Prickly Pear
10-minute Solarpunk short story I wrote for a reading at our farm
Evan sat downcast on the stoop. The small prickly pear cactus fruited happily in the June sun beside his tense body. Baron caught sight of him as he drove up, but Evan did not look up. Baron’s stomach sank into the riverbed below as he parked the car and turned off the ignition.
Baron approached, not daring to speak. Evan finally, mechanically, looked up with a flexed jaw.
“It was you, wasn’t it.”
Baron wished he had spit it out, screamed, spewed venom. But he folded the words out calmly, emotionlessly. He knew. Baron’s only chance was a plea bargain.
“He wasn’t good for you!”
“So you told my parents??” Evan stood up.
The truth, pressurized, suddenly forced its way out.
“You were going to leave me here!”
Shock, anger and pity carouseled through Evan’s eyes. Finally, he shook his head and stooped to grab his bag.
“Wait Evan, please...” Baron pleaded as he reached for his shoulder.
“Don’t fucking touch me Baron,” he snapped as he dodged Baron’s hand. He let out an aggravated scream as his elbow jammed into the cactus and he pushed past Baron into the driveway.
Baron fell to the dirt, one hand on the stoop, the other bracing his suddenly searing chest.
He gasped for air, “Evan” he tried to say, but there was no wind in his lungs to form the words.
By the time breath returned, Evan’s bike was crunching gravel far down the road.
Minutes passed before Baron could stand. Once vertical in the entryway, he noticed the gash in the cactus that once belonged to his parents. It was now his after they died separately of cancer. Perks of living under the shadow of a refinery.
Magnetically drawn to the wet green wound, Baron poked the cactus where Evan had elbowed it. As soon as his finger pressed into the flesh of the paddle, his heart exploded with a second wave of ache. He flinched, retracting his finger reflexively before returning it to the wound with unassailable curiosity. He pressed into the paddle gingerly, feeling the ache in his heart bloom in stride with the pressure he applied.
He continued to experiment—poking, prodding, getting out his lighter and searing, as bruises and burns appeared on his skin. Quickly yet in full maddening disbelief he came to understand that he was this cactus and it was him.
Over the next weeks, as Evan refused to meet him, screened his calls, left him on read, Baron returned to jab the festering wound. The pain gave him an odd sense of relief. This pain, at least, he could control.
Baron was moving. He was in bed, but he was moving. The bed was moving, no wait, the whole house was moving.
The lamp didn’t work. He threw off the sheets, sidled his legs onto a wobbly carpet, and turned on his cell phone flashlight. The relentless rain created a permeating static punctuated only by shudders of wind. He made his way over to the front door, the cactus stood guard obliviously, as Baron realized what was happening. The river had swallowed them.
They found him clutching his cactus, face cut by the spines, in the nook of an old oak tree amid clots of fabric, streamers of plastic, and nests of metal decorating the branches in human folly.
Baron was relocated. The Climate Relocation Program bought his parents house—now that no one would— and secured it for riparian restoration. It was no great loss. Evan had run away without telling him; Baron had nothing left to lose.
He moved into his grandma’s back house half way across the country, under the California redwoods, in a strange little town called Guerney-ville.
He got a job at a local resort, mainly picking up after screaming kids who he believed, sadistically, enjoyed throwing up in the bathroom for him to clean up. It was always gorgeous, and his co-workers were overly sweet. He hated it. He got through the day with mostly grunts and shrugs.
Months in, he was miserable, and so was his cactus. It wasn’t getting enough sun, the towering trees blocked its chance at life. The paddles, slowly bleaching of verve, faded into a pale green.
He saw in the cactus a reflection of himself, they were both withering. And then it hit him: how could he thrive here when his health was tied to this cursed cactus? He realized, with exalted clarity of purpose, that he simply had to sever the connection.
Baron went to ChatGPT like one does an oracle: desperate. Surprisingly, the robot didn’t tell him he was crazy, even normalized his madness. It offered, with metallic cheeriness, a ritual to sever the connection.
“I honor what this connection has taught me. I now release us both to our own paths. May you flourish as yourself, and may I flourish as myself.” Baron repeated as he took his fingers like scissors to snip the magical cord he imagined tethered them, and then blew out a candle.
It didn’t work.
Weeks went by, and he and the cactus continued to deteriorate. Baron developed sore joints and a stubborn cough. One of the paddles turned brown before blackening at the crusted edges.
One day, at work, he overheard his boss talking about a mystic in town. She helped her sever ties with an ex. She swore by it. Her friend rolled his eyes, but laughed, “honestly, at this point, whatever it fucking takes, I’m in.”
Baron rushed home after work, grabbed his cactus, and went straight to the crystal shop the mystic inhabited. It was dark, the air, of course, smelled of patchouli. The mystic, of course, said “I’ve been expecting you.” Baron didn’t question her, he was desperate, he plopped the cactus down on her table.
“I need help. I need to sever my connection to this cactus.”
“Is that what you think you need?” she tented her fingers and tilted her head. Incense trails snaked in front of her face.
“Yes, this cactus is killing me. It’s draining my life and making me suffer.”
“I can’t help you,” she shook her head and pursed her lips.
“What do you mean? Isn’t this exactly what you do?”
“I mean—I am not the help you need.”
“Well, then who can help me?”
Her eyes got distracted by something out the window, she peered out for a moment, before returning her gaze. She smiled, a little sadly, a little sweetly.
“My dear,” she said, “help is all around you.”
Baron grabbed his cactus angrily and rushed out the door, turned the corner abruptly and smacked directly into a man walking the other direction. The cactus between them, Baron winced in anticipation, expecting a rush of pain as the cactus transferred its harm to him. He held his eyes shut, but there was nothing.
“Oh god, I’m so sorry, are you okay?” the man asked.
“Am I okay? I just rammed you with a cactus?” Baron blurted as he finally took the man in.
He was tall, brown hair and brown sun-drenched skin, wearing a green, heavy leather jacket with a puffy lining that must have cushioned the impact. He was, incidentally, also gorgeous. Baron swallowed.
“May I ask why you’re rushing out of the crystal shop with a cactus?”
“It’s a long story,” Baron said, defeated.
“I figured it must be,” he chuckled, and followed with, “you’re new to town right?”
“Yeah, just moved here from Texas, how did you know?”
“It’s a small town, I know pretty much everyone. Always love meeting new neighbors though—want to tell me that long story over a beer,” he gestured to the bar a block down with five neon lights in the arced shape of a rainbow.
“Will they let me in with my cactus?”
“The things they let go on in there... yes I think you’ll be okay with the cactus.”
They found a spot in the sun in the back patio. Baron set the cactus down and could swear, for a moment, it shimmered in the warm light.
The man’s name was Silas. He was a landscaper. Greenified rich people’s estates to pay rent and restored native habitat in his free time.
Over the beers, Baron began to unwind his story. Starting with the basics. Grew up in Texas along a polluted and murderous river. Red county. Very conservative. Very few gays. Tried to date girls. It didn’t work. Learned to just disappear into the background instead. Evan still found him though, even when he thought he was invisible.
Silas listened intently and asked disarming questions that greased the spool. More and more poured out of Baron. A clot of silence and loneliness dislodged a deluge of stories.
He told him about how Evan had been his best and only friend. Their long summer days at the river that wasn’t yet murderous, making forts in the willows, and refusing to leave until well after dark. He told him how Evan found a Miami boyfriend in a chat room, about how he moved away. He left out the part where he outed him to his parents.
“Evan sounds amazing, I can’t wait to meet him. When’s he going to visit?”
“I... I don’t think he’s coming to visit.”
“Why not?” Silas was earnestly concerned.
“I didn’t want him to leave. I... I did something bad. We had a falling out.”
Silas was kind enough not to press.
Wanting to change subjects, Baron put his hand on the cactus’s pot.
“The last day I saw him he accidentally elbowed this cactus, and...” Baron hesitated, but all the truth was flowing out of him now, there was something about Silas that made him open up and words fall out of him, as if he had some special gravity—and the fourth beer wasn’t helping.
“Ever since, I’ve been linked to it. The cactus. I feel its pain. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. That’s why I was seeing the mystic. It’s causing me to suffer, wither—it doesn’t like it here. It doesn’t belong here. I have to sever the ties.”
Baron couldn’t look Silas in the eye. He probably thought he was mad. He probably just lost his one chance at a friend.
Through his watery vision affixed to his shoes, Baron saw Silas’s hand reach over and land on his knee.
Baron dared to look up.
Silas held a warm, caring look, like someone might toward a wounded animal discovered on their doorstep.
“Have you tried caring for the cactus instead? Helping her thrive?”
“I live under the redwoods, there’s not enough sun,” Baron retorted quickly.
“I have a south-facing corner in my backyard she’ll love. Right up against a warm fence.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can plant her at my house! She’ll love it. Come over anytime, we’ll take care of her together.”
Baron was filled with a strange feeling he hadn’t felt since the river swallowed everything, since his only friend left him, since his parents were taken from him. The pain in his chest softened—just a sliver, just a chance, just the first leaf of new life...
He felt, the possibility, of home.
THE END