Plant-Based Pain and the Privilege of Suffering
Patricia McCrystal
We didn’t know how to cope with the cactus man’s death. The mayor — a loyal Advocate, like most of us in town—proclaimed a day of grief as soon as we heard the news, just after sunrise. He shouted himself hoarse from the defunct church’s bell tower, the peeling once-white clapboard licked down to its tawny marrow from relentless sun and wind. The bank and school were to remain closed. The funeral would be tomorrow, at the top of Weeping Woman mesa. The mayor rubbed his bloodshot eyes, sunken and perpetually inflamed from dust and drink and now, despair. The saloon would stay open.
Children from first through twelfth grade sped off on their bikes and rode all the way out to the cactus man’s property to circle his compound under the torrid cockcrow sun. As heat and dehydration began knocking them off their bikes, they collapsed onto the wall of cacti that knifed through the crimson dirt surrounding his home, their wails of sorrow mixing with cries of pain. It was exactly what he would have wanted.
It was Rayna who had first announced the cactus man’s passing. She led a one-person funeral dirge down the main drag at sunrise looking like a spitting image of a Phainopepla, her favorite desert bird: long black skirt dragging in the copper dust behind her, eyes griefed in scarlet. She gripped the cactus man’s heavy Chinese gong in one trembling hand, mallet in the other. Three penance bands bit into each calf, the bands nearest her knees newly fortified with a searing layer of cholla cactus spines, fat driblets of fresh blood juicing out beneath.
The loss of the cactus man meant the loss of what made us who we were as a community. We weren’t a town that outsiders visited to get a taste of early-colonial charm as they passed through from California or New Mexico. We were off the beaten path, way off, and we weren’t quaint in the way of mining museums and cafes; pottery stores and antique shops. We were a people with our own way of doing things, a collection of Advocates from all over the country called to a practice that worked to push back against injustice.
The cactus man made this so.
In the windswept downtown strip that morning, between body-wracking wails, Rayna lifted the cactus man’s gong and pounded it over and over, the deep tone palpitating in our chests and pulling us onto the boardwalk. I had just finished delivering the mail to the drug store when I saw her. As I fell to my knees in the dirt, the fist around my heart clenched tighter with the realization that the only other person in the world who could help me shoulder this grief was unreachable, her red eyes shrouded behind a veil of black lace, sparing no passing glance as she staggered past, bare feet kicking up dust.
That afternoon, I went to the saloon to find respite the only way I knew how since Rayna left me. Truth be told, I’d been doing it since before she left, too. The inside of the dim bar was cramped with mourning Advocates. We raised our scarred hands for whiskey and tequila, wiping our fingers beneath our eyes between shots. I tightened my penance bracelets to their highest setting, the two-inch barbed cholla cactus spines pressing deep into my wrists and sending sickening waves of heat to my shoulders. I ran a finger over the outside of the band I had made last week, after Rayna left. The supple leather felt like the smooth skin of her lower back. I closed my eyes and took another shot. All the Advocates decided we wouldn’t leave the bar until the sum of us had taken down 101 shots—the spiritual age of the cactus man in his passing—even if it meant we had to crawl home.
It should be said that not everyone in town recognized the cactus man. Andy and Rick and a few other Tohono O’odham tribal members, for instance, shook their heads and scooted over to the next barstool whenever we came in. Miguel, the barkeep from Oaxaca, liked to say the cactus man was just a defunct actor from LA, an old hippie playing Indian with his braids and jewelry and pseudo-Native plant worship. As more mourners filed in, I overheard Miguel telling One-Eyed Sal that half the cacti on the man’s compound didn’t even grow in the Sonoran Desert, that he had a bunch of old world plants trucked in when he was building the place. The man must be loaded, Miguel whistled. Sal smiled, tiny brown teeth aglint, single bloodshot eye twinkling with ridicule.
I was immune to their scorn. They would never understand our purpose or means of pursuit. The cactus man had been cultivating a community of followers for almost a decade. His teachings gave those of us born with pedigrees of privilege a way to repent, to milk some good out of the guilt of being born with silver spoons in our mouths. We toiled under penance bracelets, pushing cactus spines deep into our skin to alchemize our pain into a cosmic energy pure and potent enough to overturn unjust systems of power across the world. Our spiritual conductivity traveled through plant-based pheromones, the earth’s oldest form of communication.
Hearing all that talk from Miguel made me shoot my whiskey faster, but I didn’t realize Carl had sidled up next to me and heard it, too. Carl had been Harvey Weinstein’s executive assistant for ten years. Since becoming an Advocate, he’d been swallowing microdoses of the poisonous Candelabra cactus every morning, and would continue doing so until he matched the number of years he had turned a blind eye to his boss’s crimes. His lips had all but disintegrated, blood often dripping from one corner of his mouth and onto his starched collar. Deranged with grief, poor Carl picked up his beer bottle and slammed it over his head. He fell sideways off his stool and dropped to the floor in an ungraceful calamity, a fresh gash above his brow grinning up at us wetly. The rest of us got off our stools and picked up the shards of glass with our hands, squeezing them hard into our palms until blood filtered through our fingers. “Thank you,” we murmured to the clay floor, our reflections murky in the oily pools of liquor and blood.
Three days before the cactus man’s death, Rayna’s friend Sarah had disappeared. Rayna packed up and said she wanted to stay at the cactus man’s compound for a while, just until they figured out what happened to Sarah. When there was no talking her out of leaving, I offered to drive her there myself.
Rayna sat silent in the passenger seat, backpack gripped to her chest, hot air blowing in through the window and lifting her dark hair up around her face. She packed everything she brought when we moved from San Francisco—some clothes, a notebook, and the knife her mother had given her for protection, back during her city-wandering days. Every few minutes she’d clench her jaw and cover her mouth with her hand and I’d nurse the brakes. She’d been sick for weeks but waved off my concern, saying it was an expected part of a new cactus supplement regimen, a particularly potent plant that cleared out toxins.
About a mile out from the cactus man’s compound, I cleared my throat.
“Did Sarah say anything to you before she left?”
Rayna stared forward, unblinking. Up ahead, a crow lay on the side of the road, face to the sky. Two other crows were hopping around it, pecking at its carcass.
“Yes.”
She itched her opposite wrist with the back of her thumb. There was a raw pink ring where her penance bracelet used to be.
It was Sarah who had introduced Rainey and me to the cactus man. The girls had been on the dance team together back in high school, but drifted away in college. When Sarah mailed us a copy of The Book, the timing of its arrival couldn’t have been more prophetic. Rayna had been in her dark place for months. Something about losing her job as the front desk clerk at a hot yoga studio had unraveled her, despite the security of a trust fund that could carry her past the grave. A sex abuse scandal between the owner—some world-renowned yogi—and a dozen female yoga teachers hit the news circuit overnight. The guy fled, the place went under. Rayna started sleeping in every day until noon. She stopped showering. She wouldn’t let me touch her, beside the occasional back rub or terse kiss before work. Then the roaming started.
Rayna walked the city for hours alone while I was at work, a development I’d been ignorant of until her mother mailed her the knife: a Spyderco Matriarch 2, a close-combat weapon that looked fresh from a tacky truck stop display in some flyover state, replete with samurai swords and grenade paperweights and corned nuts.
I asked Rayna what the knife was for. When she didn’t reply, I called her mother on the way to work. There was something strange in her voice, a restraint that was unlike her; a woman usually eager to reveal all the gory details of others’ lives with a grim pleasure.
“It’s a bit of a...you know, dear...a woman’s issue,” she had said. “She just…she needs some time.”
“What are we talking about here?” I pressed. “Early menopause?”
“I knew that place was no good. I tried to warn her,” her mother hissed. I pictured her ducking out of earshot of Rayna’s father, perhaps into her ludicrously sized closet furnished with a luxuriating bench, presumably in case one grew tired while walking from one end to the other. “Believe me, Oscar, I did. Imagine a girl with her degree working behind the desk at a yoga studio, for Christ’s sake. We tried to tell her: better to not work at all than have something like that on her resume.” I gripped the wheel, irritated and relieved to hear her mother veer back into her old self. “But it’s like she’s got this endless need to rebel. Excuse us for giving her absolutely everything in the world.”
Then The Book arrived. The next morning, I woke up to find Rayna reading on the balcony like she used to before work, fully dressed, hair wet from the shower. I came up behind her and kissed the top of her head, drinking in the smell of shampoo and fresh coffee steaming from her mug. She tilted her head back and smiled. Rainey was back, with even more intensity in her quick, dark eyes, her sly smile that had made me dizzy with longing on the first night I met her at our college bar in Berkeley.
“Listen to this,” she said, and began to read aloud from chapter four, The Ceremony By Which Teenagers Become Actualized Adults. As we sipped our coffee and rolled our fingers together, dashing off buttery flakes of croissant between bites, she read me her favorite parts of the chapter, highlighter in hand, knee bouncing beneath the table.
When children turned six years old, they went to the cactus man’s compound to pick a small cutting from an Old Man Plant, waxy knobs covered in a downy white fur that they could wrap their hands around. At sixteen, they were to return and cut a clipping from the hundreds of brutal species surrounding the compound. They were to pull away a clipping without gloves or shears, as this was how children became adults: by giving back the blood and pain it took to bring them into the world. By honoring the original mother beneath their feet with beads of crimson gratitude.
The teens were to take the clipping home and replant it, making sure it took root and propagated. At twenty, they were to return to the cactus man for their first penance anklet: a leather band with cactus spines sewed to the inside that punctured their delicate skin with every step.
“It’s a training,” Rayna said, setting The Book on the table and picking up her mug. “To embrace pain. To choose it before it chooses you. To wield it as power instead of being powerless.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Can you imagine how much better off us girls would be if we learned that lesson earlier?”
Two months later, we arrived in Arizona. We had donated everything we couldn’t sell or fit in the vintage pink and white trailer I found on Craigslist. The previous owners had named it “The Pearl De Vere,” an ode to an infamous brothel-owning madam of the American West. Aka, the shaggin’ wagon, the crustaceous old man had winked coquettishly, one gibbous eye still bulging from his neckless head, nose hairs quivering. I frowned. Rainey adored it.
It was Sarah who first greeted us—sweaty and sore-eyed after the long drive from San Francisco—with an ice-cold pitcher of prickly pear margaritas laced with the faintest trace of Candelabra cactus milk to take the edge off. She’d been living with the cactus man in his compound for almost a year, tending to his plants in exchange for room and board. I asked her about the layers of penance bracelets stacked to her forearms, the lacework of dried blood stretching between them. She smiled and touched her fingers to one of them.
“Working with him is an intense job. Most of the girls don’t last long,” she said, voice dark with pride. “There’s a lot of things we do out here you won’t find in The Book.”
She reached her hand across the table and took Rayna’s. “But considering how we grew up, we’ve got a lot to balance out.”
Rayna and I had been Advocates for three months and some change when Sarah disappeared. By then, the distance between the two of us had grown wider than the miles of highway we’d devoured to get here. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find the bed cold, the door to the trailer wide open. Some nights I’d find Rayna picking her way back through the sagebrush in her nightgown, barefoot and feet bloodied.
She spent her days helping Sarah tend to the plants at the cactus man’s compound. The girls helped with other things too—cooking, cleaning, shipping out copies of The Book. They wore multiple penance anklets and bracelets so their forearms and calves were perpetually inflamed, stoking the admiration and jealousy of other Advocates in town.
Meanwhile, I delivered the mail. I walked the daily route under the punishing Sonoran sun, dreaming endlessly of numbers. I was a bear market investor back in the city, the kind who surfed through down markets like a pro and barely kept my head above water when the bull market reared its head. The rush I felt from remembering the eerie sense of calm that fell over me just before my stocks hit target price sent me jogging in the unbearable heat, zig-zagging between storefronts and frisbeeing letters and packages at dust-caked doors. I found pride in the steady optimism I could maintain during a storm; in my expertise for spinning gold out of gloom. I can now admit it was this exact point of pride that compounded the sense of failure I had felt in my inability to deliver Rayna from her dark place back in the city.
The cactus man’s teachings weren’t just a salve for the ills of the world; a clap back against human rights violations and the school-to-prison pipeline. His doctrines were the remedy that revived Rayna. While I missed our old life from time to time, I knew there was purity in the pain you couldn’t get out from under your skin, in the endless tiny burrs that burrowed in the webbing between your fingers and beneath your nails.
In our community, if someone wanted a breakup or divorce, they went to the cactus man’s compound and picked a clipping from a Red-Headed Irishman to give to their once-loved. It’s a cactus with blossoms beautiful enough and bristles sharp enough to underscore the pain of loving something you couldn’t touch.
The day after I dropped Rayna off at the cactus man’s compound, I opened the door of our trailer to find not a lethal beauty sitting on the rusted step but a potted pencil cactus, its skin smooth and spineless, rail-thin body gawky, one skinny appendage broken and oozing thick white sap.
After Rayna left me the pencil cactus, I drove my truck up and down the highway looking for Sarah. She didn’t have a car, and I figured she hadn’t gotten far hitchhiking. The closest town—if you could call it that—was 40 minutes northeast. I stopped to fill up the truck then stepped inside the dim diner to grab a cup of coffee. Faded maroon shades were drawn tight over all the windows in a weak attempt to rebuff the sweltering high-noon heat. Squinting in the gloom, I spotted a crown of bleach-blonde hair and the top of a red backpack huddled together in the farthest booth.
I slid down into the cracked vinyl seat opposite of Sarah. She sat up, eyes wide, and twisted around to see if anyone else was with me.
“It’s just me,” I said. She wore a thick flannel over a dirty tank top pitted with dark sweat. I cleared my throat.
“Rainey misses you –”
Sarah lunged forward and grabbed my wrists, fingers digging in just above my penance bands.
“It’s not real,” she hissed.
I tried to pull away. Ropy tendons in her wrists pulsed beneath rings of white scar tissue, the thin skin beneath her eyes a sickly green in the fluorescent light.
“What isn’t?”
“Plant-Based Pain and the Privilege of Suffering. It’s a fucking lie.” She leaned closer. I winced at the ripeness of her sweat, her stale breath. “The only power that comes from our pain is his own,” she growled. “How long have we been bleeding out here in the desert? Have rainforests stopped getting slashed and burned for livestock? Have oil spills stopped contaminating our drinking water?” She was so close I could see my reflection in her bloodshot eyes, two warped twin shadows in her dilated pupils. “From Canada to Nigeria, have girls stopped going missing? Have we stopped getting kidnapped, raped, murdered?”
She let go of my wrists and sat back. “Adding blood to chaos doesn’t change shit. We should have learned that from Jesus.”
She pushed herself to her feet. Her stomach rose from beneath the table, belly button protruding fiercely. Her dirty tank top strained over the swell of it. I stared.
“The plants are laughing at us, and he knows it.” She shimmied her flannel off her shoulders and twisted around.
Her back was raked with scars. Long white welts ringed in halos of pink skin twitched between her shoulder blades. Some of the gashes were still fresh, clotted with tendrils of scabs that curled at the edges.
My stomach twisted. I felt sick with dismay and something else, dread shot through with a forked lightning bolt of admiration and envy. My fingers twitched as if to caress the lacerations, to press a cracked scab and watch it pucker under pressure.
“I’m going home.” She pulled her flannel around her shoulders and sank back down into the booth. “I’m hitching a ride to the bus station and not stopping ‘til I reach San Francisco. And the second I get there, I’m telling The Chronicle everything.” She opened her backpack and pulled out a worn notebook. “My mom works for the paper. She’s running the story as soon as I’m home. This will all burn.” She laughed and shook her head, slid both hands over her stomach. “And I’m taking care of this little monster the second I step off the bus.”
She hooked a finger beneath the blind and pulled it up a few inches, squinting out the window. She waved at someone.
“My ride’s ready.” She shuffled out of the booth and stood.
“It’s Rayna’s decision. What she does,” she said quietly. I stared, dazed. Her eyes hovered over my hand on the table, as though she was considering reaching for it. Then she yanked her backpack off the seat, threw it over her shoulder, and turned away.
I hightailed it to the cactus man’s compound. I pressed the Kokapelli-shaped doorbell and pounded on the steel door until the skin of my knuckles split. Shadows moved behind the opaque curtains shrouding the vast south-facing windows. Finally, the door opened.
The cactus man stepped outside. He held a steaming cup of tea in each hand, long gray hair parted into two braids that fell behind his back.
“I want to talk to Rainey,” I demanded. He smiled, eyebrows titled with concern.
“She’s resting now,” he whispered. “Why don’t we take a walk?” He pressed a clay mug into my hand. “From my special reserve.”
I looked down at the tea, my shadow rippling across the dark surface. “Sip it slow,” he warned. “The mescaline is strong in this batch.”
I hesitated, looking over his shoulder at the windows. Nothing moved.
We walked slow, our pace languid to accommodate sips of tea. “Did you know the saguaro doesn’t blossom until it’s nearly thirty years old?” He glanced over at me. “You’re still a young man yet. Twenty-five, is it?”
I brought the tea to my lips. It was bitter and acidic. I thought of swallowing a rattlesnake. I exhaled hard through pursed lips and shook my head. The cactus man smiled.
“I understand you’re having trouble providing for Rayna.” He gently touched my forearm, just above the penance bracelet. “It is rare to find a man of your age who’s ready to offer the emotional nurturing that women need. My younger self included,” he chuckled. My cheeks burned. I tipped back my head and swallowed what was left in the mug. I wretched, stomach jerking, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Sometimes I think it’s impossible to make her happy,” I heard myself say. My tongue tingled. “Coming here was supposed to help. Back in San Francisco...before she read your book, I mean, Rayna was in this bad funk.” I surprised myself. I had come to find out what happened to Sarah, to protect Rayna. But the cactus man’s tender expression, his slow gait and stooped shoulders were a trampoline, a place I could fall into and be raised up again.
“It started after she lost her job, which didn’t make senssse,” I slurred. “She doesn’t need a paycheck. She’s got a trust the size of...” I stretched my arms as wide as I could and puffed out my cheeks. “But the way she was...you’d think her parents, like, died. She wouldn’t let me touch her. For monthsss.”
The cactus man squinted into the sun. I stared at his profile, at his hawkish nose and calm, unflinching mouth. I blinked. How hadn’t I seen it before? He looked just like my father, or what I remembered of my father from the summer before he left my mother, just before my freshman year of college.
“Your book was the only thing that made her happy,” I said, looking at my feet. Had my toes always looked like that? Curled like the corkscrewed tendrils of a frizzle sizzle succulent?
“I heard about her old job.” The cactus man looked at me strangely, sympathy mixed with a question.
I pointed my right foot to straighten out the tendrils. “Yeah, the owner was a creep. But...I don’t know,” I glanced over my shoulder as if to see if Rayna was standing behind us, dark eyes pressed to my back. “The girls she worked with...they were the type to go sit on some rando’s lap at the bar after two martinis. But I mean, they were single, so more power to them, I guess,” I shrugged. “I’m just glad he never touched Rainey.”
The cactus man turned to me, the whites of his eyes pink and lending the blue of his irises an alarming vibrancy.
“Did she say that?”
I blinked and leaned forward. I didn’t see his mouth move. His chapped lips twisted and multiplied like a Spiral Aloe above his chin. I laughed.
A few feet away was the hand-painted sign for the Trail of Tears, a path the cactus man had designed for only the fiercest Advocates: a harrowing patchwork of Golden Balls and Latispinus and Red Thorns and Teddy Bear Chollas. The cactus man slipped out of his worn huaraches. He lifted his left foot and hovered it over a vicious throng of thimble cacti. Slowly, he set his foot down.
He shuddered, sweat curling the gray hair at the nape of his neck. I bent and peeled off my hemp Sanuks. I stood next to him, zeroing in on a Pima Pineapple cactus, clusters of inch-long spines constellating over the squat green dome in a razor-sharp star spread. I lowered my foot.
My body was made of bees. Every cell had been replaced with a buzzing, ear-splitting intensity. Fire ants circumscribed glittering currents around the cactus with zealous fervor. I was the sun, purveying my tinsel kingdom below and all its tiny subjects with a searing, seam-splitting pride.
“It will be hard for a woman like Rayna to be patient,” the cactus man breathed. Sweat dripped from his temple, saturating his linen kurta. “You can’t expect anything different from a woman with beauty like that, like a cool rain after five months of high desert heat.”
I laughed. Rain. Rainey. I had never put it together.
“She needs to stay with me for a while.” He lifted his other foot and lowered it onto a barbed Powder Puff. He wheezed, breath rattling. “She needs to distract herself from the ego-driven pain that consumes her. It’s blocking the plant pheromones from carrying out our purpose here. Our sacrifices are going to waste.”
I gritted my teeth and hovered my foot over a cluster of hedgehog cacti, each spine the length of my forefinger. I stepped down. The flesh of my heel parted happily.
“But there is hope for her,” the cactus man exhaled. “Even more than I saw in Sarah.” He nestled his foot onto a barbed tangle of Teddy Bear Cholla, face sagging in relief.
“Sarah was weak,” I asserted. My voice sounded young, like my fifteen-year-old self performing for my father at breakfast, parroting his thoughts about football and the attractive news anchor who shouldn’t have cut her hair so short.
“Weakness isn’t the problem,” the cactus man sighed. “I fear it is Rayna’s strength that holds her back.”
The path ended. We turned around. The cactus man bent to collect his shoes, and as he did I saw a pale face peering out from behind the window curtain. Rayna’s mouth was still, eyes blank. I blinked twice, three times. The curtain fell back into place, bloody fingerprints lingering on the hem.
The door of the cactus man’s compound was locked, lights off. I hollered for Rayna until I was lightheaded, voice feeble against the fortress of concrete and adobe. I had only successfully rammed a door once, after staggering home late from pledge night and discovering my freshman roommate had locked me out of the dorm. I hadn’t thought it would work, and after my shoulder forced open the door I was stunned by the sensation of free-falling through the darkness when there should have been a solid barrier holding me back, keeping me on my feet. It only took one ram of the cactus man’s steel door to nearly splinter my shoulder. I swayed, knees buckling, and sank sideways into a rancorous bed of Golden Orbs. Whiskey and bile splashed in the dirt. I rolled on my back, gasping, tuxedo jacket twisted beneath me.
I had gone to the cactus man’s funeral alone. I hadn’t been to a funeral since I was thirteen, a lurid affair for an aunt whom I never much cared for; the organ player in the wings of the dingy church woefully unskilled, the priest fumbling for kind and generic suppositions of my aunt’s character, the stale egg salad sandwiches afterward cementing the entire experience as a two-dimensional pantomime, something akin to a scene on television for which I felt nothing. All the Advocates had ascended the mesa barefoot, the hems of our black tuxedos and mourning gowns scarleted with clay made from tears folded into dust. I stayed with the cactus man’s body after all the other Advocates had left, nursing my flask and gazing into the open casket at his unusually pale face, perpetual sunburn finally drained from his cheeks. Though rigor mortis had framed an uncharacteristically troubled snapshot of our leader, my father was clearly there, in the furrowed brow and turned-down corners of the cactus man’s mouth. I spread my arms and rested my head on his chest, careful to avoid the massive squash blossom necklace like a hot poker in the sun, his yellow burial dashiki warm against my cheek. I closed my eyes. Beneath the coffin, something snapped.
The coffin slid and pitched forward. The cactus man’s body lay in the dirt, face down, shirt wedged up around his ribs, lower back exposed. There, in the cactus man’s back, were three knife wounds, the skin around them purple and shriveled as pursed lips.
Lying in the dirt outside the cactus man’s compound, stars glaring, I knew Rayna was gone. Maybe she’d followed Sarah back to the city. Maybe like Sarah, she was planning to leak everything about our community, about our ceremonies and sacrifices.
Had the cactus man’s medicine meant nothing to her? Moving here, giving up our life in San Francisco…did she feel any appreciation for how he saved her? Any remorse for what she’d done to him—to us? Was she even capable of appreciation, or remorse?
My stomach lurched. Had she meant to block our blood from healing the world with her stubbornness, her refusal to repair?
How was the world not enough?
After the cactus man’s death, the Advocates were to pay homage by visiting the ancient saguaro behind his compound. He had seen the cactus in a dream decades ago, a floral citadel that had called him to the desert to realize his teachings. I had seen the thirty-foot saguaro from the road, had read the story about the blood the cactus man shed when he carved his own face into the plant’s flesh with his fingernails.
The saguaro loomed at the end of a stone path, underlit in a warm light. We were supposed to stay on the path and show our devotion from afar. I leaned in, nose to nose with the cactus man’s whittled face, roughly hewn eyes oversized and haunting. The surrounding needles were stained a deep brown, slaked with decades-old remnants of the cactus man’s blood.
I closed my eyes and pressed my right hand to the spines, willing electric waves of heat to singe my shoulders and stratify behind my navel. I felt nothing—no pain, no suffering. I brought both hands to the cactus and pushed harder. The needles bowed rubbery beneath my palm. I opened my eyes. Foamy green skin puckered beneath my fingertips. Then the saguaro began to tip backward.
I jumped back as the cactus wheeled away in the darkness. It fell noiselessly into the dirt, massive arms outstretched. Three iron rods extended from the base, and three holes punctured the ground where the rods had been threaded deep into the earth to keep the mannequin upright. From where I stood, half-crouched in horror, I could see straight into the base of the cactus, into the black void of its interior.
It weighed next to nothing, this towering botanic effigy that drew in the eye for miles, a pointed interruption to the endless sunbaked vistas and windswept valleys. I pulled it to my chest and shuffled it back into place, sliding the iron rods back into the dirt. I pinched a rubber needle between my fingers, ran my hand along the painted foam exterior. The cactus man’s graven stare implored my attention, my reciprocity. I returned his gaze.
Each gash of foam had been delicately coated with reddish-brown paint that now flaked and curled at the edges, revealing a layer of spongy yellow foam beneath like a blanket of fat over a rib cage, a frail husk holding a hollow cavity, protecting everything inside that is dark and fragile and vital.