Joanna Theiss
Summer Man
Summer! I grow a man. Not a sugar snap pea weakling who bleaches in the sun, but a big, virile man like the kind my mother wouldn’t let me date in high school.
My man is tall: eight feet and strong. Strong pectorals of thistle, nipple-shoots of habanero. Squash vines that shoot up like scaffolds and bushy, greedy mint with purple roots. A plate-sized sunflower growing at the cut in his legs. Arms of soft-petaled zinnias, perfect for cuddles. He leans against the fence with one stalk bent under him and watches me wiggle as I weed.
The other gardeners come to scold. This is a community garden, they say. You ought to be growing things you can eat. My man and I laugh at them. My man is a man but he is a thing to eat, too. He is seed bursting on my tongue in a hot gush. He is strawberry pie and basil ice cream, salty spicy lemony. My man is a meal.
Other men can’t compare. At my sister’s wedding, the row of groomsmen are soggy mushrooms, her new husband predictable as a hardware-store mum. My girl cousins, all married or engaged, cluster like starving bees to ask me, Where’s your man? Haven’t you got a man? so I hop on a rent-a-bike in bridesmaid’s taffeta and ride to where he waits for me, a giant against chain-link.
I dig. I push my satin shoe against a shovel and push. I squish slugs and crush cicadas, I draw up the bedsheet smell of bruised sage. When I reach my man’s hairy tangle of roots, I tug. I wrap my arms around his body and twist until his roots come free and the vines break. We dance-stumble to a wheelbarrow and I almost fall putting him in because he is so big, so tall, but horizontal, he does not look so strong anymore.
Until I reach the hotel I can pretend we will go on forever, but under the fairy lights and the compound eyes of my cousins, I see my man is wrong. Limp and wilted, his sunflower a wrinkled brown knot, yellow petals curved inward as if ashamed.
I touch his squash cheeks and kiss his crab-apple mouth. I remind him of worm nights in the garden, of sweat so thick it pickled, of green and dew and mud, but pieces of him are landing on the dance floor, crackly crunchy gritty as compost. A sympathetic usher offers to water him, but I know it won’t help. Our love is seasonal, and the season has already changed.
Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her stories have appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, Best Microfiction, the wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, among others, and she is an associate editor at Five South. In a past life, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law. You can find book reviews, links to her published works, and her mosaic collages at www.joannatheiss.com.
