F I C T I O N
Jess Guinivan
Salsola
S
amson managed to avoid the tumbleweeds for nearly twenty years. The ubiquitous plant piled high along fences, abandoned buildings and stables all over New Mexico, taking root in whatever loose patch of otherwise uninhabitable dirt it could get its barbs into. But not in his yard. Samson refused to landscape in rock and cacti, an approach he thought dreary and defeatist, so he diligently cultivated his lawn, knowing the tumbleweeds only grew easily if you let them. Neighbors lost their own battles to the weed over the years, complicating Samson’s. Every winter, the plants would dry out, break, and roll into his yard. He had to put up a fence. Then one day in November the whole city of Clovis, New Mexico, woke up to a blizzard of tumbleweeds. Salsola tragus, Russian thistle, had accumulated Nicole Aronson everywhere. The ghostly billows invaded in impossible numbers, burying the entire north side of town. They blacked out windows. They smothered mailboxes. Samson made quick work of the removal, taking a day off from work to haul them all to the dump. But come spring, after the first heavy rain, the seedlings sprouted all over his yard: at the edge of his sidewalk, in the cracks of his driveway, on both sides of his fence. They had found every nook and cranny of fallow lawn and dropped seed, planning a future without his consent. Samson spent the next weekend tearing up the littles ones by hand. The big ones he dug out with a hoe. He wasn’t sure what to do about the ones sprouting remarkably from the pavement. They would need to be sprayed, he supposed. The plant would need to be eradicated, the property carefully watched when it inevitably spread. This was not how he wanted to spend his summer.
