Whispers
Dennis popped his head into Crystal’s office. “Hooliganz?”
“That’s the one at North and Elm, right?”
“Yup. I’m heading out now—see you there.”
Crystal wrapped up the e-mail she was working on. She’d been looking forward to a bitching session with Dennis for a couple of weeks. They’d had to postpone a few times, but that just meant more to gripe about.
When she walked into the bar, she scanned the two-tops and completely missed Dennis, who was in a group of seven men fixated on a game. When he caught Crystal’s eye, she immediately recognized that the bitching had been usurped by basketball. Typical Dennis.
Crystal ordered a light beer that she could drink quickly and that wouldn’t go to her head before she got home. Driving to her house, she recognized that it was a perfect early fall day. There wouldn’t be too many more of these before it would be too cool and dark for evening walks. Rather than go home, she went to the park.
For 40 minutes, sunlight snaked through the tree leaves. The faintest of breezes whispered to her about the latest promos for fiber-optic television. She felt the delightful mixture of the sun’s warmth on her arms’ goosebumps and knew that only Food Network in HD could complete this day.
When Crystal got to her house and pushed open the front door, a dried oak leaf leaped onto the door frame. Her foot brushed it into the house.
She called the TV company to upgrade to the Emerald package. While she waited for it to kick in, she flipped through channels. A stunning landscape caught her eye and she paused, then was drawn into a film set in rural Mexico. The dried leaf listened.
The leaf had never heard anything similar, of course. It had spent its eight months all within two blocks. World news came through a chain that started with a houseplant hearing something on TV and ended with a nearby tree rustling a mere snippet. So an uninterrupted symphony of grass swaying in the wind brought a flood of information—almost too much for the leaf to take in at once:
- Breathable air continued to be on the rise, of course, but the amount of land to live on was, also predictably, getting smaller.
- Efforts to influence cattle ranchers and developers were not promising.
- The black-tailed prairie dogs listened, but weren’t much of an ally.
Even the houseplants were amazed by the amount of time the Mexican grasses were on. Usually, they processed one- or two-second bursts. The trade-off for the long shot durations was timeliness: the grasses in the film were now great great great grandfathers. And dead.
The air conditioning kicked on but the snake plant in the house was nowhere near a vent that could stir its tall, sturdy leaves. It had no way to share the eight years of information it had collected.
The nerve plant, in contrast, was in a hanging pot right near an AC vent. Its small leaves quivered out the plant’s deepest thoughts. Of course, the nerve plant had only been around for, what, three months? Even its deepest thoughts were pretty shallow.
—Oooh, sunlight!
Still, the nerve plant would mature.
But when the woman came around the corner headed for the door, the oak leaf had only seconds left. It considered all the information flowing out of the television and how little of it ever left the house. As Crystal stepped forward to open the entryway closet, her right heel crushed the leaf’s veins, letting it make one final sound.
—Outdoor television.
The snake plant considered the idea. Communicating past the walls was the key to organizing—even a nerve plant could understand that. For years, the snake plant had thought about how it could share information with those outside—never how to bypass itself entirely. The leaf’s idea was a good one, but the snake plant knew that it was highly unlikely that the woman would want to watch TV outdoors. It was, in fact, unimaginable that she would invite friends over for a patio dinner and an episode of Chopped. But suddenly, an answer arrived.
The woman closed the closet door, turned, and walked back toward her couch. The corner of her sleeve brushed gently against the plant. The snake plant whispered:
—Dennis is cute.
