by Emma Hoskisson
There are rooms here we don’t know what to do with. We planted them, and they grew, and now there are rooms all around us and we don’t know what to do. They’re beautiful rooms. I’m amazed, we only planted them on a whim. We had this room, this first one we began with, we were cutting out the flesh. It was just time, you know? And we found the seeds. We laid them out to dry. In the late August sun. Maybe that’s why these rooms have so many windows, they love the sun. I’ve filled these three up with things I found on the ground. That, yes, that plastic toy there, I found him on the floor of a sushi restaurant. Spotted him immediately while waiting to be seated, a nice hidden joint in a section of downtown, saw the little plastic guy and thought, Maybe a kid’ll come back for him? Sometimes I find something on the ground and think, Some kid must miss that, so I leave it. Sometimes I hope other people will see it and think about the kid who must be missing his toy car. I’ll set it on the yellow parking block next to the grass at the edge of the parking lot and hope other people see it and think about all of the people who have seen that toy. Then I hope the little kid gets his car back.
It’s snowing outside now, you can see it well out of that east window in the back room. One time I was watching the snow fall in that room and I wished I had a wood-burning stove and then I had one. I had to go outside during the snow–it was ok, it was a light snowfall, more like a haze of flakes gently falling, you know–and cut down a tree. Then I thought, what have I done? This has to dry out. This has to dry out just like the seeds for my rooms did, in the late August sun. So I placed the tree parts on the coffee table and I sat on the empty wood-burning stove and watched the snow fall until late August. Then the tree and I laid outside in the sun together, and when we were both dry we curled up in the ground and grew.