Wallstrait

Mills was plant-sitting for her mother’s friend Noreen. If she did a good job, her mother said, perhaps Noreen would consider her for a position at her company. Mills needed to find work; her mother’s social security wasn’t enough for them to live on, and her internship at the filing center was showing no signs of becoming a paid position.

 

Mills’ mother gave her Noreen’s instructions between prolonged fits of coughing and spitting up bile. The waste bin beside the couch had again filled with tissues, and Mills took it to the dumpster outside before leaving. Someday soon, she knew, her mother would die, and when that happened, Mills would throw out the bin itself, along with however many tissues had accumulated within it.

 

—

 

Noreen lived in a largely vacant neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Her apartment building was a brutalist concrete slab that stood beside an empty lot full of weeds and shards of broken bottles.  

 

Mills took a slow, grating elevator up to the fourth floor, the doors opening with a terrible metallic creak.

 

The hallway was narrow, lit poorly by dim floor lamps on either end, so that when you got to the middle you were almost entirely in darkness. Mills was surprised Noreen lived here. She’d pictured her in some large, glossy complex—modern and sterile, optimized for the corporate professional.

 

The apartment itself was small and cramped. Filling the space was a loft bed with a desk underneath, a loveseat missing a cushion, a sink, microwave and mini-fridge clustered together on a carved-out slat of wall, and a dresser pressed into the corner that made it so you could only open the bathroom door a quarter of the way.

 

A spider plant sat on the sill of the lone window. It already looked in desperate need of watering; most leaves were slumping lifelessly against the side of the pot. The only cup Mills could find was the one holding Noreen’s toothbrush in the bathroom, a heavy coat of toothpaste crusted around the lip. She filled it with slightly discolored water from the tap and tilted it carefully over the spider plant’s soil. But the water seemed to go straight through, leaking out from the bottom almost immediately. Unable to find a rag, Mills used her coat to mop up the spillage, then took the plant to the sink and set it under the tap. She plugged the drain and ran the water briefly. Again, the soil seemed to absorb nothing, and a small pool of brownish water appeared around the base of the pot. Mills decided to leave it like that overnight, so that maybe the plant would soak up the water from the bottom. She could come back in the morning before work and return it to its perch by the window. A good, responsible plan.

 

On the way to her car, Mills passed an old woman sitting in a wheelchair before the empty lot, staring out at it as if it were a lake. A resident, perhaps, of the retirement home a couple blocks over. The wheelchair she was in looked ancient and incredibly uncomfortable; the wood of the backrest was splintered and appeared to have been crudely bolted back together, resulting in uneven planks and jagged lines of metal pressure points. What kind of retirement home puts a resident in something like that? Mills wondered.

 

—

 

At home Mills heated up TV dinners for herself and her mother, mixing her mother’s medication into the suspiciously orange-colored mashed potatoes. They ate in silence before the glow of the television: some old romance about stage actors in New York City. Soon her mother fell asleep. Mills listened to the shallow stutter of her breath, the strained, sandpaper edges of every exhale, like Pop Rocks.

 

Mills ran a bath and tried to relax, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the spider plant at Noreen’s. Would she be able to revive it? Noreen would surely be pleased, if so. It would demonstrate Mills’ strong sense of duty, her close attention to detail, the care with which she treated even the smallest of tasks—the kind others would lend only the minimum amount of effort. Noreen would give her a job, her mother would die, and Mills would begin to lead something like a normal life. She would enjoy normal things, like eating out and going to the movies, getting a drink with a friend from work and discussing their dating lives. She would be a person in the world.

 

—

 

In the morning Mills put on what she envisioned her usual work outfit would be at Noreen’s company—a long plaid skirt and patterned wool vest—and hurried to her car. The early dawn roads were dim and foggy, every structure a silhouette.

 

Mills shivered. The heater in her car had stopped working last month, and her hands burned against the chilled steering wheel.

 

The retirement home near Noreen’s building loomed on the horizon, windows aglow. Mills pictured the residents gathered in a dingy room with newspapers and bitter coffee, a dead-eyed attendant circling with a rusted mint-green cart, offering sugar packets and half & half. Mills couldn’t blame her mother for refusing to live there, even if the terror of old age seemed largely independent of location.

 

The sun was starting to cut through the fog as Mills got closer, a glimmering tunnel that seemed to point directly and specifically to Noreen’s apartment window.

 

—

 

Mills took the screeching elevator up to the fourth floor of Noreen’s building. At the end of the hall, resting in half-shadow beside apartment 4E, sat the barbarous wheelchair she’d seen the old woman in yesterday. So she hadn’t been from the retirement home. Mills supposed that made sense, given the wheelchair’s condition. A man came out of the adjacent apartment as Mills stood there. Younger than the old woman but still pretty aged in his own right, he had a buzz cut of gray hair and large, egg-shaped eyes that drooped with fatigue. He wore a white lab coat and was carrying one of those old-timey medicine bags Mills had seen in movies.

 

“Hello,” he said. “Are you my mother’s neighbor?”

 

“Yes,” Mills said reflexively.

 

“She needs a lot of help these days.” The man smiled sadly.

 

“My mother, too,” Mills said.

 

“It’s difficult, isn’t it?”

 

“It is,” Mills agreed.

 

The man nodded, then shuffled past her down the hall. Mills wondered, fleetingly, why he didn’t get his mother a new wheelchair. Even the cheapest model available would surely be much more comfortable.

 

The spider plant had soaked up the water in the sink, just like Mills had hoped. She moved it to the window and sat watching it from the cushioned half of Noreen’s couch. It was getting better already. A few of the sagging leaves had begun to rise into natural curls, bodies fuller-looking than before. If she stayed vigilant, the plant could likely make a complete recovery before Noreen got home.

 

—

 

The filing center where Mills had interned for the last eight months was located in a colossal beige building, surrounded by a colony of smokestacks that expelled billowing black brume from the neighboring factories and lumberyards. Mills’ desk—the intern desk—was really more of a counter; just a slab of metal that folded a couple feet out from the wall. Since there was hardly enough room on top of it for the piles of documents left for Mills to file every day, most of them were stacked on the floor beside her chair.

 

Right away, Mills went to speak with her supervisor, to give him one last chance at promoting her to a paid position. If he didn’t . . . well, she had a better opportunity coming down the pike.

 

Her supervisor, Lonnie, was at his desk—a space-eating, horseshoe-shaped behemoth with swaths of unused surface area.

 

 “How’s it going there, Milly?” He smiled. Mills had never gone by Milly, but it hadn’t ever seemed important to correct Lonnie, especially since her time at the filing center could come to an end at any point. 

 

More people had started to filter into the office, paid employees who spoke of things like weekend plans and funny habits of their spouses. It was difficult for Mills to see herself as a part of the collective humanity they formed around her, to see them as anything other than people with infinitely fuller lives than her own. She knew they weren’t all perfectly happy; that beneath their fortified surfaces of well-being they contained their own sorrows, their own emptinesses. But even so, Mills longed to experience those inner voids on the same plane of existence as they did, one in which you could look in another direction and see something—someone—that suggested the void’s irrelevance.

 

Lonnie’s smile faded as he waited for Mills to speak. Steam from his coffee wafted up to his face, and Mills briefly imagined him falling into one of the nearby smokestacks, his body burning down to the bones, flesh becoming just another part of the next hour’s smog.

 

“I just wanted to check-in about my status here,” Mills said quickly, chiding herself for using the word just—a word born from a life-draining instinct to make things that were important to her sound like no big deal. “I wanted to see if there were any plans to make me a regular employee,” she clarified.

 

Lonnie squinted at her. “Didn’t we talk about this recently?”

 

“Two and a half months ago,” Mills said.

 

“Two months, really?” Lonnie shook his head. “Time flies, doesn’t it?”

 

Not really, Mills thought, but returned his smile anyway.

 

“Well, I hate to be the bearer of no news.” Lonnie chuckled. “But I don’t have a new answer for you yet. Your permanent status is yet to be determined.” He looked down at his desk and performed occupation, shuffling around papers before moving them back to their original places.

 

Mills begged herself to speak further, to make demands, to state her worthiness of a normal life. But in the end, she simply returned to her corner and picked her things off the floor, folding her desk back into the wall before quietly leaving the office.

 

—

 

When Mills got home, her mother was sitting in her usual spot on the couch, head slumped to the side. A commercial for laundry detergent blared from the television. Mills turned it off and stood beside the couch, gripping the cold plastic of the remote. She realized that she had known immediately, right when she walked in, on some unconscious, bodily level—before she could even notice the stillness of her mother’s chest, how quiet the room became without the constant wheezing of her breath.

 

She called 911 and reported her mother’s death.

 

“Please remember that this line is for emergencies only,” the operator chided, then transferred her to someone at a nearby funeral home, who said they could pick up the body in two-to-six hours. Mills gave them permission to enter the residence if she wasn’t there.

 

Her mother had always said she was proud of Mills, but Mills never felt like she had earned it. What had she ever done to earn it? She knew parents often experienced a sort of unconditional pride towards their children, but hearing her mother say it only made Mills feel like she was getting away with something—pride only placed onto her because her mother had nowhere else to put it; an arbitrary, empty bestowal.

 

The fog had cleared into a bright, sunny day, and Mills was worried that the afternoon light pouring into Noreen’s window would be too intense for the spider plant. It was probably best to move it off the sill until later. She packed a few things and drove back to Noreen’s apartment, deciding to stay there until Noreen got home. This would be the surest way to maintain the plant’s care.

 

—

 

Once there, Mills quickly moved the spider plant away from the acute afternoon sunlight. She placed it on the dresser and ran a finger softly along one of its leaves, as if to soothe it. She really was doing a great job; the plant appeared to be nearing a full recovery. Noreen would have to hire her after seeing it.

 

Mills unpacked and heated up one of the TV dinners she’d brought with her in Noreen’s microwave. She didn’t want to use too much extra electricity, fearing Noreen might be upset if her bill reflected extended usage by someone else, so she kept the lights off as night fell, using the flashlight on her phone when necessary. A slice of moonlight settled on the spider-plant, and Mills swore she could see it growing. The leaves stretched out bravely into the world, buoyant and content. And that was just the surface; beneath the soil was a beautiful self-contained universe, lively and glowing with togetherness. All thanks to her.

 

—

 

Mills woke to shouting coming through the walls, a door slamming in the hallway. She looked out the window. Soon the man she’d seen in the hall yesterday came into view, rolling the decrepit wheelchair towards the empty lot. His mother wasn’t in it. Mills could hear her yelling something from her window next door, voice full of acid. The man paused, shaking his head, then turned and brought the wheelchair back inside. In a few moments Mills heard the elevator doors groan open, and the deep snapping sound produced by the wheelchair as it rolled up the hall, like bones breaking over and over. What could that have been about? Mills kept still and pressed her ear to the wall, but the woman and her son seemed to have gone quiet.

 

On Noreen’s dresser, the spider plant had nearly doubled in size, new tendrils shooting up through the soil while the existing ones towered over them. It didn’t seem possible, but Mills didn’t know much about plants; maybe such a thing could, occasionally, happen—provided they received attentive care. Since she couldn’t have placed it back on the windowsill now without significantly bending some of the leaves against the pane, she tried moving the dresser closer to the light. But it was too heavy, even after Mills had taken out all the drawers. She needed another person to lift one of the sides.

 

Emboldened by a sense of immediate purpose, Mills went and knocked on her neighbor’s door—or rather, Noreen’s neighbor’s door. It clicked open and the old woman’s son regarded her from inside, face hovering before a backdrop of shadow.

 

“My mother’s napping,” he said softly, then stepped out and closed the door. The hallway lamp buzzed beside them, casting the man’s face in a faint white glow.

 

“I wonder if you could help me,” Mills said. “I need to move a dresser.” She showed him inside Noreen’s apartment. The spider plant seemed to have grown bigger even in the minute she was away.

 

“Sure thing,” the man said. He moved the plant over to the counter before getting into position beside the dresser. Mills admired his precautionary thinking. She lifted the other end and together they walked the dresser over to the window.

 

The man lingered when they were done. It seemed like he wanted to talk to someone, or maybe he just didn’t want to go back to his mother.

 

“Is everything okay?” Mills asked.

 

The man sat down on the uncushioned side of Noreen’s loveseat. “I tried to replace my mother’s wheelchair,” he said, shaking his head. “Get her out of that terrible thing.”

 

Mills nodded. “It looks awful.”

 

“She sees it as her penance,” the man said. “Told me I was denying her salvation by getting rid of it.”

 

“Penance for what?”

 

“She won’t tell me. Just says, all of it, for all of it, every time I ask.”

 

Outside, a silver sedan came around the corner and parked in front of the building.

 

“But everything begets itself,” the man continued. “Suffering only leads to more suffering.”

 

The concept rang true to Mills, and she felt a surge of intimacy with the man. “And sadness to more sadness,” she added.

 

“Precisely.” The man sighed, covering his face with his hands. Mills sat next to him and put an arm around his shoulder. His muscles tensed upon contact before gradually sinking back down.

 

Mills began kneading the man’s shoulder. Intimacy, she knew, demanded unflinching honesty, practiced within an orb of non-judgment. The man was letting her in, and she had to do the same.

 

“My mother died yesterday,” she said. “I’ve been wanting her to for a long time, but now that it’s happened, things don’t feel different in the way I hoped.” Saying the words felt like free-falling into another world, its climate to be determined by the man’s reaction. But the man said nothing. His shoulder began to feel oddly soft and pliant, giving like wet cardboard beneath Mills’ touch.

 

“She didn’t deserve to be wished dead,” Mills added, “and I’m not sure I deserve a better life.”

 

The man remained silent and still, face buried in his hands, even as keys jangled in the doorknob and a woman entered the apartment, rolling suitcase at her side.

 

Noreen.

 

She was tall and tight-lipped, dressed in the dour colors of business. Mills rose to greet her, cursing herself for having yet to move the spider plant back to the dresser.

 

“You must be my plant-sitter.” Noreen smiled curtly and extended a small wad of cash.

 

“It’s doing great,” Mills said. “I was just about to move it over to the dresser.”

 

“I see the dresser has been moved as well,” Noreen said, in a tone that made clear her disapproval. “And who’s this?” She nodded to the man, still sitting on the loveseat with his head between his knees.

 

“My neighbor,” Mills said. “Your neighbor, I mean.”

 

 “Hmm.” Noreen approached the man and kicked his shin. “You awake down there?”

 

The man shot up, shaking his head. “Forgive me,” he muttered. “I must have dozed off.” He looked back and forth between Mills and Noreen.

 

“Well, I’d like to be alone now,” Noreen said. “Long flight, you understand.”

 

Before leaving, Mills quickly carried the spider plant over to the dresser, setting it down in the perfect amount of half-light.

 

In the hallway, Mills tried to think of what to say to the man, how to explain her arbitrary lie of being his neighbor. But she wasn’t sure she had an explanation to give, at least not a clear and concise one. Maybe it had felt better to say that she was a fixed part of something, rather than just someone passing through, the latter of which had come to feel like her default state.

 

“My best to your mother,” Mills said, and continued on to the elevator.

 

—

 

Mills returned to the small, splintered blue house she’d shared with her mother for the past three years, dread building in her chest as she stepped inside. She held her breath until she got to the living room, where she was relieved to find that her mother’s body had indeed been removed.

 

Mills ordered Chinese food and ran a bath. She lit a single candle and lowered herself into the tub, sinking all the way down to her chin. She probably shouldn’t have ordered the takeout, not on her limited budget. But soon, she knew, things would be different. Noreen was tired from her trip, so it made sense she didn’t offer Mills a job right there at her apartment. Once she got a good night’s sleep, she’d be able to better appreciate the spider plant’s growth, the recovery from its dying state that Mills had facilitated. And then Mills would get a call, one that started with the words I wanted to see if you’d be interested . . . or something like that. From there, her life would roll along like a big ball of tape, details sticking, sticking, sticking, until finally its surface area was full, and she could rest, happy.

 

But as night fell, and the silence of the house choked her positivity, it began to feel less likely that Noreen would call.

 

—

 

Mills’ dream that night was particularly vivid. It started with her back in Noreen’s apartment, a police officer banging on the door. The spider plant had grown over the entire room, making a curtain around her.

 

“Millicent Wright,” a voice came from the hallway, “You’re under arrest for several different things!” The officer spoke with utter repulsion, disgusted with Mills beyond measure—as if until now, he thought he’d seen it all.

 

Finally the door broke open. The officer, whose torso bent sharply to the side as if his spine was drastically out of alignment, brushed past one of the spider plant’s giant tendrils and produced a set of handcuffs. Mills didn’t struggle; she could tell she’d been found out. The officer knew everything, all of Mills’ failures. He knew about the fruitless internship, her nonexistent social life, even her mother—the way Mills had secretly longed for her death, had imagined it as a takeoff point for the rest of her life.

 

“Thank you, officer,” the man from next door said, sitting there behind them on the loveseat, head between his knees. “Thank you for delivering justice upon this foul creature.”

 

“All in a day’s work.” A proud smile swelled over the officer’s cheeks.

 

Outside, the officer took Mills into the empty lot beside Noreen’s building. His slanted upper half curved away from her, bobbing a little as he walked. They stopped at a point where the ground became particularly broken, a web of cracks branching out in every direction. Above them, the sky looked like a strange, biblical painting; beams of sunlight cutting through dark clouds, colors ultra-saturated.

 

“Where are we going?” Mills asked. The officer shook his head distantly, refusing to look at her.

 

“You’re going where you belong,” he said, then pushed her to the ground with sudden brute force. The pavement gave beneath her, and Mills began sinking into it, losing all mobility as the cold cast of concrete gripped her body.

 

But then there were sounds—a low and gentle beeping, water boiling on a stove. Light came next, dim and green-tinged. A paneled ceiling slowly came into focus. It seemed that she was rising up from the ground now, rather than dropping into it.

 

“You’re almost there,” someone said. The voice was very near, but Mills couldn’t turn her head to see who it belonged to. Gradually, she felt the grip of the concrete loosen around her. Its texture became gelatinous, as if her body was slowly emerging from a vat of syrup.

 

Finally, she felt her limbs come completely free. Some viscous substance puddled at her back, clinging to her sweater as she tried to sit up. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came into view above her and knelt down to offer a hand, smiling gently.

 

“Let’s get you in your chair.” She motioned for someone else in the room to approach, and Mills heard a familiar snapping sound swell towards them, like bones breaking over and over.

 

She didn’t understand how she had gotten so old, so quickly. But here she was, wrinkled and living in a retirement home, confined to a torturous wheelchair. Her legs had been paralyzed, perhaps by the trip through the ground. She tried asking the nurse if she could switch to a more comfortable chair, but the nurse, whose demeanor never seemed to waver from one of cheerful indifference, simply chuckled and muttered, “The grass is always greener, isn’t it?”

 

—

 

Mills woke up early. Her alarm was still set for morning plant care. She made a cup of coffee and got in her car, reluctantly resolving to go back to the filing center as if nothing had happened.

 

She stayed parked for several minutes, watching her phone to see if it would light up with a call from Noreen. But it didn’t.

 

Mills thought about her mother, about her wishes for Mills’ life. They were never anything grand, just normal things like a stable job and a partner who made her happy. Mills hated that she hadn’t been able to give her mother the simple satisfaction of seeing these things realized.

 

She picked up the phone and called Noreen herself.

 

“Noreen Headings,” Noreen said, answering in that important-person way of simply stating one’s name.

 

“Hi,” Mills said. “This is Mills, your plant-sitter?”

 

“Yes? Did you forget something at my apartment?”

 

“I was actually just wondering if there were any open positions at your company,” Mills said. “I thought I might apply.”

 

“Well, you’d have to check online,” Noreen said absently. “But most positions require years of experience.”

 

“Right.” Mills shivered in the car’s frigid interior. She leaned forward and switched the heat dial on and off, on and off, on and off. There was a small clicking sound each time from somewhere behind the vents, but it didn’t seem to mean anything.

 

“Was there anything else?” Noreen asked.

 

Mills grasped for further conversation, hoping—against reason, she knew—that prolonging their discussion might somehow change its outcome. 

 

“Why do you live in that apartment?” She asked. “When you could afford a nicer one, I mean.” 

 

Noreen sighed. “Not that it’s your business, but most of my money goes to my perennially broke adult children. Now, if you’re through asking rude questions—”

 

“My mother died yesterday,” Mills interrupted. On, off, on, off. Click, click, click, click.

 

“Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that.” Noreen’s voice dropped its sharp edges. “She was a fine woman, from what I could tell.”

 

“Weren’t you friends?”

 

“Not as such. We were only in the same Plant Moms group online.”

 

Mills pictured the begonia her mother had kept on her bedside table, before she’d resigned herself to sleeping on the couch. Mills never went into her mother’s old bedroom; she supposed the begonia was still there, long dead.

 

“She would have wanted you to give me a job.” Mills was surprised the words had come to her, let alone come out of her mouth. But once they had, she felt just fine about them.

 

Noreen cleared her throat. “What an exceedingly inappropriate thing to say.” The phone beeped twice as she hung up.

 

—

 

Mills drove to the filing center and began her usual workday, classifying five sets of documents that had been piled on the floor beside the intern desk.

 

“How’s it going there, Milly?” Lonnie approached with a plastic smile, crouching beneath the pipes hanging over Mills’ corner of the office.

 

“Good,” Mills said flatly. “How about you?”

 

“Oh, just fine.” Lonnie paused, lips pouting. “Were you at the meeting yesterday afternoon?”

 

“No,” Mills admitted. “I had a family emergency.”

 

“Ah,” Lonnie said. “Well, it had no bearing on your role here, but please do notify me if you have to step out again, okay?”

 

“Sure,” Mills said.

 

Lonnie nodded and turned to leave.

 

“It’s Mills,” Mills called after him. Her breath tightened up, heart thudding: the sensations of taking root. “It’s no big deal, but I go by Mills, actually.”

​

​

—

​

​

Timothy Day lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works at a grocery store and teaches a class centered around weird fiction. His work has appeared in Booth, The Adroit Journal, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find him online here.