-looking as the men on Paradise Island, objectively. But those idiots’ go-to move was to lean seductively against the scalding poolside asphalt, gaze into Lucy’s eyes with camera-visible intensity, and tell her how hot they find quirky chicks. She does not miss them, or the ex-boyfriend, or anyone, really. She is experimenting with alienation. She has given up on humanity, or something less melodramatic, but equally justifiable.

In the evenings, Lucy sits on her phone and watches the comments pour in. Someone thinks she is a legend. Someone thinks she is a dumb whore. Someone thinks she is just so fucking relatable. Someone has made her face into a T-shirt, available for $24.99, at their Etsy shop. Someone has diagnosed her with multiple serious mental illnesses and hopes she’ll remove herself from civilized society for the rest of her life. Someone thinks she was the realest (and hottest!) of all those fake-ass bitches on Paradise Island.

To her distant mother’s chagrin (expressed in tense and quickly terminated phone calls) Lucy has only watched the first two episodes. Her mother had been delighted with her possibly-famous daughter right up until the finale. In an effort to avoid the delicate navigation of her mother’s feelings, Lucy has stopped picking up the phone.

Still, since her return to the world of the living she’s felt compelled to at least give the show a try, to put herself in the audience’s shoes and see just how poorly she came off. In the pilot (in which, thank God, she does not feature prominently) she watches herself lounge on a blue towel in the starburst shadow of a palm tree. The screen makes everything look simple. She watches a chiseled redhead approach herself, proffer an uninspired line of flirtation. As the camera zooms up close and catches the slow one-two blink of her own overlined eyes, she watches.

In the second episode, things get much worse. The redhead proves dull-witted and persistent. She watches herself kiss him across the gap between plastic pool chairs, mouth half open. The position of their bodies looks so unnatural that she spends several seconds (from the sagging couch, in the still of her living room) trying to contort herself into something resembling her own image, doubtful the airbrushed creature onscreen could really correspond to her own undeniable body. The venus flytrap laughs at her, jaw hanging open in front of the TV, and Lucy laughs back and turns off the show and doesn’t watch any more of it and doesn’t want to.

Later, she wants to, but she still doesn’t. Someone thinks she is probably the weirdest person who has ever walked the planet, she reads as she brushes her teeth.
 

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The daffodils out back are having an argument. Lucy sits quiet next to them on a dangerously rusted white patio chair. She is smoking a joint and attempting to ventriloquize herself outside of her mind and into the sensuous world—into the orange evening light spreading like honey across the patio, into the press of her bare feet against brick, the almost-something of air on skin. She is not succeeding.

One daffodil is annoyed that the building manager has switched to cheaper fertilizer. The other prefers the new brand, and besides, understands that fertilizer is not a high priority in the manager’s mind. He must have a thousand more pressing human tasks stacked in paper piles on his desk—he can hardly be expected to continue paying a premium for fertilizer with both ammonium filtrate and ammonium nitrate just because the first daffodil prefers the way it tastes.

“Dude, you gotta raise your standards,” says the first daffodil. Far in the sky above them, Lucy nods her blooming head in agreement.

“Well, excuse me for sympathizing,” says the second daffodil. “I thought you’d see my side, Lucy. I always see you rushing around like the world depends on it. I thought you lot had better things to do than fertilizer shopping. ”

“Not better,” says Lucy.

“She doesn’t rush around like that anymore,” says the first daffodil shrewdly. “Or else why is she always out here talking to us? When was the last time a human did that?”

“Sometimes the old custodian used to sing to us, you remember?” says the second daffodil, and hums a few bars of “Build Me Up, Buttercup.”

“But everyone else,” the first daffodil laments, “wants us blooming all the damn time, without a damn word. They’d replace us with plastic flowers in a second if they were anything near as pretty. No more watering, no more fertilizer, no more running away from life in all its multiplicity.”

“I think,” says Lucy, thoughtfully stoned, “they’d replace us all with plastic if they thought they could get away with it.” She is not sure who they are, but the words taste true in her mouth.

“You think you could grab a bag of that fertilizer for us sometime, Lucy?” says the first daffodil. “The kind in the red bag, not the pink one.”

“I like the pink one,” says the second daffodil.

“What’s up with you two today?” says Lucy. The daffodils are usually sweet-tempered, and it has become one of her simplest delights to sit outside and listen to them express their boundless affection for each other, for her, for the swell of the breeze and the bright of the sky, flowing into and out of and around her in effusions of sweet yellow. Lucy comes to the patio when looking for gratitude. Today, she is not feeling it. She draws a circle in ash on the brick of the apartment wall, dots it with two eyes and an ironic slash of mouth.

“It’s the fertilizer,” says the first daffodil. “I swear, it’s making me wither up at the roots.”
 

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If anyone asks (and not many people have, outside the endless stream of Instagram DMs, which Lucy cheerfully sends right into the digital trash can), Lucy says her mother made her do it. In reality, it’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but the answer gets the point across. The truth is that Lucy’s mother was once beautiful, and cared deeply about remaining so, and when the crow’s feet around her eyes started leaving footprints all around the perimeter of her face, she switched her attention to a fresh canvas, which was Lucy’s face, Lucy’s skin, Lucy’s beauty, even though she was always so strange, always even in childhood out in the backyard entangled in the arms of the maple tree, always listening to the whir of grass-blades in wind, and always looking so becoming while doing so. Her mother had made it her life’s work to make Lucy normal, to ignore the chatter of the more-than-human world just like everyone else and set her eyes on the successes of the modern day: beauty, online presence, public acclaim. And somewhere along the way—Lucy is still trying to figure out where—her mother had succeeded.

Because in reality, Lucy chose it. Lucy filled out the application and stood in the sweaty hopeful lines outside the studio and cried hysterically when she got the phone call. Lucy flew to the island and kissed the men and found it increasingly impossible to pinpoint what constituted reality at all. More than once, on the show, she’d poked fun at the idea of reality TV, named as if this spray-tanned ordeal could be considered anything akin to real life. She had gotten a lot of strange looks. The reality is that we’re real people, silly, one black-haired girl, the kindest of the group, had tossed back. Real people just being ourselves.
 

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That night, emboldened by her conversation with the daffodils, Lucy braves the next three episodes. The show consists of eight in total—if she’s not mistaken, things will really start to fall apart around episode six. So the first five constitute a sort of exposure therapy, a means of familiarization with the disconnect of Lucy braless and unshaven in her apartment and Lucy spray-tanned and glowing on a tropical beach.

The third episode is not awful, and at times even makes her laugh. It revolves mainly around a newly forming couple, the guy dark-skinned and charming and the girl bustily blonde. Lucy had not cared for either of them in her time on the show—the guy had shaken the shared resort bedroom with his snoring, and the girl had once remarked to Lucy, with a calculated three-quarter turn towards the cameras, that she admired Lucy’s ability to go through life without caring about her appearance. So it is funny, vindicating, to see the mess they make on screen, to watch lust get the best of them, to see them caught in the trap of selective editing, uttering sentences to make any at-home viewer feel suddenly confident in their relative brilliance and self-control. The production crew has included the blonde’s dig at Lucy, and—hallelujah!— they have made her out to be an undeniable bitch, Lucy slinking away devastated and eminently sympathetic to the audience.

“You’re the only one who’s got half a brain,” remarks the venus flytrap from the windowsill.

“See, that’s what they want you to think,” says Lucy. “You wouldn’t think so if they didn’t want you to.”

The fourth and fifth episodes whiz by. Perhaps the worst part of the whole thing is that the show is wildly entertaining—its vapid popularity makes increasing sense to Lucy. She watches herself form a semi-friendship with the black-haired girl, their conversations mostly snarky commentary on the exploits of other cast members. This is not how it really was—in the moment, the black-haired girl had felt like her only tether to sanity, and mid-production they had started sneaking away from the group for off-camera beach walks, talking about anything but Paradise Island, about their favorite dogs and the traumas inflicted by their unenlightened parents and the countries they would run away to if they were able to run away. One drunk night they had even kissed in the hot tub, which the editors had included, for laughs, the camera a close-up of wet skin and tongue before panning to the jaw-dropped stupid faces of the male contestants as they watched. Camera cuts to Lucy’s redheaded beau, who states he is looking respectfully, and the whole affair is past. In episode five’s final minutes, Redhead pins Lucy against the wall of the resort and confesses to feelings too burning to hold in his mouth any longer. The screen holds for a moment on Lucy’s widening eyes, catches a tremble in her mouth. The episode smash cuts to credits. Lucy kills the television.

“They really make you out to be a weirdo, don’t they?” says the venus flytrap, sagely.
 

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Lucy wakes up early the next morning and goes to the nursery. She wears her purple bandana. No one recognizes her. It turns out the store no longer stocks the fertilizer in the red bag because it is too expensive. The plants at the nursery are raving about the kind in the blue bag, so she takes their advice and buys that one. She stands for several minutes between the rows of vegetables, listening,  the bag of dirt heavy in her arms like a petulant child. The tomatoes, still hard and green, are howling for sun. The corn is knee-high, dreaming of how it will one day push itself into sky. The artichokes are handsome, prickly, dissatisfied with the too-small pots from which their gray-green limbs spill.

Lucy drives home and doesn’t even think to take off the bandana until she is back in her living room, wishing she’d thought to pick up groceries during her rare excursion beyond her apartment, when the venus flytrap points out, rather snidely, “You do know the secret’s already out with me, right?”
 

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The secret is that Lucy always wanted to see her face on screen. The secret is she grew up terminally online, her adolescent battle for attention fought on digital grounds. She recalls her avatar feeling indiscernible from her body, bathed in blue light, sending messages into the ether and calling it contact, like skin on skin, or the next best thing. And it grew from there, that want, it filled her with the desire to be more than a body, and soon she didn’t care for anything that reminded her of the very bodily fact of her, she was chasing the thrill of her face meaning more than just a slab of flesh, that’s how she saw it, she wanted herself to mean something to those not herself, and now she has done it, her want no longer a dirty secret but played out before a million eyes, and the whole thing is ruined.

Her mother has been calling, almost every afternoon. Lucy imagines, soon enough, she will find something to say to her. Instead, she takes the elevator downstairs and pours clumps of fertilizer into the planter box around the daffodils, who wriggle and squeak with excitement.

The comments are getting worse. Someone has taken a screen-grab of her face and made it into a semi-successful meme format. In the picture, her hair is wild, jaw streaked with dirt; she gapes into the camera as though an alien has descended from the heavens and shoved its bulky black nose into her face.  Me when I spend so long in my house I forget I’m a human being. Me when the bouncer at the bar asks me how many drinks I’ve had. Me when the mushrooms hit and the trees start talking to me.
 

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Lucy is not planning to finish the show, perhaps ever, but the venus flytrap guilts her into it. “Do you know how boring it is here?” it groans. “I really think the cat’s out of the bag, Lucy. Might as well get it over with.”

Lucy does not particularly like to drink, but for the special occasion, the season finale, she downs an entire bottle of wine. On Paradise Island, the contestants had been constantly plied with alcohol—it made for far more entertaining soundbites. But she had not been drunk, not in these final episodes, towards the end of production she had started filling her opaque metal cup with lemonade and merely playing tipsy. Swaying in her living room now, she scrabbles for the remote among the couch cushions, flicks on the TV.

“There it is,” says the venus flytrap, as Lucy’s face swims into focus to the beat of a royalty-free pop chorus: I don’t know just what I want, just what I want, just what I want.

The redhead and the audience are waiting for her confession. They are waiting for her to take his face in her hands and tell him he makes her world complete. Or they are waiting for her to cringe and shake her head and say, I think you’ve misinterpreted things. Watching, Lucy is waiting for it too. She knows how the script goes. She knows exactly what this moment is supposed to look like.

Instead, she watches herself gulp, turn away, dodge under the redhead’s outstretched arm like an animal darting beneath a barbed wire fence. She watches herself sway, stagger, regain her footing, sprint past the blue-lit swimming pool, towards the shaggy palm-tree silhouettes that mark the resort’s edge. And this is fine, perhaps excusable. The editors have made the redhead unappealing. Her butt looks respectable, even in flight.

But the camera follows her, to the far black line of the fence. She watches herself take a running leap, catch the boards in her hands. Her bathing suit top snags, pulls free, flashes the vulnerable tower of her spine. Half-naked, she hauls herself up and over. Then she cannot watch herself anymore, and neither can the cameras.

Lucy pauses the TV and kills flies in the kitchen until the buzzing goes quiet. All those little black corpses dotting the countertop. She turns the TV back on.

They have put out a rescue committee for her, of course. She watches a khakied ranger inform the other Paradise Island participants that she has not yet been located, but it is only a matter of time, she cannot have run far barefoot, no shirt, through the dense tropical jungle. Her fellow contestants offer their opinions in a rotation of quippy talking heads: Hey Lucy, I think you missed the memo, we’re on Paradise Island, not Survivor. She always seemed a little, you know. That girl is bleeping crazy, I’ve been saying it since day one. I hope she doesn’t get eaten by a tiger or something. There are tigers in the jungle, aren’t there?

It is a joke. She is a joke. She knew it was true, but it still aches. The venus flytrap is cackling in the window.

The newly forming romantic relationships have taken a backseat. One couple tries to take advantage of the group’s distraction by getting frisky in the communal shower, but they are caught by another contestant and roundly shamed for their inconsiderate timing. Lucy’s flight is suddenly the climax of the series. No one had seen it coming. In the penthouse of some office building, casting directors pat each other on the back for choosing a girl who makes such good TV. This, perhaps, is the oddest part to Lucy, that her escape into the wilderness, the only tolerable period of her time on Paradise Island, has probably earned the production company millions.

It is at this point, episode seven drawing to a close and her poor bolted self still unfound, that she notices she is crying. All she had wanted that night was contact—not the kind she had thought, not the arms of the men, not the infinite eyes, but the bare of her feet against grass and the splinters in her palms from the unfinished wood of the fence.

And the cool of the wind and the welcoming whispers of the leaves.

And the great old palm tree by the water’s edge that watched her roll across the sand and murmured, “You poor girl, come here, come lean against me for a second.”

And look out at the half-moon, hanging round and possible above the sea. And feel your body, part of all this. And let yourself be an animal, you animal, you.

So she had. And it was glorious.

And episode eight is dawning on the TV, a stock-image sunrise pouring pink over the ocean like an oil slick. And look at that, she has been found. In a craggy cove eight miles down the coast. Bare feet cut to hell on the rocks. Sitting silent among the grasses that mark the line where the jungle becomes the beach.

Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Portland, Oregon. In their writing, they hope to  explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their work appears in publications such as Adroit Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Cincinnati Review. They can be found on X/Bluesky/Instagram @esmepromise.

Header photo by andersphoto, courtesy Shutterstock.