Fiction by Elisa C.
On the off chance that Phoebe and I have the opportunity to climb trees, we do so. In California, there aren’t very many of those woody bushes smacked in the trails behind your house. Instead, there are beaches infested with big bummers of tipsy children frolicking across sand.
“Ready, ready, readyyyyyy,” Phoebe calls from the kitchen.
“K, let’s go.”
I grab the nearest Green Bag, or GB for short. Scattered across Phoebe and my apartment are ten GBs–three of which have been ransacked and are close to empty.
Each Thursday of every other month–currently, it’s the Sunday before–Phoebe and I refill our GBs. We stuff essential items for on-the-go. Such items include four Bandaids, one tube of sunscreen, two metal water bottles, scissors, two goggles, three granola bars, eighty bucks, and five chargers.
The GBs vary from GB to GB. For instance, GB in the laundry room contains an extra pair of socks and an old T-shirt; GB hanging from my chair in the kitchen carries ingredients for precisely three PB & Js; GB stuffed behind the stack of self-help books, under the heap of old school uniforms, next to the mama spider and all of her eight-legged babies, has an extra handful of purple pills.
Anyway, as I was alluding to, Phoebe and I are going to climb trees today. Our neighbor, Phoebe’s good family friend, Jimmy Reefer, recently coded a small forest in his backyard. He was only the sixteenth person to do so, and according to his texts to Phoebe, he perfected the measurements for east coast types of trees.
Phoebe and I are very excited.
We rush to our Super Scooters (SS) and plug the coordinates into Jimmy’s workhouse. There are some days where I feel the creeping emotion of what some early 2000sers, such as my great-great-grandparents, might call “envy.” Envy creeps and crawls around, beginning at the tips of my toes, then snakes up and around my heart. Well, it’s as if it does because the news channel confirmed that scientists confirmed that envy, along with anxiety–and soon exhaustion since we’re so close to developing the perfect coffee beans–went extinct in 2030 after all those vaccinations and such. I don’t tell Phoebe that I think I’m experiencing this, but I do tell my therapist Edward. Edward tells me this is (was) a very natural feeling (at least for 2000sers) and believes it to be genetic. He reminds me I must not let it touch above my kneecaps, and never my heart. Because once it has captured my heart, it will easily consume my brain, and who knows what sort of things it’d make me do. Who knows! You know, I bet Jimmy knows. Edward advises I take the purple pills for it every so often.
“You go ‘head,” I tell Phoebe. She smiles, reading my remark as letting her say her greetings to her beloved childhood friend first. But as soon as she punches the GO on her SS, I’m shoving six purple pills down my throat.
“Hey ho, looky ho, it’s Sethy boy!” Jimmy is as chirpy as usual.
“Jimmy,” I nod and we perform a quick fist bump. I note as his radioactive fist crackles, producing tiny sparks. “Looking forward to seeing your newest work.”
“Ah, yes, yes” he claps his hands and rubs them together four times. “Just this way back.” Jimmy turns around and begins moving down the hall. For a second, I stand still, analyzing his quite large back. I wonder for a second if it’s also genetically or manually tampered with, but then one of the six purple pills flicks that thought away, and I’m immediately following after him.
When we arrive at Jimmy's forest, Phoebe is hanging upside down from an apple tree.
“Hey, look, Seth! I’m Johnny Appleseed!” She plucks a ripened fruit from the tip of the nearest branch and crunches down. My non-genetically altered eyes pick up on the specifics of her spit, the angle her whitened teeth chown down.
Still, instead of worrying about how many dollars or cryptos she might spend on her next dental appointment, I respond with “I see” and a handsome, pearly white smile of my own. My voice feels distant, slowly reverberating off those great glass walls.
“Phoebe, I told you not to taste the apples yet!” Jimmy scolds. “They’re not ready yet.”
“Whatever, Jim.” Phoebe replies. “They look and taste fine enough.”
Jimmy gives a hearty laugh and turns toward me, two hands on his hips and a booming voice: “Well then. She can’t be stopped. Feel free to explore yourself!”
–Two purple pills dance inside me–
“I’ll be around.” He claps me on the back, then flies away.
“Isn’t this gorgeous?” Phoebe asks. I take to the second nearest tree, seven trees away from her. I peer out at the sea of leafy greens and woods, and it almost feels as though we are in some desolate place like New Hampshire or the Carolinas or something. I have to commend Jimmy.
“Uh-huh.” I sit in a little groove in my tree and rest my head on one of the thicker branches. I’ve hung my GB on the subsequent branch. “It’s quiet.”
In my peripheral vision, I watch Phoebe move to lie down. She shucks off her boots, and they make a soft clack on the tile floor. “Hm, you’re right. It is quiet, isn’t it?”
I peer up at the ceiling. “Phoebe?”
She has closed her eyes by now–I bet. “Hm?”
“How’d the apple taste?”
“It was sweet, crispy.” The apple is now on the ground. “Like bones on bones.” It’s green, still.
“That’s nice,” I respond.
I fish out a Band-Aid in my GB and place it on one of my bloody fingers. I scraped it while reaching for the branches–I believe.
“Phoebe?”
“Yes, Seth.”
I keep looking up at the ceiling. I wonder what prompted Jimmy to create these trees. He didn’t construct the grass, the sky, or any animals, but he decided to make apple trees and invited Phoebe and me.
“Actually, nothing.” I dump the contents of my GB out.
“You can tell me.”
“No, really, it’s nothing.” I shove my GB over my head and tie the cloth strings around my neck, making a sort of bowtie. I know Phoebe won’t further push for a response, so I just wait to feel the rest of the purple pills working. It’s not long until they come, and when they do they’re like a mother’s hand, rubbing soothing circles across my back, attempting to smother the creases of my newer thoughts by sanding them until they’re as smooth as the rest of my brain; those thoughts becoming semblances of notions I’ll never comprehend, succumbing to soil in my stomach.
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