By Terri Linn Davis and Daniel DeRock
I planted the magnolia with your ashes and watched it grow unwieldy.
A limb thrust out, reaching like fingers. Egg-shaped leaves emerged, their veins searching—and below, the same, the root system split—mineral dendrites, coral, a drop of blood on white fabric, a crack in a windshield.
❖
Remember when we were drinking on the rooftop and you told me there were other worlds and countless versions of ourselves, back when it was just our legs dangling over the ledge into the dark? When I scooched back, dizzy, you asked if I was alright. It was the wine, I said, but really I was startled by your calmness. There are others of us? Versions that diverged whenever the universe copied itself or because we made choices too casually? I joked about how I might be the choice between pancakes or French toast away from being someone you couldn’t love anymore. You said French toast and pancakes didn’t matter, you loved me in all of the worlds. Our dog, Anya, howled from somewhere inside. It horrifies me to consider the ways I might lose you infinitely.
❖
My grief is a centrifugal force, my mind is flung out from the spinning center of your dying. There are many worlds and you love me in all of them. The magnolia tree and your ashes taught me that the leaves only develop once the petals fall off. I develop leaves and outgrow my petals. Time branched with sumptuous fleshy flowers and two worlds existed, and two saplings, and three and on and on and I became many fruit bursting with red seeds.
I am cast into the multiverse, caught, welling into my-selves. I am searching for the world with no drop of blood or crack in a windshield.
❖
in this red seed we are lying in bed in low light. My hands are gaunt. I haven’t brushed
my teeth. We’re watching a recording on your phone of a stranger steam cleaning an elliptic rug
caked by filth. We wonder if anything can truly stay clean.
❖
in this red seed I find you, after months and months, at a park we’ve never been to. You are following a child and walking her across a small painted beam. You call her “Anya.” A man smiles at you from a bench. You look at him like you tell him there are many worlds and that you love him in all of them. I walk past. I am–
❖
we are mannequins facing each other in an abandoned store room. In this red seed, you know what I’ve been doing, and beg me to leave you alone. You say that the multiverse is like sharing an air mattress that’s deflating. That whenever I move or roll, you are shifted too.
❖
in this red seed there are so many black beetles.
I scream.
❖
I planted the magnolia with your ashes and watched it grow. It branches—roots, veins. It is a map of countless universes, many worlds branching, branching.
Forgive me, I have become uprooted.
I’m trying to find a red seed with a rooftop, and Anya howling, and no crack in the windshield, and you.
Terri Linn Davis is the co-editor of Icebreakers Lit, a chaotic, loving home featuring collaborative writing. You can read some of her work in Taco Bell Quarterly, Rejection Letters, Bending Genres, Cultural Daily, The Daily Drunk Mag, Five South, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @TerriLinnDavis and on her website www.terrilinndavis.com.
Daniel DeRock is a writer from the U.S. living in the Netherlands. His work has appeared, among other outlets, in Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, and Ligeia Magazine. He is co-founder and fiction editor of Icebreakers Lit.
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