Weed Killer

by Amanda M. Blake

At first, we thought they were just more dandelions.

Mom called me from the back and asked whether I’d forgotten to spray. I hadn’t, but in the spring and early summer, we spray practically every week. When one dies, three others pop up in its place until the summer heat off the pavement finally breaks down their yellow-petaled or fluffy wills and we can strip them away without any hope of seedling resurrection.

I’m no landscape artist. We have a pair of window boxes in the front of the shop, but the plants are all fake. No one has time for gardening here. We’re selling fried yeasted dough and puff pastry, not flower pots.

I sprayed the pavement and promptly put weed-killing out of my mind.

But the leaves and stems didn’t wither. They remained a ragged but vibrant green and grew taller.

At Mom’s prodding, I sprayed again, but the stems thickened, sprouting more leaves. For a moment, I worried they’d vine and we’d never get rid of them. After about a week, though, the stems thickened enough to support themselves and the growth continued upright.

The actual dandelions died. I pulled them away without problem. But three clusters remained unaffected, even when I drowned them in enough weed killer to down a thistle and it trickled in a thin line down the storm drain.

The next step was to pull them out by the root. The only reason I used the weed killer was so I wouldn’t have to kneel on a hot, dirty sidewalk—just spray, crouch, pull, and toss.

When weeds take root in a sidewalk crack, you don’t expect them to put up much of a fight. How deep can they go, right? They only have about a half inch to take root, at best. But no matter how hard I pulled, they stuck tight. Maybe when the seeds sprouted, they created just enough of a crack in an already unstable foundation that the root could reach farther than the average urban weed. These slabs were last updated in the seventies, and some of the slants had caused more than a few skinned knees.

The roots didn’t give, but one of the stems snapped, secreting a milky substance onto my hands.

If you don’t remove the root system, the weed grows again, but to get Mom off my back about them for a while, I severed the stems and picked all the leaves.

Before we go to bed, Mom likes to watch the five-thirty world news, then the six o’clock local news, so she feels more connected to a world beyond doughnuts. In the local news, they had this informative segment about the new weed-killer-resistant plant popping up in various places all along the stretch of downtown Main Street. They suggested that everyone leave them alone while the botanists at the nearest university studied them because the weeds had proven difficult to remove and emitted a defensive substance that damaged garden gloves and irritated skin.

Which was the understatement of the year because Mom had already broken open the aloe vera leaves, and I was soaking my red-hived hands in them, trying not to cry from how badly they itched—like a thousand mosquito bites reaching their worst all at once. It lasted for days. Mom had to call in Tuyet to cover my shifts until the blisters scabbed over and the itch faded into irritating instead of excruciating.

After that, people tried new formulas of weed killer, but mine weren’t the only hands with chemical burns that week, so they mostly avoided trying to break or cut the weeds off at the stem. The ones who tried pruning shears ended up with at least some splashes, some eye irritation from aerosolized droplets and from the little filaments like tarantula hair on the leaves and stems.

“We’re still looking into this unfamiliar species, but like other plants as well as animals, they’ve evolved to protect themselves,” the experts said. “They’re hardy, but as long as you leave them alone, they should be harmless.”

So, all along the street, people mostly left them alone. Storeowners’ kids drew around the weeds with chalk to discourage tourists from walking on them or touching them. Most storefronts had signs in the corners of their windows as well, to minimize liability—not that anyone ever reads signs, based on the number of people who try to come into the doughnut shop after one in the afternoon when the closed sign is turned over in the door.

Soon, the chalk art became more elaborate as curious kids and curiouser adults studied the steadily growing stems and the clenched, closed buds at the tips. Henrik Sorenson, a local window and chalk artist, embellished the work done by some of the kids as they imagined what kind of flower would bloom. Amid giant dandelions, daisies, and sunflowers, he also drew a flower with tentacle petals and a Venus fly trap parody with a cartoon speech bubble saying, Feed me!

People laughed and took pictures, but I didn’t think it was funny.

Still, the more that people took pictures, the more people came to walk downtown and into our doughnut shop. Mom extended the hours to three in the afternoon to accommodate the post-lunch dessert crowd. Since Tuyet was an accomplished window artist herself—and since her window art was covered by her hourly wages rather than Mom having to pay Henrik extra—she made the storefront a botanical wonderland that put our fake window-box flowers to shame.

We also designed a specialty doughnut with sugar flowers on top and floral patterns painted into the icing. Customers were encouraged to take pictures in front of the window art or next to the chalk art around the weeds themselves and post with the hashtag flowerpower.

Not my idea. To me, it all seemed like a lot of noise over a freaking weed.

When I hinted that Cheryl down at the antique store was maybe having some luck killing the weeds with some essential oils, Mom told me to get back to my kneading and “Don’t interfere with good business.” I didn’t mention that she was the one who’d wanted me to get rid of the weeds in the first place, because I sure as heck never minded a dandelion on the sidewalk. She would have scolded me for mouthing off and given me the silent treatment through supper, even though I was twenty-two and only lived at home because she and Dad wanted me to stay with family—until I made my own, she’d say.

Between tourist fascination and academic confusion, everyone had flower fever. Our quaint little town found itself in the middle of its fifteen minutes of fame. “It’ll fade,” I told Mom. “Don’t expect these numbers we’re doing forever.” She said she understood, but she’d milk the attention for all its worth, while we could.

Meanwhile, the weeds continued to grow, leafing like something from the Amazon, the bud at the end growing with it but remaining tightly closed and encouraging more and more outlandish speculation about what was inside.

At this point, I could look up from the cash register to give our customers their change, and I’d see the bud swaying in a breeze. Whenever a child’s laughter rang discordant through the distortion of the window, I’d wait for the scream—from the child stepping over the chalk lines to grab at the stem or tear away the leaves like a lovesick girl, from a customer coming in with their wailing child’s hands or face bubbling with red blisters and exclaiming that they would sue us for child endangerment.

I guess when litigation strangles your intestines like that, you know you’re an adult. I wondered whether Mom woke up at midnight from the same nightmares.

After the breakfast crowd thinned and I restocked the case, I kept checking through the windows, through the illustrated imaginings of what the weeds would become, to see whether the buds had cracked. But they remained locked closed, even as the stems shot up like bamboo and the leaves grew as big as saucepans, expanding beyond the lines of the original chalk art.

I didn’t understand how a weed sprouted in a sidewalk crack could get that big. I’d been half kidding with myself when I’d assumed it must have cracked through the foundation. Tree roots could upend a slab, but these were weeds, not two-hundred-year-old oaks. Yet when I stepped out one afternoon and crouched down, a mound of sidewalk pebbles surrounded where the stem emerged from the crack, where the thickening had overwhelmed the integrity of concrete. If the stem could do that, I didn’t have the expertise to say the roots hadn’t done otherwise. I stood up quickly and edged as far around the weeds as I could, although there almost wasn’t enough sidewalk left to avoid them before having to step into the street. The only reason I’d left out the front was to stop by the sandwich shop, but after that, I took the back door every time, because at least the weeds growing in the alley stayed along the brick walls.

I started to get even more nervous, though, whenever I saw those weeds back there, where there was no window or chalk art or people taking pictures to make their social media accounts more interesting, no promotions for our little downtown street to make a few extra bucks. No one was paying these weeds any attention, not even the news outlets, because only store employees ever saw them or had to avoid them. But they were still there, both on and around Main Street, as though deliberately surrounding us.

Every time I asked to take some time off to escape from them to the city, Dad told me that plants don’t have brains or neural networks, that they communicate, but it’s a series of chemical reactions responding to stimuli, nothing more. He didn’t have much of a reply for me when I said that we did the same thing, and my chemical reactions were telling me to get the hell out of Dodge.

But I had responsibilities, at work and at home, and I didn’t want to leave Mom and Dad without warning just because I was paranoid.

The coverage became like a countdown to the new year, like those old white people who wait with baited breath for the corpse flower to bloom for a few glorious, stinky hours.

The window and chalk art became more elaborate and colorful; Henrik painted a mural on the other side of the curio shop. With the time that our icing artists had to perfect them, the floral doughnuts became more realistic and popular, even more popular than the croissant doughnuts.

The weed stems thickened to the width of my wrist, and the buds reached the height of my head, shaped almost like a candle flame and as long as my thigh, clenched like a secret and swaying even when there wasn’t a breeze.

Now, though, the first buds cracked slightly open outside the tea shop.

Reporters have swarmed upon Main Street, and not just local news. Our alleys and parking lots are clogged with panel vans and rental cars. Tourists have their cameras and phones out, gathered in crowds around the clusters of weeds that the journalists haven’t claimed as their own.

We’ve sold out the floral doughnuts. Our windows have darkened with people, but they form in an arc around the three weeds in front of our shop, so I can still see them perfectly. Tuyet, Suki, Mom, Dad, and I all stand on the other side of the cases and stare out at the swaying buds. The rustle of the weeds’ leaves is like hands swirling taffeta. I somehow hear it over the canned chattering of the crowd.

“It’s happening.” Tuyet steps around the counter as conversations go silent and the cameras and phones flash like thunderless lightning.

I can’t speak to how soon the buds at the tea shop bloomed, whether they were the first or whether they were simply the harbinger, the signal for them all to bloom at the same time, triggering a collective gasp and silence along the street. All I can see is our doughnut shop and our weeds, and the press of people crammed shoulder to shoulder to get the first photo, to be the first to see the unknown flower and the first to share it with the world.

Suki joins Tuyet at the window, but I remain behind the counter, as do Mom and Dad, but they stay because that’s store policy—no crossing the line unless we’re cleaning. Mom doesn’t snap at Tuyet and Suki to get back to work, though. No one’s working, no one’s buying, and everyone just wants to see what happens as the buds crack open, one by one, showing hints of pink like a leg between the slit of a skirt.

It’s slow at first, second by second, glimpse by glimpse of the bright pink through the green, but then they unfurl all at once. The petals are the color and texture of a brilliant hibiscus, but the thickness makes me think of a knife sliding through skin to strip it away in slices. They open like arms.

If there was a collective gasp when they started to bloom, there is a collective moan of awe as the flowers open, more beautiful, thicker, and healthier than anyone imagined—despite the fact that their powerful roots crumbled our infrastructure before they would allow themselves to die, and their stems and leaves burned us before they would let us stop them from growing. Their colors put our most vivid efforts to shame.

When the petals settle in their splendor, a spray of golden mist emanates from the center.

The camera people on the sides of the arc in front of our shop pitch forward first, falling to their knees, perhaps because of the extra weight on their shoulders. But everyone starts coughing around the same time, dry coughs as though they can’t catch their breath, until they heave and spasm in the effort to drink in the air around them.

Their faces turn pale and dark ashen, their lips blue and purple. They grasp at their throats with bruised fingertips, collapsing onto the sidewalk. Some of them fall onto the furred leaves of the weeds and claw at their eyes before they stop moving. Others tear away the leaves in an effort to pull themselves up. Their skin continues to blister well after their hands have relaxed on the pavement.

I try to tell Tuyet and Suki to get away from the windows, but they’re already coughing.

Even as I grab Mom and Dad by their sleeves to pull them out the back, I know there’s no point.

The weeds along the brick wall have opened as well, sending pollen through the empty alley, a line of defense against those of us who have run out from our stores. I motion that we should cover our mouths with our shirts, but even so, we don’t make it four steps before a breath isn’t enough to breathe.

The flowers orient not toward the sun but toward us, their faces vibrant flesh and their leaves shuddering, humming. Or perhaps it is simply the desperate rush of blood through my ears.

Birds fall from the sky like hail, thudding to the ground. We join them, even as we struggle to reach the car, as though breathing doesn’t pull air in from the outside.

The golden mist fades until it can no longer be seen, but maybe my vision’s only going dim. All I know is that just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s gone. Only that it’s spreading.

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