Miracle Supply Company

Though they would all be dead in a few weeks, the campus oaks were healthy—root, limb, and leaf. Minh always parked in a neighbourhood north of campus so she could take the path under their canopy to listen to the summer leaves or watch the winter branches crack the sky. Jeff, her supervisor, was declaring that they had oak blight. She knew that wasn’t true because she knew the oaks in the rundown park by her house. Every other tree there was stricken, leaves gone brown, big limbs rotted, riddled with white mushrooms, downed in the windstorms that blew in wilder each year. That summer, the hottest on record, an odd fungus had appeared in the oaks in her park, strange stuff seeping in their roots, red and shiny, blackening to scabs the size of her hands. No, the campus oaks were thriving; they were just clearing the trees for more buildings.

In the next cubicle, Alison was saying that the campus would feel weird without them. Susan responded in the same Teflon tone she used for layoffs saying it was so sad. Minh bit her lips and thought of the emails celebrating the architect’s sketches and big donors’ names on big buildings. She kept her eyes on her screen, sorting the names of the living and the dead.

~

The fall light was still enough to tend her garden after work. Mark hadn’t liked her to grow flowers, only a few tomato plants. He said it was stupid to spend money on seeds. Now, she spent her money as she pleased. And her garden grew taller and wilder each year, sunflowers towering over the house, ferns curling below, vines spiked with flowers climbing the iron railings and the brick walls, a thick curtain over the front windows. She pulled some crabgrass, cut a fistful of marigolds for the kitchen, leaned in to look at the morning glories flooding the back of the flower bed, climbing the front wall. She remembered shaking her head at the grand name of the seed seller: Miracle Supply Company. Though the morning glories were certainly a marvel this year, deep purple, almost black, their star-shaped throats lit with pollen.  

Minh sat on the porch as the sun went orange and red over the old Jewish graveyard at the top of the street. Her mother, gone sixteen years now, was not much older than she was now. More and more, pausing at the stop sign in the morning, waking in a panic in the dark, she felt time pressing down on her, like the pressure in her brainstem before a storm. Sixteen years on this street, watching the houses fall apart slowly. Her own among them, needing a new roof after the spring’s bad hailstorms. She felt the weight of it, the linoleum cracking in the kitchen, the windows rimed on the inside with ice during last winter’s polar vortex. Some people, she’d heard, exchanged their houses for vans; her car, with its low ceiling, was only a place to lay down. That’s how it felt, these sixteen years, so little room to move, time like a tunnel she was rushing through, pushing paycheck to paycheck. 

She pulled a juniper berry from the tree that grew beside the house. Dusty blue in her palm. Crushed it between her fingernails and inhaled the smell of its sap, that sharp heart of pine. The misty blue of its skin, and the sweet keen scent of it, brought her back to the lake, to the summer she cleaned lodges up north. It was the summer before she finished college. Her mother let her go because her older cousin Cai was with her. Cai soon found a boyfriend, leaving Minh alone with her books and walks by the lake. How free she felt on her days off, never again so free, waking up on a Wednesday with nowhere to be. Her life like wide water blurring boundless into sky.  

~

Her supervisor, Jeff, had the soul of a proofreader. Last year, at the holiday lunch, he’d taken twenty minutes to lecture at the whiteboard on how to better format emails. “Been writing them since 1994,” Alison had muttered when Jeff turned his back to remind them, with a broad red stroke of his marker, to not forget to link any hyperlinks. Jeff was brought on as another director of alumni gifts, but it was unclear what he did besides make phone calls and prowl the office. He would suddenly appear at people’s backs, peering into their screens, checking that they were not reading articles on insomnia as Joe sometimes did, or watching capybara videos as Alison sometimes did, or staring out the window as Minh did more and more, watching the gingkos go yellow.  

Six months ago, Jeff had reorganized everyone’s duties. He booked fifteen-minute meetings for each of them in his corner office. Pressing his palms together for emphasis, he told Minh that he had determined that her mentoring program for student workers was “not important anymore” and that she would now focus on “getting our numbers in order.” He seemed to not see the loud shout of her eyebrows or hear the six clear reasons she gave against it. The seventh reason, which she didn’t say, was that the Thursday meetings with the students had been the best part of her work. 

It was becoming hard to bear her days deep in the spreadsheets. Sleep was harder too. She would lay in the dark, seeing screen light, the grid of boxes, the blinking cursor—all seared in her brain. Sometimes, she’d give up, sit up, scroll through the news. Tent cities out west. And the fires. In the north, farmers wait for rain, the corn stunted, seared in the fields. Floods in the south, and too much rain here too, seeping into basements, sinkholes swallowing streets in the older parts of the city down along the river. When sleep came, her dreams were cluttered. And she started to dream of the war again. So many years have passed since the trees turned to torches, but she was still running from the fire, the ground exploding around her. There was always a child clutched to her chest, someone’s toddler, a young cousin, a neighbor’s baby, and, later in life, her own small daughter. Her grandmother was always calling her name from the yard. That warm, low voice suddenly pulled razor thin. Minh would wake, sweating, not thinking, more like waiting in the dark. 

She knew that dreams could change things. A few months after Mark left, she dreamt he was standing over her, shouting. As she scissored away, he kicked her between her legs. She felt her bones break and woke cramping to her monthly blood. The worst part of the dream was the way he looked at her. He’d never laid a hand on her in waking life, but his eyes had often looked at her that way toward the end. She thought the dream was all, but then she fell and broke her hip two days later on the icy stairs. She was young then, in her thirties, and this was an old woman’s injury. She was more embarrassed by the fall than about Mark’s betrayal. She had pushed him away for years. She had never wanted to marry him, never wanted to marry anyone. But they’d been going out a while, and she was 28, and her mother was pressing her to settle down. Right after Bian was born, it was clear they weren’t in love, just locked in some struggle. She never blamed him for leaving in the daylight world. Crazy though it seemed, she blamed him for the dream assault: her broken bones, the years of painful work it took to mend them. 

The war dream that dogged her for decades was different. No change came from it. * 

When he narrowed her job to numbers, Jeff had joked, “Nobody wants this part of the job,” followed by, “But you are just so good at it.” Since then, he would pop by and stand behind her to peer at her spreadsheets. He liked to say to everyone, “What matters is the numbers.” And, for her, he would add, “And that is what you do now.” She would arch an eyebrow, but he was already onto the next thing.  

And so, her day was a grid of boxes in the box of her cubicle with its grey walls, grey desk, grey pen dish with its paperclips lined up like fish on a dock. Her eyes craved curves, sought sinuous lines of roots, crooked branches, curls of fern. She savored the oak path to her car. Found solace in her garden. On Saturdays, she’d drive to the garden shop to wander among the fruit trees and flowers. During the week, she’d think of those sunlit rows of shaggy plants as she worked. How there were people her age working there, teaching customers about seeds and soil, and sunlight, and water.  

In the evenings now, she had started bundling the Russian sage to dry inside and cutting back the bee balm and phlox ahead of the frost. Her eye caught on the stone Bian had painted for her in grade school, round and red, a ladybug. “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,” she sang as she pressed it into the earth with her light-up sneaker. She remembered Bian’s face falling when she didn’t join in the song. She had been a tough mother, she knew. Worn down from work and worry after Mark left. How to make the mortgage on the little bungalow. How to pay for childcare. Clothes. College. She tended to shut down into silence, though Bian’s bright attempts at chatter didn’t fade until her teen years.  

Still, Minh knew she fed the girl well, with books and music and vegetables from the garden. And when Bian was young, among the asters and the dahlias, she drew her daughter closer, bent over ferns and roses together, seeding and weeding and tending, teaching themselves the names and ways of the flowers.  

And now this splendid yellow chrysanthemum, last of the season. She’d text it to her fiery child, far away in LA, a teacher by day and drummer by night. It was how they talked now, in photos of flowers. 

~

HR had emailed her a contract. Had given her unit ten days to sign it at one of their busiest times of the year. It said that if they left in the next twelve months, they would have to pay a fine, a thousand dollars “to offset recruiting and onboarding.” “Indentured servitude,” muttered Alison. Joe said Jeff had boasted it was his idea, picked up from his old job at Magnus Bank. Petty, Minh thought. She’d been there for twelve years; she planned to retire there. She thought of her roof, her bad hip, the tent cities. The cubicle felt smaller the rest of the day. 

That night, she wanted soup that would burn her throat. She cut some of the last lemongrass from the garden. Cut another hunk at the root to plant in her kitchen pots before the frost. At the porch stairs, she paused, grabbed a spade, cleared away some of the mass of morning glory, and dug a wide, deep hole, gently pulling up the delicate roots of one part of the vine. She would bring it inside the house to winter with her. She potted the plants on the porch, then tucked the morning glory under the window where she could see it from the kitchen table. The night-dark petals shimmered with hints of violet, crimped in like cat claws. As the flowers registered the low light in the kitchen, they swelled into the shape of a chrysalis, shut up tight in the dark. 

~

They were cutting down the oaks, piece by piece. She went to watch on her lunch break. Men in white hardhats dangled from cranes, loud saws shearing away the treetops, the lush green canopy she loved. She watched the limbs go next, then the trunks bit by bit. Nothing but a concrete path now under the suddenly stark sun. She felt like she’d been skinned.  

Jeff was strict about the lunch hour. You had exactly one hour, or he’d call you into his office. It was time to go back. And today was the last day to sign the contract. Somehow, she’d let the week pass without signing it. She had opened the document a few times, felt her jaw tighten, then turned to other tasks.  

At 12:57 p.m., she pushed open the office door. Stood a moment taking in the little flotilla of cubicles. Joe eating his sandwich in his little box, Alison whispering to Ruby over the tops of theirs, Susan hunkered over a report. Minh smelled the stale coffee-pot air of the place and realized in a rush that she was not going to sign the contract. Then she was back in her box with the paperclips lined up like freshly caught trout. She turned back to her work of sorting names. 

“This is why we proofread things,” Jeff said at her back, dropping a hundred-page donor report on her desk, rows and rows of names, dates, and dollar amounts. It was binder-clipped to page forty-two, “Janson, not Jansson” scrawled in red pen. 

She felt a spark of white heat in her brain, felt it surge down her shoulders, spread to her skin, as if it was seeping from her pores, surrounding her body in a chemical mist of pure fury. She could feel Jeff standing over her as he always did when he made his rounds. Waves of rage churned in her chest, fanning out from her shoulders, making the air dangerous, clear, and alive as if seething with gasoline. She knew there was power in silence, but the fire rising in her throat exploded into a long sigh. She pushed her keyboard back slowly. Rested her hands for a moment on the cool of her desk. When she turned her chair to look at him, he stepped back, two fast steps back, to the flimsy threshold of her cubicle. She took in his flushed face and locked eyes with his suddenly nervous stare. “You fix it,” she said. 

~

The walk home felt wrong without the oaks. And it was the wrong time to be going home, the sun still so high, almost blinding. But the sky was such a bright October blue. She felt like swinging her arms as she would when she was a child walking with her grandmother, singing together little songs of catfish and butterflies. But she carried her bag carefully, Bian’s framed grade-school photo peeking out and pothos plants curled in the crooks of her arms.  

That night, she dreamed the old dream of the war. Running from the blaze of the trees on fire, the ground rising, a rain of dirt around her, the child pressed to her chest. But this time, she wasn’t afraid. She could feel her strong legs carrying them both, and some part of her told her that she had carried them both for years. She saw the gunshots sparking the woodline and marveled at her nimble limbs and luck. And then the gunshot sparks and crack of bullets turned into bees, wings glinting in the light, flying beside her like protectors, and her heart glowed brightly as pollen in the dark.

The next morning, she rose late and made bánh tét as if it were a new year. There would be time for worry and new work, but not yet; now, the morning glories were open, soaking up sun pouring through the kitchen window. She took her coffee out to the porch to watch the autumn sky. Cloudless, endless. Day like a lake before her.