Saguaro
“You can scratch it, you know,” said the man. The woman responded with an embarrassed giggle in the form of a hiccup.
“Oh, thanks, I mean, I’m sorry.” She scratched her nose and resumed her stoic position. “I’m sorry about that, Marc – er – Mister Remington,” she quickly corrected herself.
“Marc. It’s Marc.” The man’s hands were as red as a riverbed and very strong, though his wrists were thin and mottled. He wiped off the clay on his apron, removed the bandana gripping his forehead, and massaged his temples. He gazed at the bust before him, an ambiguous mass frantic for a form, doing its best to imitate the body four feet beyond it. Her body was long, she would’ve looked starved if not for her nervous energy. She moved in short, accidental motions. When she spoke, the words came out like a tic:
“How long have you been doing this, Marc? This sculpting thing?” Marc exhaled over several seconds, and she tucked her head to her chest, embarrassed. “Sculpturing? Is it sculpturing? I’m sorry, I get it confused.”
“Sculpturing, yeah.” He replied, almost smirking. “I’ve been doing it for a long while.”
“Oh. And um…” she waited to speak, “how long is that?”
“I never remember not doing it.” He capped his thumbs around the bumps where her eyes would be. He circled his fingers, making the sockets as small and hollow as broken butterfly eggs.
“Oh. That’s a long time, alright.” Again, her chin fell to her chest. “Do you,” she swallowed hard, “live out here alone? Or do you have a, um… a wife”
“A wife?” he swallowed hard. “No. No I do not. Nothing close to it. It’s just been me here for about two years.” He stared hard into the bust. “Two years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Me and my husband split about ten months ago. It’s been all sorts of trouble – he’s made all sorts of threats to me and our boy, but things are finally starting to-“
“Hold still, please,” Marc interrupted, “move as little as necessary. Facial muscles, especially.” She promptly closed her mouth with a sudden flutter of her eyelashes, her neck tensing to keep her chin raised and level.
☰
After about two hours more of sculpting and a day in the kiln, the woman returned to retrieve her bust. It was silky and detailed, slight but magical. She felt that it captured a sense of her constant motion, and she was enchanted with the result. He made a version of her that showed everything that was ever beautiful in her, amplified to an unrealistic degree. She paid him with a generous tip, as she carried off her self-image; a prop in a period play with the Phoenix Theatre Company.
Marc was pleased that his customer was content, but sad that his work can sometimes be a lovely form of lying.
He returned to his workshop, walking past the client room, to the rear of the building. He preferred to work in a relative silence, with nothing but the tinny echoing of his radio, so made his studio twelve miles from the city, on a lonely Arizonan stretch. His footsteps sifted on the soft cement, encased in collateral clay or stone dust, as he made his way to the refrigerator. He reached in, his hands appearing to steam in response to its interior, grabbing an Oak Creek lager and opening it on the brunt of his forearm. He threw the bottle cap to the ends of the workshop, it ricocheting three or four times until settling it some corner he’d never care to clean. He tipped it to his mouth, sipping, his chapped lips slightly recoiling at glass’ sharp chill. His speakers droned the Gin Blossoms: ‘If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago, I might not be alone.’ He coughed and laughed at the same time, forced, as if he couldn’t choose which to do, and slammed down his cervesa. It landed on an old Polaroid with caramel-skinned woman, nose-ringed and coyly smiling, sitting in a pickup truck bed with a bottle of red wine. A familiar discolored wrist led to fingers that snaked through her heat-crisped hair. Cigarette holes impaled her eye-sockets. It was dated 9/4/1993 in blue sharpie.
Marc made his way to two heavy, brick-colored sliding doors. He threw them open, thumping into the room. It was dark and mild in there, with still air smelling of heavy sugar. On the shelves were a long series of faces – or rather one face, repeated, with minor differences: a thinner nose here, a wider brow there. What was varied was the medium: some were carved into tree stumps, pineapples, others into coconuts and pumpkins. Living things, petrified like ancient mummies, to resist the rot of time. He looked across his gallery of grotesques and contorted his mouth into the shape of a rhombus, a polygon of self-disgust. He rustled saliva to and fro in his mouth to spit on the ground, but instead clenched his teeth and swallowed it.
He decided to close the shop early for the day, at 2 pm.
☰
Marc drove his ’88 Nissan Hardbody down Route 17, towards the city. He stopped at a Beer and Wine outlet, and bought himself a 50 ounce jug of Wild Irish Rose, ignoring the eyes of the teller.
He drove south, sipping from the jug at stoplights. He saw a large square sign, a stylized firebird, reading ‘WELCOME TO PHOENIX’. He slowed, smacked his lips, and spun his wheel to the left, turning around and aiming himself back north. Tonight was not a night for fake people and fake jokes and a morning where both pretend that you’d like to see each other again. Tonight needs to be something a bit more lucid, a bit more spiritual. Marc needed to get this riling demon out of him, this demon frozen in the Polaroid of his mind, constantly shaking around in it, developing, developing, developing into something more and more eviscerating. He took a large gulp of his bitter wine, capped it and tossed it onto the passenger seat, and aimed himself towards his shop. Tonight was a night for an exorcism.
☰
When Marc got there, his body swayed, seasick. He walked unevenly, as though his studio was treading stormy waters. He raise himself onto his Genie cargo lift, and carried a 6’x3’x3’ clay prism to his carving stand, standing it upright, like a monolith. He put on his work gloves, and after a few chugs of Irish Rose, he wrapped his fists in wire, holding a two foot strand between his hands. He arced his arms and sliced large, superfluous chunks from the form, shaping a slender center. Once the silhouette was outlined, he unfurled his toolset, a collection of pen-handled shapes rivaling those of a dentist. He smoothed bumps and removed knicks, slowly revealing the shape of a woman beneath: thin legs with a poking knees, a belly button ring, one pierced nipple, one untouched; slender arms with hinting tones, long fingers with short nails, lips soft and throbbing like larvae, and a thick mane, reaching to a middle vertebra of the curving, tender back. The abdomen was strong and thin, with sly muscles mountain ranging the ribcage.
In the background, his radio crackled the drones of Depeche Mode: ‘In a world full of nothing, though it's not love, it means something.’ Marc let out a heavy sigh, stood up and calmly walked in the direction of the radio. He raised the 32 millimeter straight gouge in his hand, and stabbed along the affixing plastic seam.
Stab.
Stab. Stab. Stab.
Plastic chips bounced everywhere as it garbled out its swan song: ‘though it’s not love, it means something. Though it’s not love, it means something.’ Marc speared its center, and cracked the cheap radio apart like a clam, its components snapping like copper tendons.
Silence.
Marc exhaled, appeased. He resumed his work, smoothing his definitions of the form. He made small arches in her feet, a birthmark on the back of her knee, and crafted so many details that one could think that he invented them as he went along. The digital clock blinked a crimson 3:00 AM. He stepped back, taking the last sips of his lukewarm wine, and surveyed the body:
Flawless.
Too flawless.
He saw the Polaroid in his peripherals and ran too it, ripping it off the table. He held it up – she never looked this good, this statue looks like a goddess, and Zabrina was no real goddess, was she? Was she? He bit on the corner of the picture until he began to taste ink, and spat it on the ground.
“She really was,” he said aloud. “But not in this way.”
He walked towards the statue, gently placing his hands against its cheekbones. He recalled his memories with Zabrina, hundreds of contradicting ones – idyllic and hurtful ones, exciting and horrifying ones, ones where he felt his soul spread across the sky, and others where he felt unworthy of human compassion. He pushed the hard to swallow ones down and looked into the statues eyes, longingly and slowly pressing his hands together, crushing the face: the clay rose up and belched down between his palms, the head spilling forth like a thick vitriol, until all that was left was a warbling sheet of clay and with a stretching, eerie grin. Marc slowly gritted his teeth, and pushed the clay figure away from him; it fell against the concrete floor, back bending like a spectrogram.
He made his way to the kitchen, and grabbed a bottle of vodka and tobacco, and rolled a cigarette. He walked out into the brisk desert dark, dawning a flannel shirt on his way out. He needed fresh air.
☰
Marc dreamt that he saw Zabrina again, brown and glowing, waving at him, calling for him on the edge of some horizon. He ran to her, but every time he tried to touch her, something bit him, like there was a forcefield he couldn’t see. He tried and tried, but grew exhausted as his hands started shedding scarlet tears. He couldn’t touch her, but he promised her he’d wait there, until that bastard magic broke. There were always thing stopping him from having her; other men, other focuses, other needs – excuses – but he wouldn’t let this silly thing stop him now when he was so, so close.
☰
He woke up curled and cold under the orange-browns of the desert dawn. Towering over him was a saguaro cactus. It was as broad as a god. He laughed at himself, mulling over the fuzzy recollections of his dream. He must have thought that this cactus was Zabrina, and he must have tried to embrace it all night, the dumb son of a bitch. He shook his head at his foolishness – he used to not drink much, and this was a good example as to why. He saw his house some quarter mile away, so he groaned himself onto two legs at began to make his way back.
After a few paces, he turned around, eyeing the way the shape of the cactus stood so strong when shadowed in the sunlight. Years ago he and Zabrina drove through the Navajo nation during the early autumn. They each took three drops of LSD, and spent the night painting the plateaus on the horizon. During his trip he spoke about the Navajos’ appreciation for “Mother Saguaro” and he said he could see how those plants could be seen as the birthplace of all things. A few weeks later Zabrina came home with a tourists’ book on Saguaro cactuses, “to better learn where he came from.” Marc remembered one of the passages:
Saguaro cacti in the drier parts of Arizona grow at half the rate of those in regions of reliable precipitation. These smaller saguaros will grow to an average of 15-20 feet tall.
He smiled, and returned home, and was very shocked to find the next morning that someone had broken in to his studio and demolished his radio. What the fuck would lead someone to do something like that? he wondered.
☰
Over the next several days he continued sculpting and stonecutting when he could; two gravestones and a bust, but his mind kept wandering and he found himself eyeing the saguaro on the horizon when the sun oranged in its rise and setting. Seeing it contented him, and being next to it gave him a sense of euphoria. He hired a professional landscaper to uproot it and cut it to seven feet.
☰
Once the cut cactus was placed on his carving block, Marc couldn’t restrain from working on it. His hands sweat as he sheathed them with gloves, and they shook when he wrapped wire around the fingers. The corners of his lips twitched with a withheld arousal. He looped the wire around at the top of the saguaro, and pulled downwards. It was difficult and resistant; he had to seesaw his arms back and forth to make any headway into the plant; cactus water sprayed all over his tools, making their blades salted and slick. He couldn’t use his normal methods on a skin so thick; he had never worked with cacti before – it was unpredictable and electrifying.
He grabbed a pair of pliers and began to pull out its needles one a time. They held on as hard as they good – after twenty minutes of doing this, lactic acid begin flooding the streams and rivers of his triceps. He ignored it and worked on.
The spines on a saguaro cactus can grow as rapidly as a millimeter a day. They are thick, and difficult to remove from a live saguaro. Even cacti dead as long as six months tend to have a very rigid structure, and some spines grow internally, and are impossible to remove.
He continued until the hundreds (thousands?) of needles that were on it were clear. He passed out on his mattress in the backroom, and slept for half an hour, but was soon stirred awake by his own excitement. He lifted himself back up, and returned to the studio. It was time to carve.
Marc’s new radio hummed Soundgarden with a clearer reception: “I pray to keep heaven, send hell away, no one sings like you anymore.”
☰
Over the next few days, Marc crafted a replica of Zabrina, drawn from his mind’s eye. It had every honest imperfection, idealism aside. The slight love handles, the scar on her left breast. It was no goddess, but it was sincere. The lime green structures inside the cactus were lined with a deep, dark, almost black lining from its skeletal support system. The space between was a cartilage white; her body was a curling nebula of earthy shades. He carved her sitting, legs spread, one hand in front of her womb, and one outstretched that she gazed at, just like when she’d hold a cigarette.
This is perfect. Flawful and perfect.
That night Marc slept soundly, and had the first wet dream he had had for thirteen years.
☰
When Marc woke up, he found himself huddled into himself, resting in the fetal position on the lap of his sculpted Zabrina. Its surface was soft, and seemed to sink with the flexibility of a sturdy mattress. He laughed and guessed that he got drunk the previous night, as well. He fell back asleep as quickly as he awoke, resting his head in the statue’s right hand.
Native birds such as Gila woodpeckers, purple martins, house finches, and gilded flickers build nests inside holes in saguaros. They will live there for as long as 4 years, because their thick, fleshy outer membranes provide an effective insulation, making them ideal homes for these species.
Marc finally woke up several hours later, unaware of the time. He put on coffee, and admired the saguaro, licking his lips at the smell of its creamy cactus water that lay like runny egg on the studio floor. He began cleaning up his workshop, washing off the tools with a revitalized vigor. He mopped the floor while listening to his answering machine play back inquiring voices. He returned calls and marked calendars, and felt filled with a sweeter blood than he had for months. While sweeping the floor, he found the cigarette-pierced Polaroid. Marc stared at its empty eyes for several shaking seconds, and then placed it in his ashtray, struck a match and lit its corner. He watched the woman’s taupe skin boil and curl, the black corners of her background meld with her hair and flesh, until the photograph became a wilting charcoal rose.
He smiled out of some sort of self-obligation, emptied the ashtray and continued cleaning the space with an anxious agility.
☰
The following day Marc met with two clients, one of them being a gravestone for a dead cat, “Marcia.”
“Do you know why she was named Marcia?” She left little time for Marc to respond before she explained, “Well, her father feline was named Michael – off of Mike Brady, from that show The Brady Bunch – and her mother cat was name Carol, from the mom on the same show. And well, they just hit it off, and Marcia was the oldest girl of the litter, and everyone just loved her. Everyone always just loved Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
“HAH.” Out came a forced laugh, like a popped balloon: one syllable echoing into the studio’s corners to the incredible discomfort to both of them. Marc never really offered those sympathy laughs with customers, but today… today he couldn’t contain himself; he was bursting at the seams. “Yes, Marcia. Do you remember the episode where they went to Hawaii?”
“Why, yes, of course.”
“I never saw it, but I’ve been to Hawaii once. Hiked all over with someone special. I was thinking about it earlier today. Really worth doing.”
“Yes, I hear it’s a wonderful place. Simply spectacular to vacation at; I hope to go there with a certain someone special, myself! But that’s only if they allow Michael to sit in a plane seat – he simply hates the cage.”
“Oh,” his brows furrowed, “Cats can’t hike, though.”
☰
Once he was finished with his customers, Marc put another cup of coffee on; he needed something to fire him, having not slept the previous night. He opened the sliding doors to the backroom, and went one room further: a white tiled cell with a large drain in the center. It was time to begin the petrifaction process, starting with an acid wash. Marc got onto his Genie and lifted the statue, carefully carrying it to the tiled room. He filled a backpack sprayer with baking soda and citric acid, and sprayed the emerald figure with this mixture every ten minutes for the next fifteen hours. Every subsequent time, it seemed to shine more, catch the light, absorb it, create it. His eyes glazed over at its splendor. The white stripes running up its breasts mesmerized him; the dark greens seduced his sensibilities. He fell on the floor, eyes blank, the sprayer showering its acidic insides onto the back of his scalp and his shoulders.
Overwatering of cacti is the single largest contributor to plant loss. Their vascular cambium become overwhelmed when flooded with an unfamiliar amount of liquid and seize up, at the risk of flooding its xylem and phloem.
☰
When Marc awoke, he had a silvery flavor in his mouth and a bluntly aching brain. He slowly rose, lightly tracing a wound on the back of his head. He got on two feet with a sway, and walked towards the main studio to find his watch and wash himself in the sink. He heard the radio singing Morrissey: “November spawned a monster in the shape of this child…” His watch couldn’t be found; he looked in the restroom mirror, collecting water in his cupped hands and gently splashing his face. He didn’t bleed too much and it had already clotted – he’d be ok. Not having health insurance helps one rationalize using one’s own first aid abilities.
Marc started a shower. He looked back, surveying himself again in the mirror: lavender bags hung below his eyes. Not enough sleep – if I get some I’ll be fine. He thought of his sculpture and smiled at how close it was to completion. He grew aroused, and stepped into the shower to relieve himself.
While in there he heard a deep roaring, like a drumming thunder. The argon oven? He leapt out of his shower before he finished, and ran to the oven with squishing, naked footsteps. He dripped warm water onto the citrus floor of the holding room, and saw the door closed and locked, the oven heated to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. The statue was no longer in the tiled alcove, but in the locked oven, now shrieking with heat. He didn’t remember placing in there or turning it on… but the temperature was right. Marc was confronted with a sense of undefined unease, like when mad at a friend for something they did in a dream. He mined through his mind, trying to decipher how this happened. But did it matter? – It was nearly finished. He set the timer for seven minutes and walked back to his shower, passing the Genie on the way.
He rinsed through his hair, puzzled. His head made noises like an off key quartet – he hadn’t had an epileptic fit in years, it was strange for it to come back now. But it didn’t matter, he was alright, he had recovered, and he was soon to finish his masterpiece, so to speak. He turned the shower off and shook his hair like a dog, and pulled back the shower curtain.
In front of him was a six foot woman, shimmering like jade ceramic, radiant from fire’s touch, standing pigeon-toed with breasts perking upwards and eyes lowered to Marc’s trembling mouth.
“Oh god…” he clasped his hands to the back of his head: no blood. “I’m hallucinate-“
“Shhhh” said the green goddess, placing a warm finger against his mouth. “I’m back. Didn’t you want me to come back, all this time?” Her voice had the same high pitch and slight gravel as… her’s.
“Z-Zabrina?” he whispered in disbelief. She bit her lip and nodded slowly. Her eyes were dark and glassy, reflecting his own terror and exhilaration back to him.
“I’m yours now. All for you – like you always wanted. I used to not want to be owned – but I am nothing with you, Marc. Would you… would you still have me?”
Marc fell down, naked and sopping, and held onto her heated leg, kissing the firm surface of her thigh. Tears ran down his face, slightly sizzling on contact with the statue’s midriff. His heart sang and his cock throbbed. “Have me.” She said, as she walked across the hall way to a mattress laying in the corner his makeshift bedroom. “Make me yours. Own me. I want to make up for lost time.” She reclined on to it, and spread her legs, her labia gleaming with heat.
Saguaro fruit are highly edible and prized by local people. The O'odham tribes have a long and rich history of using the fruit as an aphrodisiac, as well as using its sacred nectar during seasonal sacrifices.
He swallowed her slick body, kissing every part he could. His tongue pressed against her clitoris, and her exaggerated body arched in ecstasy. She yet out a layered yell, as though with two voices at once. Her hot hands held his cheeks.
“Own me.” Marc chewed his lip and nodded. He took his member, and pressed it into her crevice, his body shuddering against the sensation of her sweltering insides. “Own me!” more voices yelled. He thrust forth, slamming his pelvis against her manufactured form. Heat swam through his body in pleasure, and then an incredible pain. He stopped, pale, blood draining from his face.
“What is it, Marc? You suddenly don’t want me anymore?” He tried to pull himself out but he was stuck. His penis was in incredible pain; pricked, pierced. Blood flowed out of her womb like the mouth of a waterfall. The more he resisted, the more torrented out of him.
“Oh, you.” Her voice was no longer Zabrina’s – it sounded like the voice he thought in, the voice inside his head. “It’s hard work owning someone else, isn’t it, Marc? Here, let me be on top.” She breathed five breaths at once and flipped him, impaling him deeper into her, puncturing him in apathetic ecstasy. She rocked her body up and down – pounding his hips to a soundtrack of eroding bones and shredding flesh.
Even cacti dead as long as six months tend to have a very rigid structure, and some spines grow internally, and are impossible to remove.
“Stop, please for the love of god, please stop,” he wheezed out, barely a noise left in him.
“Don’t be selfish, baby” she said in tiered baritones, “I haven’t come yet. That’s not very fair of you.” She drew her head back and continued to bob on him, his screams muffled by the pounding of petrified wood against marrow.
☰
Twelve days later, investigating officers found Marc’s body with nine broken bones, caked in blood and castrated. His fingers were shoved into his eye sockets; puss gloved his palms and his mottled wrists.
In the center of the studio stood an enormous statue of a young woman, one hand covering her womb, one hand outstretched, holding what appeared to be a scorched black rose, wilted from the remains of an old and unintelligible Polaroid photograph.
The cactus flower, echinopsis oxygona is sweet-smelling, but short lived. It opens towards evening, hoping for a pollinator, but inevitably dies the following morning. A Saguaro cactus can have as many as hundreds of thousands of its flowers die in its lifetime. Oftentimes, its pollinators will die as well, attempting to re-pollinate the dead flower, exhausting its last ounces of life while under the euphoria-inducing aroma of its own decay.