Ten Exotic Pepper Plants

Three rooms hold five pieces of furniture including a cardboard box bedside table lamp and martini pitcher filled with dying roses. In the fourth room scattered on the floor a mattress, two dirt-caked bocce balls, and books. The fifth room kitchen and dining and where the living takes place: crates of records, a mustard-colored steel workbox, a large tongue-and-groove wooden table pencil-etched with a vine, then lacquered, then cluttered with: cilantro, pink ginger, a chef‘s knife, sashimi, a mason jar of sea salt, and ten exotic pepper plants in plastic pots. Outside, a yellow bowl rises, steaming wisps of clouds. Pond frogs add bassline to the night song. From other waters, different frogs respond, so that between the distinct growl of these is the whelping of others—echoes of shades from one to another over space and time. “Beautiful guest,” he says, calling her back to his table. “Would you like to go to bed?” His hands over hers—so much touching to do. Happiness surrounds them like a sigh. Morning dusts off the earth, the haze smelling like clay. He surveys his garden. Barefoot, he takes a thistle, any pricks of feeling deflected by callouses—as rough as her pads were cold beneath his covers. Now drowsy, frogs sleep; birds take up the morning melody. She, the guest, drinks coffee from a soup bowl. Far beyond the vineyards, flashing silver cars ride the highway like rosary beads on twine. She confuses squinty-eyed delight with belief: that happiness is as simple as peppers growing. But the soil is hard, dry—cracking and red like an abrasion. Wind whips across it. His ten exotic peppers plants, with fruit broad shouldered and narrow hipped, sit on the deck’s bottom step. They must be hardened to the seduction of night, the harshness of day.