MANDRAKE

MK Pinder

There is this literary concept called the ecological sublime. It refers to the metaphysical transcendence, beauty and spirituality at work in the interconnectedness of nature. And humans, despite our best efforts to destroy it, are a part of that ecosystem. We are ‘of nature’. There is something very romantic about the idea that if we strip ourselves down to our core components, our materials, we are not so different from the non-human ecosystem.

Her boots hit the cold concrete as she made her way across the square. The ground had been recently cleaned, but little flecks of rubbish still hid in its cracks and grooves. It was a permanently contaminated space. She could feel another crack forming, another tiny piece of her falling away, with every minute of loud discordant chaos and every piece of trampled packaging.

She moved quickly through the perversive symphony and discarded artefacts of the city, soon arriving at the garden. It was a small oasis in an artificial world. An Eden. Somewhere to be still, to reconnect, to decontaminate.

As the sun began to set the giant sunflowers turned away from the wire fence and the city beyond. The fence had been erected decades ago to protect this vulnerable treasure from the violence of humanity. Nowadays the protection it afforded was purely symbolic being crudely patched and noticeably leaning. The gate produced its tell-tale rattle and clank as her boots crunched against the grit path.

Her hands brushed against the greenery in the waist-high garden beds as she walked casting her eyes over the familiar lines of plants. The seas of leafy green were punctuated by blossoms and underripe fruit. Nature—curated and imprisoned within corrugated iron cells. She ran her fingers through the fragrant leaves of the herb garden: the untamed peppermint, the sap-laden rosemary, and the failing basil. And there it was right where the sage should have been…

Wide green leaves with rounded tips, dainty flowers, and bright berries that hung from the stems. On the surface there was not a hint of what lay beneath, a complex system of roots, not dissimilar to a human form. It was the fascination of folklore. The stuff of witchcraft. Poisonous and perfect.

—Mandragora officinarum—

Or the Mandrake. It was a plant commonly found in Mediterranean climates not in a warm-temperate inner-city garden. It should not have been there.

She traced the edges of the rosette of leaves. The strangeness of it was intoxicating. It gave her an uneasy awareness of her material form its unpleasant masses of flesh and bone. It disgusted her. She wanted to abandon it, to merge with the leaves, to be consumed by the strange masses of roots—absorbed, subsumed, disappearing into the shades of green and brown.

But the cold hard surface of the raised garden bed was an unnatural barrier. A human construct confining these non-human forms into neat and manageable rows. It reminded her of hard corporeal truths. She was stuck in this body, this ugly, unnatural human body, so isolated from the world around it.

Mesmerised, she reached out and tore off a leaf. She put it to her mouth daring to take a bite. It was sweet and just a tiny bit acidic. Not at all what she expected. Maybe she had misidentified it? She stared silently at the plant for a long time looking for any signs of its supposed malevolence and witchery. As she watched the roots of the plant began to surface from the earth, writhing and reaching out to her. But when she reached back to touch them, they disappeared. Her mouth was dry, and she couldn’t breathe. The blood in her veins burnt and fizzed.

The world shifted and shrank. She felt dizzy and reached out to steady herself on the cursed flower bed. Slumping to the ground she let out stifled silent cries. She shut her eyes as tears fell down her cheeks, and reached her hands out tracing her fingers through the dirt. She rested, and all that could be heard was the distant traffic, and the busy sounds of an artificial ecosystem.