PROPOGATION, PT. 2
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| Ambrosius Bosschaert. Still-Life with flowers. |
Charlie had been looking for a job. Or had been trying to look, to approach and attack the thing with the appropriate skill and stealth. But the daily chore of it had become confounding and dangerous, as if he was hunting a bird only to find the bird was in fact the feathery eyelash of an impossible monster. He had been finding himself in too many moments, resume and references manila-foldered and in hand, but his mind utterly elsewhere, wading through the details of his favorite recurring daydream, the one about an unpeopled world.
This daydream wasn't a new one, except in its recent intensity and grand detail, blown-up by this new media-frenzy, led by Al Gore of all people, of climate-change dread. What he imagined was a landscape placed upon the immediate environment, a landscape of either the untouched natural world of centuries ago or the post-apocalyptic sprawl of a future nature, generations after mankind was gone.
The geologic age of his daydream, the before or after of it, depended on the time of day, the quality of light, his general mood. On hazy mornings, when in his own city home, the gridlocked expressway, a carefully manicured public square, he would simply imagine the forest, the rolling land, the wildlife trails that must have been in that spot, sometime long ago. The creation of this image excited him, consumed him, and if he concentrated hard enough he could feel the rumble of civilization, approaching, ready to scrawl its vulgar name across the earth. During these moments the natural world was to him like a ghost, one that if he squinted and stood still long enough he could see in hazy silhouette.
When he was feeling less charmed he would imagine everybody dead, an untamed macroorganism consuming the abandoned city like a green glacial fire, muscly roots pulverizing the concrete, ropy vines tearing the buildings to the ground.
But then again, other times, he would just lose himself in a specimen. As when he had visited the large suburban conservatory last week, with the intent to leave his resume and cover letter as advised. But, as had become routine, that morning had been full of degrading chores: selling old textbooks and records, cashing in quart jars of loose change, meeting with a self-described entrepreneur named Starbody who wanted to buy his old heat lamps, no questions asked. By the time he finally got off the slow suburban train he was fatigued and hungry, desperate for something he could not define. Entering the vast building, he decided to first walk the overgrown paths, and found himself wandering, staring at the sweaty ferns and palms, inspecting the tips of leaves like a blind man, like a child.
By the time he reached the crooked umbrella of the Eugenia uniflora, the one that crested the narrow path so he had to duck to not hit its dangling fruit, he was lost to himself. He had stared at the craning branches, the tufted green, the bunched and bulbous fruit, trying to trace each red bead’s lifecycle back to blossom ovary, back to reproductive bud, back to green knotted branch. He had fixated on one fruit cluster, a low hanging group, for what felt like hours, eyeing its waxy curves, hypnotized by its even patterns, moving closer and closer to a single cherried blob, until his face was an inch from the thing. He had stared deeply into the center of the fruit, into its tiny orange heart until, without a thought, he had perked his head like a bird and bit the fruit off its stem, its thick juice bitter and warm.
He left quickly after that, feverish and confused, avoiding eye contact.
“I think I’m de-evolving,” he had told Beatrice over the phone that night. “Like an animal. Like I’m becoming an animal. They don’t have jobs or long-term goals. That’s what I want. I want to hunt and procreate and be all covered in fur.”
“Ew,” was all Beatrice had said.
He had begun to give things up after he lost his job: first caffeine and beer, then bread and red meat, then dairy and desserts. He started eating tiny but frequent meals of dry salads, handfuls of almonds, spoonfuls of tuna right out of the can. He had unplugged his television and stereo, stacked them in a dark closet. Had given up taxis and buses to instead walk his quiet meandering miles alone. He stopped shaving. “Ancient Greeks abstained from shaving when they were in mourning,” he told Beatrice, “they found the vanity of grooming disrespectful to the deceased.”
“Mourning? What the fuck are you mourning?” Beatrice had asked—she could, like her father, have a shout of a voice.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Charlie had said. “The goal is to give away everything until I just disappear. Like a memory that loses its details until one day it’s something that never happened. My last thought will be ‘where did I go?’ and then poof!”
“Poof?” Beatrice had sounded skeptical, but also concerned. “What do you mean poof?” A girl in her dormitory had committed suicide last semester and Beatrice still seemed edgy because of it.
“Not poof poof. Like a Zen kind of poof. I just need to simplify. You know? I just need to get rid of all this…all this stuff!” There was an unconvinced silence. “I just want to garden, you know? Can’t I just have a little space to garden? And can somebody pay me to do it? Is that an unfair request? Is that too much to ask?”
“It’s always too much to ask, Charlie,” Beatrice had said resolutely. “That’s why you have to ask.”
There was a pause. Charlie didn’t know what she meant but it sounded profound.
“What does that mean?” he had asked.
“I don’t know. Whatever you want it to mean.”
“That’s not very helpful,” Charlie had said.
“I don’t know what to tell you!” Beatrice had said, loudly. Then quietly, almost to herself: “I might be a little stoned right now.”
Now at Samantha’s holiday dinner table, Beatrice is tapping a salsa beat on the edge of her glass, looking over Charlie’s shoulder. She seems, as usual, stuck in some faraway idea, or maybe only bored.
“So, Berty, how’s school?” her mother asks her. “You never talk about school.”
Beatrice flinches, as if pulled from sleep. “School’s good. Yeah. No, it’s good.” She grabs for her water glass giving Charlie a quick flared look that he cannot quite interpret. School is not good; Charlie knows. It is a problem. The how and why of it is beyond him, kept from him. He suspects that hers is an indefinite kind of problem—a brooding doubt, a murky unwillingness—that kind of problem she cannot explain or point to or share.
It is just that she has become very angry and political in the past year, quick to complain about the illegitimate President and his illegal war. It is that she has been talking a lot about fascism and how it is everywhere. And that she has been listening to a lot of violent and angular music, wearing formless unattractive clothing, reading dense tomes about power dynamics and the systemic oppression inherent to this thing and that. It is just that, he suspects, she has been wrestling all at once with a world that was too big and too complicated to be coherent. It is just that she was sixteen years old when twin towers fell and had to watch it all in Algebra II. And it is just that she had just gotten her first cell phone and once, at the beginning of the semester, she had called him in the very early morning, her speech drunken but frantic, weepily muddled and vague. She had told him something about how cruel and convoluted everything had become, how worthless people so often were, how she was done with all of it, but was wildly overdramatic about it, her tightly held emotionality pouring out all at once, sweeping and unhelpful. Charlie had talked her down and quickly got her to sleep, but the two hadn’t spoken about it since. Every time he asked her how she was, trying to be as unassuming as possible, she grew cold and general and changed the subject.
Charlie loved his sister but could not stomach all the politics. Charlie thought himself a scientist and had no interest in the lure of the ideal. It all seemed to him a futile sport, a loopy dance poorly disguised as an ever-onward march. He worried about Beatrice, albeit quietly. As children they had learned how to read each other’s lips; lately, he felt divergent experiences were separating them, flinging both of them on opposite trajectories.
Now Beatrice is searching for the most neutral words for her mother. “It’s just school,” she says. “More of the same. But it’s good.” She tries a reassuring smile, but it flashes so quickly, disappears so utterly, that it looks more like a twitch. She takes a quick sip of water.
There is a dull clunk in the kitchen, Samantha swears under her breath. “You need some help, Sam?” their mother calls out, but Samantha ignores her, instead appearing through the kitchen door with a slightly crazed look, as if she has made a monster instead of a meal. “Dinner’s ready,” she beams, eyes wide. “Greg?” she says, jerking a nod towards the kitchen. Greg hops out of his seat. “I’ll look into your garden idea,” he says to Charlie.
“He’ll look into it,” Charlie repeats to the table, as if to answer their silent question.
What follows is a parade: asparagus, cranberry salad, clover rolls, creamed potatoes, a bean casserole, a curry carrot dish, spiced yams, something murky and brown, gravy perhaps, a poofy spring salad, and lastly, a gleaming, fatty duck.
“Alright,” Charlie says, rubbing his hands. Looking at the dinner’s spread, he realizes that he hasn’t eaten a real meal in weeks. “I’ll carve the duck!” he says with a raised fist.
“First,” Samantha insists, sitting at the head of the table, “Greg’s going to say Grace.” Charlie gives Beatrice a vacant glance, his fist still hung over his head. Their mother had once been a churchgoer, but only attended the spacious Unitarian Church near campus, and even then only to have a presence in the community when her career was just beginning. “I really like it when we all sing,” is all she ever said of it, “I always wanted to be a singer.” She fell away from it quietly when all her children entered high school. Their father never went, and neither did any of the children. But Greg, for all his sleepy simplicity, is a devoted Lutheran, the kind who sings bass in the choir and reads daily from a heavily annotated King James Version that he refers to as The Manual. And so, all of them assume prayer positions, limp hands in laps, heads tilted downward only slightly, eyes on their empty plates.
“Dear Lord,” Greg says, his eyes just shut. “Thank you for this day and this bountiful meal. Thank you for this opportunity to share our gratitude, and this chance to share with each other our joy and peace. Thank you for the opportunity to be inspired by each other’s lives, so led with purpose and duty.” Charlie looks up to Beatrice who magically meets his gaze. They both mouth the word doody, just as they had as children. Beatrice keeps a straight face but Charlie bites his lip hard, elated that she remembers. “Thank you for family,” Greg says. “Continue to bless us with care and direction.” There is a short pause, for Greg to ponder something silent and personal, or maybe just to make sure he has covered everything. He nods, satisfied. “Amen,” he says to everyone’s relief.
“Amen,” they all mumble in response.
Bosschaert the Elder, Ambrosius. Still-Life with flowers. Wikimedia Commons. 9 Mar 2026, 12:03 UTC. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ambrosius_Bosschaert_the_Elder_-_Still-Life_with_flowers_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg&oldid=1178326197> 23 Jun 2026, 03:42.