Martha Hipley

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A friend once told me I should just buy cut flowers instead of keeping up the ruse of buying living plants. With the way I live, the way I kill things, they will last just as long and probably be cheaper, she said. In fact, before this month the longest I had kept a plant alive was nearly a year. I had found the cheerful little fern sitting on the street in its cheerful little pot on my way to pick up the keys for a new apartment. It felt like a sign, and the plant sat happily on the windowsill in the new apartment until it tumbled over in an earthquake and I realized it was made of plastic. The next day, the landlord told me she was raising the rent by nearly fifty percent. Of course this was illegal, but the portent of the fallen plant set me up to fear any attempt to hold onto my lease. I moved on to a different neighborhood instead, to a new apartment that I would fill with the husks of more dead plants

Last month I got a new job, a good one with a company with more money than sense. With the fresh infusion of cash, I decided to go to one of the trendy plant stores in the trendy neighborhood, the kind of store where everything costs double what you’d pay at one of the plant markets in the south. You’re not paying for the plants, of course. You’re paying for someone both intimidating and kind to tell you exactly what kind of plant you should buy and how you should care for it and all the special accessories and products you will need to make the plant feel loved. After thirty minutes of this lecture I took home an enormous monstera in a ceramic pot that probably only cost about $2 to produce but for which I had paid $50 (plant not included). I felt like a jackass but hoped that the financial pressure of the situation might incline me to follow the shopkeeper’s instructions this time.

I swear to you that for the first week, I really did do what I should. I had written down all the shopkeeper’s instructions in the Notes app on my phone, and I even made a little chart to track what I should do on which day. After only a few days in my home, the plant was already wilting, and by the seventh day it was barely alive. By this time, the job was also turning out to be a nightmare, a real mess of incompetence and bad management. After a night of drinking on the couch to dull my sorrows, I really resented the plant’s suffering and decided to give it a stern talking-to. How dare this plant reject my hospitality? I poured out the rest of my fifth or sixth beer in the plant’s pot and went to bed.

The next day, the damn plant was already perking up. I tried to return to the prescribed routine, but it seemed to cry out for filth. I began dumping my half-finished beers, my cigarette ashes, the crumbs from the bottom of my chip bags into the pot, which took on a real patina of decadence. The plant recovered rapidly and began to grow at an unseemly pace. With half a can of an energy drink it would begin to vibrate and hum, its cells multiplying fast enough to be visible to the human eye. By the end of the second week, it had taken over most of the living room, and I began leaving the windows open at all times to let in the polluted rainwater. By the end of the third week, it had sprawled into the bathroom as well and indulged in the cornucopia of chemical runoff from my hair and skin routine. I began to leave the television on at all times, tuned to a twenty-four hour news channel. It pressed its biggest and greenest leaves flat against the screen.

My inability to keep even a cactus alive had begun to seem like some greater referendum on my maternal instincts, even more so than my inability to keep a relationship alive or my general disgust for children, but here I was, beyond my childbearing years, finally discovering them. I even took on new vices and returned to old ones to help my monstera thrive. I raked cocaine into the soil. I soaked its roots with Coca Cola. I called up an ex boyfriend just so he would come over and pick a fight, a big screaming blowout that filled the apartment with hate and bile until one of the neighbors called the cops. The veins of every leaf throbbed and stretched and expanded with every new toxicity. I couldn’t help but feel proud.

But there’s only so much a mother can do without giving up the very gift of flesh and blood. And what better gift to give? At the rate it is growing, even in this summer heat, I expect my plant will digest me before anyone can even smell my body. I can already imagine how it will delight in my flesh, a flesh riddled with microplastics and cellulite, tobacco tar and cirrhosis, tattoo inks and base metal piercings, dental fillings and plaque. For my last meal I have chosen a no longer guilty pleasure: a Big Mac and an extra large Diet Coke, the aspartame a greater delight than even corn syrup could ever be. With this confession of a mother’s love, I lay myself down at its roots, ready to be consumed.

This piece was first published by Witcraft

Martha Hipley is a writer, artist, and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland. Her stories have been published in Utopia Science Fiction, Maudlin House, and surely magazine, among others. When not working, she enjoys training as a triathlete and boxer and exploring flea markets.

Read more from Martha:

Maudlin House – ‘My Work History‘
Surely Magazine – ‘Soon Parted‘