A salamander with green and yellow speckles shimmied up the broad trunk of the ornamental palm on the western side of the fence—the fence that separated Cora from them.

The amphibian disappeared behind the trunk, hopped onto the back of one tall, wooden picket and slivered casually down into their yard. Further down the fence, a puddle formed in a dip in the grass making a glistening pool that stretched across the boundary line, halved by three wooden pickets. A daring, young vine had begun to curl its way around one of the pickets, searching for the sun wherever it could find it.

Nature, it seemed, would not be ruled by manmade tenets of territory and ownership. The salamander would never know the dread that gripped Cora tighter with every step closer to that boundary.

Sounds that curled her belly also drifted uninvited over to her side of the picket fence. What would it cost to build a concrete wall? A toddler’s high-pitched laughter brought nausea roiling like hunger from the pit of her stomach to the top of her throat. The sounds of the perfect family picture she was robbed of were broadcasting just twenty feet away—its members ignorant of what they’d stolen. At least, most of them were. Roshan knew. He knew what she and him once shared. And what he had sacrificed for this shiny, new life.

The glassy clinking of the sunspotted wind chimes over her head sounded like the door to that sleepy cafe near the campus. Those bells that jingled when it opened or closed hung from the frame. That was the soundtrack to the first time she had seen his face, scrunched into a frown at the pile of books on the front desk. For all that frowning, his face was unlined, unmarked by the ridges of responsibility and sacrifice.    

He was a waiter there, she learned, studying his way through school. She had observed him sneaking out his books when the manager wasn’t around. She was older than him, well-settled into her career as an insurance broker and climbing at snail’s pace up the ranks of a mid-range firm. She’d crossed forty last year. “Over the hill,” a balding man from Accounts had teased.  For all she’d noticed about this waiter, she’d never expected him to pay any attention to her. She began to lean in when he took her order, basking in his scent. Like pencils, and was it… tea tree? She made certain to ask about his studies, daring to hope that he would remember she cared. 

Once or twice, he’d shocked her silly and giggling, offering up cheeky anecdotes about his classmates. On those days, Cora would leave the café feeling like she’d been invited somewhere she hardly belonged. Then, one day, taking Cora totally by surprise, the timbre of their banter changed. It was early in the morning, and she was the only customer in. Roshan seemed distracted, lazily arranging and rearranging the furniture.

When she asked him what was wrong, he replied, like she was his long-time confidante, “I think Sencha’s breaking up with me.”

This was the first time he had ever mentioned a girlfriend. Her heart gave an involuntary jerk in her chest.

“Why do you think so?” she asked, giving him space to vent. 

“I went around to her dorm last night and she basically shut the door in my face. She said she was busy again. She’s been doing that constantly in the past few weeks. Never ever says what has her so busy.”

“Have you asked her if something’s wrong?” she probed.

“No,” he said softly, “Nah, she’s probably just fed up of me.”

After a long pause, Cora’s reply stuck in her throat, he blurted out, “She’s the love of my life.”

Cora cringed now at the recollection, warning signs she had never heeded. It was only days later he had run after her, as she was leaving the café. Brimming with boldness, he asked her to meet him for drinks later. His relationship troubles seemed to have vanished. She had followed his lead, allowing herself to imagine it had never been mentioned. It had started her heart drumming fast, at a time when she was anticipating slower and slower counts toward the end.  

 

Her stomach roiled again as she now sat hunched, an unpitied victim. The sick feeling in her stomach wouldn’t go away. She tried desperately to stifle the urge to succumb to numbness. To lose time.

The scent of the marijuana leaf lingered on her hands, taunting. The muscle memory of drawing her pipe to her lips tingled in her fingers. She sat on her porch step, phone in hand, looking at the messages streaming in. Five, short word-grenades, blowing up her life.

 She rose in total resignation to concoct the potent potion, mashing the crushed fragrant bud into the bowl, then lit the flame that secured her release. But the longer she held onto the instrument of her relief, the heavier it got. The curling amber glow of the burning weed mimicking the pulse of her breath, only reflected the holes that had been burnt into her. And the bitter choke that pulled unfeeling into her lungs drew whispers into her head. They reminded her of the feeling of failure that always followed that lost time.

 She began a study of the wood grain of the stoop below her. The lines curved, in sync, but irregular. It occurred to her that each of these patterns told a subtle thing about the tree it came from. She felt a sudden urge to visit the tree at the side of her house. It was an old Spanish cedar tree, nothing magnificent, but it took her back to a life

before Roshan, when she had planted it. She walked around to the side of the house, gravel crunching under her soles and between her toes.

 What she came upon stopped her heart. The garden she used to tend lovingly and with care, losing hours at a time, could now only be described as a tangle of weeds and thorns. How long had she left it to fallow? It had been months since they first started seeing each other—when she had dropped everything she cared about for him.
Her friends at the firm. Walks with her mother. Her beautiful garden.

But there, amidst the bramble, still stood the cedar tree. And peeking through the thicket she spotted one tiny, defiant, rose red tomato. The ground was still rich, it seemed. She had brought Roshan in here once. Invited him into her palace. They sat in the garden on plastic lawn chairs she had borrowed from her mother. They watched ants crawl into the teeny hole in the wall that probably led right to her kitchen sink, and imagined soap opera stories of their lives. The ants seemed to her so rigid and dull. But Rosh’s fables would be wildly amusing, narrating the trail like a high-speed car chase. A soft chuckle escaped her lips, just before that familiar grip tightened around her heart.

 A splotch of yellow on the charcoal-painted flower bed frames she had installed distracted her. A lime-green pod lay cracked nearby, its smooth outer shell facing upwards. She bent over to examine it closer. It was waxy inside, with folded hearts for seeds. A crack in the frame revealed a busy freeway, ants tugging at broken bits of the waxy seeds all around the pod. Some worked in pairs, legs stretched straight with the effort. Some clipped bits off the seeds; some climbed all the way up the side of the frame only to fall back to the ground under the weight of their bounty. It all seemed much more dramatic today. She could feel the urgency, the grit in these tiny capsules of life. Had she been paying attention before?

 An old anxiety stabbed through her brain. Did Roshan truly see her? That day in the garden, she remembered now, she had been consumed—Wondering why he hadn’t complimented her flower bed, why he hadn’t said a word of thanks to her for setting up the picnic spot, why he seemed distant from her, why he found ant dramas more interesting than her.

 Just then, a gust of wind blew across the garden and another large pod dropped from above. It landed right in the line of ant traffic. A flash of worry for the ants had Cora reaching frantically to grab the pod. As she dropped to her knees, a razor-sharp pain lanced through her legs, jolting her to another time and place. A time when her muscles forgot their purpose and her brain sparked and powered off—when the signals never reached her legs and they let her fall to the ground. Shockwaves had reverberated from her knees and up her thighs before her crash into gentle darkness. That was the day she saw him touch that woman’s belly, like there was something separate in there that he loved.

 She made her way back to the house now, her vision clouded by tears. She picked up the pipe again and breathed in another dose from its stem. Stepping back into the empty living room, she felt a constricting reminder of her loneliness. There was a stillness in the air that, in a smaller room, would have stifled her.

 The sun’s heat refracted off the metal roof and was diffused to a pallid warmth through the glass windows. Wiping away her tears, she looked around the room and saw disarray everywhere. The sink was filled with dishes, and the table piled high with disordered files. Empty food containers still lay near the sofa from two nights ago. The only thing in neat arrangement was the bookshelf by the back window. Like a sacred place, nothing lay out of order. Books stood tall, grouped snugly into categories of love.

 The ones that had caressed her soul. The ones that had dazzled her mind. The ones she had never stopped thinking about. Her most distant memory so far—a composite image of hours spent reading, on the couch, on the porch, at the foot of her bed. In every frame: peace.  Her eyes alighted on a water-stained book jacket, a collection of folk stories that taught a young Cora how to spot mischief. She opened it to her favourite story and began to read. From the first page, her lips were stifling chuckles at the protagonist’s antics. Before she knew it, she was lost in the bends and twists of the ridiculous saga.

 At the end, she paused to bask in the story that had just become a part of hers. A wry smile crept over her face and she knew. This was the place she loved. The space between words and around pages. In the depths of intuition, and with a hopeful breath, she did another thing she had not done in a long, long time. Cora made a wish. She wished to become a real and firm part of the books in front of her. To share her own tender grasp of the world with the unknown other. To be seen in a sentence, a passage, a page. To birth the un-birthed.

 The next day, Cora’s heart beat urgently in her chest until she opened her eyes. Be-come. It seemed to beat. That muscle twitching, her hand pressing her to a new instrument, one that she would pour in to, not take from. She rustled through a kitchen drawer and drew out a ballpoint pen—no frills, just something to get the words down:

how to measure and weigh pains

when small ones scream their misery

and big ones whisper so soft

you have to be still to hear them

how to know your heart’s desire

when it drums for those who hurt you

and pounds for things that scare you

and shrinks at the thought of change

Cora worked, ate, smoked, wrote and slept through several weeks. She poured her soul like a flood onto pages and pages of her notebooks. She was slowly divesting herself of the pain she had embodied. She barely heard the noises across the fence, she began to pick through her untended garden plot and her hand ached from use. She picked through the time she and Roshan had spent together, sifting the reality from the dream. She remembered the desperation she had felt when he seemed to want to connect with her. She remembered the dullness in his eyes when they first had sex. He had rolled away while she lay there, next to him, but in an entirely different galaxy. She remembered waiting on messages from him—his words like air to breathe.

 Then, there was the day he asked her to abort the process started in her womb.

 She’d never seen herself as a mother. Never, until the moment she stood next to him in his studio bathroom, watching that second line appear like a sign from God on the screen of the stick test. He had squeezed her hand when it appeared and guided her to a soft seat.    

 A notion was conceived—was still unformed when, later that day, he made it clear he never wanted to father a child with her. They weren’t ready, he declared.

 “Be real, Cora. We never intended for this to be a long-term thing.”

 He was right, “we” never did.

 “Why are you saying this?” she’d asked, tears streaming down her face. How could you destroy this for the sake of honesty? her brain screamed at him.

 An image of herself, with Roshan, staring adoring into a crib flashed and shattered into a thousand pieces in her mind.

 “You really think she doesn’t know?” she murmured, bitterness grating her voice.

 Cora had known all along, of course, that he was still seeing Sencha. But she wanted to believe that their first night together had overshadowed his past. She’d imagined the deception alone would tear him away from her. Could love be true if words were false?

 “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said, “From my perspective it’s a happy future. We’ll always be friends.”

Two weeks later, she found herself at the clinic alone. It seemed a bit too personal to ask a “friend”. She climbed onto the bed with the resounding knowledge that at her age she’d likely never get the chance again. The questions that had made their home in her mind were still echoing: Could she raise this child alone? Would he hate her if he found out? Would he love her if she bent to his request? Would this tiny thing’s life be happy with just her?

 No, she agreed with herself, to witness a beautiful thing unwanted was too difficult to bear, too harsh a penalty for innocence.

From that day, all that lingered was a gnawing in her stomach and a whisper of what could have been in her ear.

 And then, there was the end of the end—just two weeks after her solo appointment,  they had moved into the picture-perfect house next door. She stared at their latest interaction on the screen of her smartphone. A neat summary, like one of her poems:

9 July

Hi Rosh  ✅✅

8 August

I miss you  ✅✅

10 November

Hello?  ✅✅

21 December

Cora, baby

I was a fool

I love you

Take me back

Please ✅✅

She thought of the laughter, the chatter, the creaking of the swing, the infiltration of happy noise from the other side of the fence. Noises undisturbed by this burst of text. She deleted the conversation thread and went back to her notebooks:

In my heart I have the energy of crushing waves,

the patience of old trees, the passion of a blazing sunset,

the abandon of a hawk in flight.

 

Only doubt brings me back to feeling small and trapped

In this fleshy container.

She sits on her regular stoop on the back porch, the warm tropical night leaving a gleam of sweat on her face and neck. She is in search of clarity, to ease the palpitations that come with her anxiety. She packs the tangy-smelling herbs into her pipe. Her fingers trembling a bit, she is clumsy with impatience tonight. Her heart craves the wave of numbness and simultaneous awareness-of-sensation the heady smoke gives her. Her lungs still rebel as she pulls too eagerly, too deeply. And she coughs, eyes filling with water. But the earth shifts around her and there’s a tension in the air. Her eyes lose focus and she smiles. A keen observer could see it was a sad smile, a regretful acknowledgment of her addiction and her broken life, her used body.

 But her dreams would be of flower palaces in the sunset sky, flaking glitter dust at her touch, an impermanent universe born of plant magic.

 Poetry will cascade from her heart in showers, whispering through her ears and opening her eyes to a complex, technicolour world that was once, minutes ago, mundane. And the poem will refresh her tired soul, reminding her of her purpose, adding a glow to her far-off hopes. Or it may simply comfort her, cushioning that long, slow fall with the realization that stars are falling all around her in a dazzling shower of light.

 With a deep sigh, she pushed herself off the porch step to call it a night. She looked off into the darkness, to the spot she had in mind for  her new tomato plants. Tomorrow she’d tend the grass on this side.

Christie Borely is a lawyer and emerging writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She aspires to tell vivid, poignant stories that convey a philosophy of inner peace and strength in community. Her love of reading and her work in the volunteer sector have shown her that an immersive experience in a new perspective can catalyse profound, paradigmatic shifts. Find her on IG: @christieborely & LinkedIn: Christie Borely

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