The Magnolia and the Beetle

Abstract

The Magnolia and the Beetle Alexandra Tennant (bio) 1 I have a magnolia on my arm. It is tattooed in the place where I would anchor myself around the shoulders of a person, or embrace a cardboard box I had hitched up to just under my chin with my knee, or where the ground would meet my arm should I fold it up and lay down my head. I got it out of instinct. Or homesickness. If homesickness lived cutaneously. In such case, I’m waiting to uncover Lake Hartwell on my knee, and summertime weather reports from my sacrum, and the dogwood planted by the elementary school recess yard in memory of my dead friends on my belly. I’ll spend my whole lifetime paying tattoo artists to fill in the topography of my body, like a scratch ticket, flicking away dead skin cells to unveil slick mud and dark gravel, the pavement that broke my teeth, blackberry thorns, and the tannic pull of a crabapple. ________ If this were true, and I am just a conglomeration of stones and rotting bark, the magnolia’s birth on my arm was the most likely to come first. I had a magnolia that was mine, and it belongs to me now, but only in the chromatic layers of memory. I have attached to it the very first feeling of love, not affection or kinship but specific, adhesive love. I was six. I remember vaguely the corners of the house where the magnolia tree grew but only flaking ivory memories. I remember the foundation of the house, where the brick split from the dirt, and I remember the metal tracks of the sliding patio door. I remember the hydrangeas, with their leaves that smelled of smashed flower stems. I remember planting my dead hermit crab underneath a bush, shell and all. But the tree I know clearly. There is the vantage point from the back-seat of the car, pulling down the street where the magnolia stood, and pivoting around it to park in the driveway. It was a dark and green silo [End Page 118] with ivory blossoms larger than my child face, larger than my adult face. There was the running out of the car, unbuckling the glitter gellies from my feet so I could cling to the gray trunk and lay my body along the gray branches among the benign wolf spiders. And there was the way the ground held the August heat way past dusk, the way the wind leaves me in a single gust, and the way the bark sands my hands on the way down. 2 Grief spoils when you’re a child. Grief can ruin an adult, but it is an invasive, climbing ruin. In a child, it ferments and curdles. There is no place for grief to grow when you’re eleven years old and your best friend in the world is killed in plain daylight by a rogue Honda Accord. That pain is born to never age, and it rots. Sometimes I still prod it, the rot. I imagine it like a mold, perhaps something noble like botrytis, lining the other side of my ribcage, so when I breathe my lungs press it, pulling off spores with every exhale. The house where the magnolia lived, so did sometimes Kayla. Kayla was my age, older by seven weeks. Our fathers met as assistant general managers of the seventh Cracker Barrel to ever open in the country. There was a summer when her father was suing her mother for custody, and time moved like water, and at times it felt like she lived with us. This summer was at the house with the magnolia, before the world of adults made itself known. We spent our days in the front yard, the canopy of the tree shading us and books and dolls. It was the theater for our stories, the circuses we told as vinelike trapeze artists, the elaborate fairy tales we imitated and manipulated from our books and movies. Always, she was the princess, I was the prince, and it was her I first kissed in the dense shade of my first true love magnolia...