Nonfiction by Emily Rankin
He bought it during quarantine, on one of our rare outings. He’d decided spur of the moment to make a new recipe, and we found ourselves wandering the grocery aisles at 8pm. He needed fresh basil, and I suggested we buy a small plant in place of a plastic carton of browning stems.
I padded into the kitchen the next morning and found it, wilted and half dead, on its side on the countertop. He’d used a handful of leaves and left it to rot. I considered abandoning it there, letting it go to show him what he’d done. But it looked so small and hurt and tired. I stood it up, pruned the decay from it, and set it in water on the sunny windowsill. I tended to it, and it was happy. It grew to be nearly two feet tall, and I bought a real pot for it, and soil. He never looked at it, never watered it. I wondered if he felt guilty. I hoped he did.
It came to me in dreams. I’d see myself, in the kitchen in the night, finding it dead. Pulling it from its pot and seeing strange roots all through the soil. Then looking more closely and discovering that it was in fact very much alive, new shoots everywhere, overtaking everything.
When I finally got out of that house and into my own apartment I took it with me, hung a shelf for it high enough that the cats wouldn’t disturb it. Watered it, added new soil.
That summer I was gone most days, no air conditioning in the place. The basil started to wilt and shrivel and no matter what I did it wouldn’t stop, until all that remained were two gnarled sticks with a few inches of new growth at the ends. I thought it was as good as dead, and it made me more sad than I’d like to admit. I gave it water and set it on the porch, in the noontime sliver of sunlight, to live out its final days with the wind against its face.
But it didn’t die. It hung on, struggling and stagnant at first, then finally growing again, slowly, in ever more bizarre twists. New shoots completely sideways, leaves sprouting at odd junctures, those two remaining branches twined like ivy. I was afraid to pull any leaves from it, afraid I might disturb its new health. After a month, I finally began to trust it wouldn’t die. At least, not imminently. I gave it new soil, more water. Set it outside in good weather. What remained of it came back to life.
A year later, it sits, sometimes, on the shelf I hung for it, winding spring-green tendrils around itself. Drooping with the weight of its own strange design, and growing ever more wild.
Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended Abilene Christian University, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangled threads of human connection and liminal space. She is currently based in New Mexico.
