The Last One(22)

The Expert tsks lightly. “This is bloodroot.” He indicates where the rhizome was torn. “See the red?”

“Toxic?” she asks.

“In large doses. Mayapple leaves are more umbrellalike and glossy in their prime. It’s one of the first sprouts to come up in the spring, so this time of year they’ll be wilting, and you should be able to find small yellow-green fruit.”

Zoo’s team loses a point, for a total score of six, but she has learned something.

Tracker’s team earns an easy seven with no incorrect identifications, including a hard yellow orb that proves to be mayapple fruit. The Expert is impressed. Tracker is caught between pride and embarrassment at his pride.

Air Force presents his team’s collection without knowing what it includes. The Expert ticks through the plants. “Pine, mint, burdock, purslane, dandelion, chokecherry.” There’s one more. If it’s correct, Air Force’s team ties for first. If it’s wrong, they come in last.

Insert constructed drama: long pauses, a close-up on Black Doctor’s eager eyes. Cheerleader Boy shifting, his mouth curled. Exorcist smiling like a mannequin. Air Force standing strong, showing no sign of his discomfort now. The Expert reaching into the bag, huffing a breath that rattles his beard. He extracts a hollow, purple-splotched stalk topped with a cluster of small, papery brown nubs that were once tiny flowers.

And now—a word from our sponsors, and whoever else has paid for a few moments to hawk their goods and services. Some viewers will groan, but they’ll be back; others endure only a staccato hint of advertising and the show returns. The viewer too can manipulate time, for a fee.

The Expert holds up the cutting and wrinkles his nose, letting the viewer in on the plant’s rankness. Air Force sucks in his cheeks; he knows something is wrong. “Queen Anne’s lace?” the Expert asks. Air Force doesn’t know; behind him, Black Doctor nods.

“No,” says the Expert. “And if you ate this, it could kill you. Anyone here heard of a man named Socrates?”

Thus is hemlock revealed.

The host steps forward, flourishing his hands to music he will never hear. He doesn’t care about the differences between hemlock and Queen Anne’s lace. He turns to Tracker’s team.

“Congratulations,” he says. “It’s time for your reward.”





7.


I clean and bandage my hand using the small first-aid kit issued to me at the beginning of the show, and then I start walking. I’m missing a shoe and I’m angry. Every branch I brush is a whispered reminder of the coyote’s snarls. If I try to focus on something more than a few feet away, I start squinting, which doesn’t help much and gives me a headache. So I don’t focus. I drift, moving through the leaves with creeping steps. And though I feel the stones and branches beneath my shoeless left foot, my vision reduces all texture to fluff. Separate objects coalesce. The forest floor is a great carpet, green here, brown there, a Mother Nature theme.

As I walk, I hold the surviving lens from my glasses in my jacket pocket and rub my thumb along its concavity. The lens has become my worry stone—more than that, my anger stone, my thinking stone, my I-can-do-this stone.

The coyote couldn’t have been real. It couldn’t have been. Now that the heat of the moment has passed, the attack feels distant and dreamlike. It was so dark, so quick. I concentrate, remembering and seeking flaws. I think I remember a mechanical stiltedness to its movement, maybe a flash of metal in the moonlight. I know I remember an electronic buzz announcing inauthenticity in the doll’s canned cries; maybe that sound was there beneath the coyote’s snarls too. I was so scared, I couldn’t see, and it happened so quickly, it’s hard to be sure.

Ad tenebras dedi. Three words and it’s over. All I have to do is admit defeat. If I’d been thinking straight during the attack, I might have done it, but now the moment’s passed and my pride won’t allow me to quit.

Pride, I think, walking through the abstract blur of my surroundings. I have only a few memories of the catechism classes my mother made me attend throughout elementary school, but I remember learning about the sin of pride. I remember old Mrs. Whatshername with her dyed red hair and baggy floral dress sitting the six of us at her kitchen table and pointing at an opal pendant I was wearing.

“Pride,” she said, “is feeling prettier than other girls. It’s wearing too much jewelry and looking in mirrors over and over. It’s wearing makeup and short skirts. And it’s one of the seven deadly sins.”

I remember sitting there at the table, fuming at her words. I hated being used as an example, and I hated that the example was so grossly inaccurate. The pendant had belonged to my dad’s mom, who’d passed away a few months before. Wearing the pendant didn’t make me feel prettier than other girls, it reminded me of a woman I loved and missed and mourned. Besides, tomboy that I was, I’d yet to even try putting on makeup.

We had graham crackers as a snack that day, and when I reached for a second I was warned against gluttony. This particular memory sparks a sour laugh in my throat as I shuffle along the pavement.

What else?

I remember kneeling in a church pew as the teacher asked us a single question over and over, my mind spinning—why isn’t anyone answering? Tentatively, I offered an idea, only to be shouted back to silence. I don’t remember the question I wasn’t supposed to answer, or the answer I wasn’t supposed to give, but I remember my shame. I learned that day that no matter how demanding a person’s tone, no matter how many times she asks something, she might not actually want an answer.