Carmens’s vineyard

Isabella Acuña | Spring 2023

Pocket mirror in hand, Carmen leaned over and began the inspection. The pains had been gnawing at her stomach for weeks. The cramps clenched her tubes into a knot and tugged at the little round belly right above her vulva. Taking care of herself had never been her strong suit, being a person far too interested in the pursuit of her vivid imagination to give her body its amply deserved attention. She’d had her qualms with her body, sure, but she didn’t care enough to torment herself over it like the other women she knew. Their conversations about pilates and buccal fat exhausted her, their superficiality a strain on her curiosity. Her mind drew too much toward the stars to give their torture the time of day, even if they found some morbid satisfaction in perpetual dissatisfaction. Besides, she liked her little pouch, a soft remnant of her heritage, a protector of her womanhood, so much so that she’d given it a name: Mia. Mia was warm and kind and reminded Carmen of her mother. When the waves would wash over Carmen, the waves of disquiet that she’d always thought had disappeared for good, she would hunch over so that Mia congealed into small stacked folds and jam her fingers between her rolls. Mia was very comforting. But recently she had been turning on her, roiling and rumbling in a pain so persistent that Carmen finally forced herself to pay her body some attention.
She flipped through the catalog of the past month’s bedmates in her mind, praying it wouldn’t come to the point of confrontation. Isaiah, three weeks ago. Mel a few times. Henry, but only when he was in town and she couldn’t remember him having been for a while, her favorite. George, two weeks ago, bad in bed. And that one woman, the first woman she’d ever been with, what was her name again? She’d been the last before the pangs.
So Carmen investigated. Her spine curved into a horseshoe, her vertebrae jutting out of her skin. She poked and prodded and pulled back layers of labia hunting for a clue as to what the issue could be. She took a pregnancy test–negative, thank Aphrodite–and any yeast infections that had lurked in the past had never crawled up into uterine territory. She wasn’t red or swollen or itchy. She was near abandoning the mission and succumbing to the pain until it eventually, hopefully, surely–it must at some point, right?–subsided when a tiny glint caught her eye. Tucked away in a pocket of skin, the solar plexus of the female reproductive system, something foreign sat. It was miniature, round with a point at the top, and tan. She picked at it, trying to get it out, but her pleas only pulled at the rest of her, too. It was a seed.
She sprinted to find her laptop, a cracked old Dell she’d been given from her eldest cousin. She opened it up and began to hunt through Google for a botany catalog when it suddenly went dark. She could hear the motherboard sizzling and whirring on her thighs. Shit. If only she could afford a new laptop. If only she hadn’t dropped out of that horticulture class. She’d always loved nature, the gentle caress of leaves and petals on her fingers. She liked to think of her body as a garden. Her hair like tufts of moss, her veins entangled vines. By no means did this mean she had a green thumb.
Margo! That was the woman’s name. She had been gentle. Perhaps she had left this here, Carmen mused. Perhaps she forgot her garden supplies on the way home. She contemplated finding her through her hefty stack of messages and sending a text. She decided against it–too humiliating to call up a lone affair.
Carmen didn’t mind the seed. She wouldn’t punish it with tweezers or razors. She would leave it alone and hope that it somehow melted away. The only issue was that she didn’t know how to deal with the cramps. She was terrified of doctors and averse to chemicals–she found pills to be unnecessary. She figured if the Earth can provide something, it must be good enough. She was not well educated in the science of modern medicine, so she stayed as far away from it as possible. She’d seen what they did to her mother when her arteries turned to weeds. After staring at it for hours, trying to figure out where it had come from and what its goal was, the only idea that came to her was to help it. Maybe if she helped it bloom, raising it like an infant, it would drop off of her body and rejoin its rightful home in the dirt. Her body was not equipped to care for this little seedling. It could barely manage itself. She filled up an old spray bottle with water and softly misted the seed, then patted herself dry and moved on. A new addition, she said to herself. That’s all this is.
This had happened once before. She couldn’t remember it, but she could remember her mother’s sweet maple voice recounting it to her. For a week, Carmen had stopped listening, stopped responding, stopped displaying any signs of hearing. She sat in the flower bed and bounced her Barbies through the mud and stayed there oblivious when her mother called her in for lunch. At first, her mother thought she was being stubborn, a frustrating trait Carmen had inherited, but she’d never been a temperamental child before. Scarlet fever? Her mother panicked. She waited. She saw no change. Carmen remained locked within her mind, unable to hear the world around her. Her mother checked her ears, and upon prying her canals open with her callused fingers, her mother found dirt clogged in the little conches. Snug within the dirt sat a sprouting root. It was an herb, eucalyptus. She grabbed her smallest pair of shears and clipped the bud. Carmen squealed and thrashed. Her mother scrubbed the dirt out of her ears and held her to sleep.
The memory twisted itself around Carmen’s heart. She missed her mother. Simple, painful longing. She forced it aside.
A handful of weeks passed. Carmen didn’t keep count. A calendar was an outdated object to her. She went through the motions of daily life–work, read, sleep–and in the meantime treated her body like a plant. She watered herself regularly. She lounged in the sun on her fire escape each morning and drank green tea. She ate foods that were born from the dirt. She hugged herself to sleep. Nothing happened. The seed did not move, no bud bloomed or sprouted, but at the very least, the cramps subsided. Her period disappeared completely. For both events, or lack thereof, she was grateful.
One day, when Carmen had nearly forgotten of the seed altogether, everything came to a head. Carmen was on cashier duty at the cafe, mindlessly punching in overpriced orders, silently pleading the clock to go faster until her break. It came, finally. She stepped outside, lit a cigarette, and closed her eyes. Yum. Then, a voice smooth as oil floated on the air and kissed her ear. She opened her eyes: shaggy black hair, harsh eyebrows, perfect teeth. It was Margo. Carmen couldn’t help but smile at the simply pleasant surprise that was her pretty face. She’d forgotten how much she liked her, the burning match she’d lit within her hollow chest reignited. “Long time no see”. They spoke and with every new phrase uttered a dormant star burst inside of her heart, expelling hot gas and magma that oozed through her pores and shot out through her toenails. Margo invited Carmen to an art show that evening. Naturally, she agreed to go, giddy. She watched Margo as she walked away, her perpetually urgent gait somehow unbelievably elegant. Upon taking in the golden outline that illuminated Margo’s silhouette, it happened.
Carmen felt an itch and a desperate yank from the depths of her bowels. She keeled over and held herself as best as she could with her two measly hands, trying to ward off the glances of customers going in and out of the cafe. Like a swarm of bees inside a mason jar, she held back an agonizing scream and forced herself to tighten the lid. What was happening? Why was her entire body committing war against her? Yet after a few moments–five, ten, twenty seconds, she tried to count to distract herself–the pain turned to pure ecstasy. Someone was tickling her from the inside, and the tingles trickled through every limb and pore of her body. She lost herself to her own boisterous laugh, and when she looked down, she began to shed tears, although she didn’t notice them herself. For a vine in bloom had crawled out of her body and planted her into the cracks of earth in the cement. She couldn’t move. Tiny roots shot out of her toes and fingers, creeping back into the dirt. Her eyes became plump grapes. Her hair became rich, green foliage. And all she could do was laugh until the only thing that remained of her was a dizzying grapevine climbing up the walls of the cafe, attaching itself to this world and longing for the heavens. She hugged her mother, somewhere in the dirt.