Page 21

The rare times I will unfold him from my memories, like a map to somewhere I can no longer go, I think of my father in the context of mountains.

He loved them passionately. According to my mother, he was an arid person: dry in wit, dry of anything resembling emotion.

She sometimes blamed it on his tenure in the military, although there were no records to prove he ever served.

Sometimes, when she had been drinking too much, she said it was because there was a half-life to being human, and my father had simply run out of time.

Mostly, I agree with her assessment of him.

Except when it came to mountains. He loved them with a fervency most parents reserved for children or gods.

The few good memories I possess of him involve us hiking along the Laurentians, drinking coffee together on a ridge of stone as he stared out at the gore of a new morning, an oracular yearning in his mild face.

He was rarely as animated as he was when we were trekking through such boreal landscapes, fervid with information about every geologic eccentricity we encountered.

I wonder sometimes if that was him introducing me to the other half of my genealogical history: neither him nor my mother ever admitted to him having living relatives, after all.

Hell, they’d never admitted to him having relatives at all.

The worst thing in the world is dying because someone else said so.

I wasn’t a mountaineer. At best, I was an acceptable hiker.

But he’d indoctrinated a certain fearlessness when it came to heights, a quirk I planned to capitalize on, given our environment.

There was no walking backward out of Hellebore’s gates, middle fingers brandished.

Those wrought iron horrors were patrolled day and night by the meat stewards, which I’d have happily thrown down with if not for the fact any attempt to even touch the foliated metal was stymied by an advanced example of spatial magic.

Once, I spent an hour angrily stalking toward the gates, only for them to remain perpetually ten feet away, the road beyond becoming painted black by rain I could smell but not be anointed by.

As a rule, it never rained in Hellebore. Only God knew why.

While there was no official route out, Hellebore wasn’t inescapable.

At least not if you were inventive. There was a canopied bend of road that curled behind the school’s greenhouse, a monstrosity of plated glass and cast iron painted white.

A behemoth disrobed of its meat, green where its lungs should have been, green along the carved ribs of its roof.

Condensation slicked the glass like sweat: it seemed to pant some nights, heaving with life.

Most of the time, Professor Fleur marched us past its front door when leading us to class.

But on this day, we had to make use of the more circuitous route—a failed ritual had left a thin lamina of living godbrain over the usual path.

If I hadn’t already been looking, if I wasn’t so desperate to get out of Hellebore, I might have missed it.

But I was looking.

In lieu of masonry, the dappled path was corseted by rose bushes grown into barricades, red blooms crowned with thorns as wide as my thumb, the briars themselves so dense only a faint lattice of light gleamed through. Dim and dilute as it was, that light suggested there was an exit there.

Professor Fleur led us to a vast copse of fig trees, which seemed to overrun the grounds behind Hellebore.

It was under their shade that Fleur had established what could tentatively be called an herb garden and what really should be named a health risk: the plot of land she had cultivated so replete with poisonous flora, it was a wonder we didn’t all die breathing the air.

Oleander and nightshade grew in pastel eruptions.

Rosary peas sprawled everywhere, ladybug-patterned in their gray husks, vivid as a fresh heart.

No small amount of the school’s namesake bloomed there too: dusky pink and slate, maroon and apricot, the hellebore petals lustrous as fine metal.

There were other things too, plants I hadn’t names for, vegetation I suspected did not exist in the natural world and were instead immigrants from weirder places.

Because of this and because Professor Fleur had a way of smiling—a very reptilian expression forbidden from ever reaching her eyes—when a student leaned too close to one luminous flower or another, we sat in defensive clusters on linen picnic blankets, careful to always keep an eye on the plant life.

“Here,” said Professor Fleur, waddling between each student. On top of being in charge of Botany, she was Hellebore’s solitary gardener or so it seemed. “Take this fig and hold it in your hands. I do not want you to eat it yet. I want you to look at it. Smell it.”

I held the fruit up to the gray light and turned it one way and then another, recalling some apocrypha about wasps and their role in the pollination of the plant: I’d avoided figs for that reason.

There was a hole at the very base of the fruit, wide enough to admit an insect, something Rowan discovered seemingly at the same time, much to the horror of everyone in his immediate vicinity.

“Do you think some wasps have death cult suicide orgies —”

“When you see the fig,” began Professor Fleur in her quavering voice. “When you taste it, when you crack it in half in your hands and lick the sweet florets, you do not think of the wasp. Although you should. Without it, we wouldn’t have this bounty.”

She gestured at us to halve our figs, splitting hers with just her hands. Juice ran down her fingers like plasma, dripping onto the grass.

The air stank of a heady sweetness. “It is important we honor the wasp.”

From across the garden, Minji asked, “Is it true that there are dead wasps inside every fruit?”

“Dead?” gurgled Professor Fleur. It’d take me another eight weeks before understanding that was how she laughed. “No. Made holy. Sainted.”

“Holy,” Minji repeated after a moment. “What a choice of words.”

The inside of my fig was vulvic red, soft and flushed, whorled with yellow seeds that at certain angles almost looked like eyes but at others resembled the walls of a lamprey’s mouth, but instead of teeth there was only flesh.

Fascinated, I tried to see if I could pick out a wasp leg or black chitin among the rich pink.

I felt a certain nostalgic affection toward Fleur.

Her accent was pure provincial French, slow and languid, every syllable turned into a concatenation of musical notes, so even when she was berating us, it was oddly nice.

“The impregnated female wasp drags herself into the fig, anointing the florets with pollen she gathered from the womb in which she was hatched. Then she lays her eggs and in doing so, gives herself to the cycle of death and life, and to the fig to survive. And so, she becomes one of the many unnamed saints.”

“I thought this was Botany,” said Rowan with considerable glee, patting himself down. “Not Vore 101. Don’t hate it, though. Keep going. It’s kinda hot.”

“Professor Fleur,” said Minji again, raising her hand. “I don’t understand why this makes the wasp holy.”

“Because what is holier than giving yourself up to something better than you?”

Mountains, I thought but did not say. Clean air.

Nights jeweled by frost. First snow. The last light of summer.

Being free. I could think of a hundred things holier than being sacrificed to something that doesn’t even love you back.

Judging from the guarded looks on the faces of the students around me, I wasn’t the only one.

I raised my hand. “Professor Fleur?”

“What.”

“Are we the fig or the wasps?”

“Eat,” said Professor Fleur, tone unctuous.

She threaded through the clots of seated students to where I hid under the roots of one of the school’s rare strangler figs.

My mother called them banyans, though no else I knew did.

I’d only seen them once myself in person on a trip to Cambodia and I’d loved them on sight.

Banyans were the opportunistic carnivores of the plant world.

Their life cycle wasn’t dependent on parasitism: some banyans could go from epiphyte to deadwood without ever hurting another tree.

Every now and then, however, their roots would grow in such a way that they’d choke their hosts to death and when those unfortunates had rotted to fertilizer, the local fauna would come to inhabit the bones, thereafter proving that sometimes, things had to die for the greater good.

“There are dead wasps in this fig,” I stalled.

“Everything you eat was alive once,” said Professor Fleur.

She was so exultantly ugly, there was something mesmeric about her: you couldn’t be this odious without putting real effort into it.

“Anyway, it’s not like you will find an actual wasp in your fig.

The plant releases an enzyme that breaks down the little insects.

Nothing is wasted and sadly, nothing can be tasted.

I’ve always been of the opinion figs could use a more interesting mouthfeel. Don’t you agree, class?”

No one said a word.

“Eat,” said Professor Fleur again. I could smell her.

An oiliness that every old person seemed to possess.

Talcum powder. Good dirt, which surprised me.

Healthy loam like the sort in which nothing cruel could grow, like what farmers might dream of.

Wholesome; a word I’d never think to associate with the school.

“I’m allergic,” I lied.

She leaned closer. Her teeth were too numerous and too small for her doll-like jaw, the only delicate feature in a face better suited for a snapping turtle.

Skin tags laddered down her jowls; there was a frothing of them at her throat.

Fleur was practically cancerous with these gleaming waxlike growths. “Eat.”