Becca Borawski Jenkins

On Account of His Wife’s Award-Winning Blackberry Pie

 

 

Each night of his childhood he had dreamed the blackberry bushes crept in through his window and consumed him, prick by prick, until there was no distinguishing his drops of blood from their traces of juice, his flesh from theirs. Given this, he found his wife's predilection for the berry distressing.

 

"Let them grow," she said. "I want to harvest the fruit."

 

Thus, year after year, he refrained from fetching his chainsaw, he kept his Pulaski in the shed, and he did not purchase a single one of the weed machines from the Sunday flier that purported to be spinning contraptions of death. Instead, with each season, the bushes inched closer to the house and the memories of his nightmares crept nearer to the edges of his mind. A low level of anxiety permeated his time, as the growing population of freezer bags and jars of blackberries permeated the house.

 

Until one evening when as he dozed off into that space where you're not sure you heard what you heard and you don't know why your leg twitched, he saw a vine in the window of the bedroom he shared with his wife. Not in his dreams, not in his memories—but there in the window, in real life.

 

That night and every night thereafter, he dreamed the vines crawled in through the cracks around the lumpy glass panes, they spun up through the heating ducts and through the vents into his room, they dangled from the space in the ceiling where the attic hatch didn't quite shut.

 

Because of all of this, he did not find the blackberries so comforting as his wife. He certainly did not find the fruit to be pleasing, and he grew into the habit of aiming the corner of his eye at the window when he entered the bedroom. She herself never saw the offending vine as it had been years since she'd slept in that room.

 

Despite that, much to his chagrin—and to her he-wasn't-sure-what—she found her way into the bedroom each day to open the window, even after he'd requested she stop. She thought he'd enjoy the evening breeze after a long day of summer heat, she said, but he couldn't quite believe her once he saw the purple lines that ran beneath her fingernails.

 

She spent her days making pies from the dreaded and copious fruit. Pies that won awards every year at the autumn jamboree and the festival of the spring melt. She made jams and jellies, too. And Bismarcks with too-sweet centers he knew would end up that way as he watched her add the sugar and the more-sugar and dunk them in powdered sugar because she mistakenly thought it was the tartness that turned him away, while everyone else bent over backward to buy her pies, to stock her jam in their stores, to convince her to show up to the coffee klatsch with donuts.

 

He never told her about the nightmares, about the moon-filled nights when he gripped his sheets and imagined every itch to be the brush of a barb against his skin as the vines slithered along the edge of the bed, gathering into a mass, ready to envelop him. To pierce his skin at the same moment it tied into a knot around his throat as the stars went dark and the endless vines looped around again and again until his vision faded.

 

He hadn't told her about that, and it was not something she could see from the couch, or the guest room, or the room that had once been their son's.

 

With each year and more prizes accrued, with each ribbon, each newspaper photo, each county fair, she grew more offended. How could he not have one piece of pie? He would like it if he tried it. How could he not try it? How did he know he didn't like it? Just one bite!

 

"This is what Eve said to Adam," he replied as he eyed the purple hue of her fingertips.

 

She gathered the jams and jellies in her apron, cast a glare, and stomped off to the neighbor's.

 

She spoke loudly to the postman as she handed him a dozen muffins. "Can you believe my husband won't eat these?"

 

She told the women at the coffee klatsch he might have a terminal disease.

 

At some point, she ran out of powdered sugar and instead of buying more, she took it as a sign to give up on the Bismarcks. But she hadn't given up. Instead, she took a new and stranger strategy, utilizing a set of skills he did not know she possessed.

 

At breakfast, he enjoyed his pancakes until she drizzled them with blackberry-maple syrup.

 

At lunch, he checked between the sliced ham and the rye bread for blackberry-mustard.

 

At tea, he grabbed her hand before the blackberry-butter could touch his toast. She pulled away and for a moment they stared at the table. He hadn't known she had so much knowledge of condiments.

 

But it didn't stop there, this extraterrestrial talent for the utilization of the omni-terrestrial fruit that haunted his dreams.

 

At dusk, he shook his head at her blackberry-bourbon aperitif.

 

After the meal, she pressed him with a sugar-free gluten-free dairy-free blackberry cobbler that she told him was based upon his own mother's recipe, though he could never believe such a lie.

 

And now, on what had once been time reserved for cervezas and tapas, he spent his late summer Saturday late afternoon dodging blackberry salsa and eating his tiny tacos so very dry.

 

"I've made you something new," she said and handed him a plate as he sulked at the picnic table. He was not so slow as to miss her side-eye as she walked away.

 

A salad. An arugula salad with toasted pine nuts and a mountain of feta.

 

He poked at the arugula. The feta precipice tumbled sideways and a lone plain blackberry stared at him.

 

"Where did you get the idea for this?" he asked.

 

"I don't know," she said. "The nighttime? The sky?" She stood with her faced turned up toward the sun and for a moment her wrinkles dissipated and with them every half-angry conversation they'd been having for years. For a moment, her skin was smooth. For a moment, he remembered her hair before there was one strand of gray. And with all the sunlight that streamed into his eyes he noticed the flowers pattern on her dress for the first time. Little white blossoms everywhere.

 

"I looked out my window and it was written in the stars," she said.

 

He blinked and the blossoms disappeared. "Out the window?"

 

She glanced at him and the crow's feet reformed at the corners of her eyes. "What's your problem?"

 

He was struck by two simultaneous albeit conflicting thoughts: Oh, where to begin, and, as if she didn't have a list of her own.

 

"Does it not bother you they would take over the house if we let them?" he asked.

 

"Them?" she said like a rotten teenager.

 

"You know," he replied and jerked his head toward the blackberry bushes he could tell without looking were at least a foot higher than they had been at noon.

 

"They're not aliens," she replied in a tone that signaled they were done. She gathered his uneaten food and headed for the patio door.

 

"You should listen to me sometimes," he said.

 

"Oh, husband," she said, pausing at the door. "A day will come. And what will you say then?"

 

From the edge of the decking, a vine appeared. It crawled up the wall, using its thorns like crampons. It circled behind her as she continued to glower.

 

"Well?" she asked. "What will you say?"

 

The blackberry vine slid across the deck and coiled in the air around her ankle, poised to tighten.

 

"Nothing," he replied.

 

 

 

Becca Borawski Jenkins holds an MFA in Cinema-Television Production from USC and has short stories appearing or forthcoming in The Forge, concīs, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Panorama, Jersey Devil Press, and Corium. She and her husband live in a RV they built by hand. They split their time between an off-grid homestead in the Idaho Panhandle and wherever their whims and the winds take them.