Green Monster, Part II by Erica Plouffe Lazure Halston Charles Jones, Jr., heaved the dull edge of his spade into the damp, sodden earth, the earth that, not through years of great trees rising and falling, their gift of leaves making feasts for millipedes and earthworms, which would chew their way through the rot to produce soil to continue the cycle of life, restoring as they destroyed it, but this soil into which Jones stuck his spade, earth overrun with the shallow root systems that created their own strangled net of rot, an aggressive green web that overlay the rain-soaked soil amid the vines of burgeoning eggplants and the boring throttle of new carrots and the tough, unchewable lettuce that still remained unpicked, came from the Home Depot. Jones tended to the land, to this inherited sidecar source of sustenance in his backyard, not out of love, for love never fails to find a home, never fails to burrow itself into the smallest of tasks, like a rat or small insect that requires paper or leaf to pass through jaw or mandible, to create a nest that festers as it grows and births and spreads throughout that sinkhole of duty, that unholy mass of obligation that is life. It was not love — the mess of weeds and brown withered branches on the tomatoes would attest to that — but rather love’s sick, tough twin, its bad seed antithesis: spite. And yet there had been love, once, but it was the kind of love that replaces convention and modesty and fear with passion, love that begins in the backseat of a fusty old car, the Sox game droning through tinny speakers on the A.M., and ends on a rotting front porch with news of a child on the way and plans for a wedding, with a hasty ivory dress and store-bought lemon cake with yellow flowers and a preacher holding a heavy book in the backyard with an eyebrow raised at the bump on that ivory waistline, and after rice thrown and her parents’ spare room cleared, he, collared not just by one set of eyes, but three, his wedding ended and their marriage, waiting for a fifth, waiting for love, began. The child did not survive. That was ten years ago and there was no other to replace it, only a barrage of stony expressions and a mattress to match and that garden that became his tithe. Instead of father and husband, he became stunted son and bad brother, and Florine, the sister and daughter and notbride and notmother, their bare, sullen present clamped down forever upon that sweltering summer night in the old Falcon. When he wasnt pulling back on his flask, the one wedding present that he found a use for, amid the blenders and choppers and dish service and unused baby wipes, the one token of celebration given to him by his father with their shared initials, “HCJ,” engraved in bright, swooping letters, Jones would sop up what remained of him with a quick pint or three down at the corner, and, between innings during night games, offer a few sweaty glances through the haze at the crow’s foot waitress, who, amid the war hero barflies and lonely pensioneers, tilted for tips, to and fro, on the stubs of her high heel shoes. Jones ignored the sound of the back door slamming shut. Florine came toward him, serene, clutching a sweating glass of amber liquid, her eyes bright in the overcast sky, the squeal of her shoe flattening the strands of grass in her path as she walked toward a sweating Jones, his muddy hand clasped around a skein of weed, ripping out this ragged umbilical cord from the earth’s belly. He studied six grubs in the shallow dip of the channel below. Florine stood at the edge of the garden. “Hal . . . brought you a drink.” Jones looked at the glass sweating in her hand and kicked dirt where the coiled rotters lay in wait. “You? Brought me a drink?” Erica Plouffe Lazure is a creative writer living in Greenville, NC and a graduate student at East Carolina University. About “Green Monster, Part II”, she says, “This is the second of three tellings of this story. This segment was inspired by William Faulkner’s high style and his innate need to fit one’s life story into a mere sentence.” An earlier, stylistically different version of “Green Monster” appears in the December 2005 issue of Smokelong Quarterly. Copyright © 2005 by Erica Plouffe Lazure.