Andre has never seen the Pasquali’s parking lot so empty. The void of blacktop and white lines seems to stretch forever. The neon store sign featuring a dancing cactus and sunflower flickers above him as he approaches. Tyler leans against the hood of his car, which is still running and casting its headlights through the slots of the front gate into the store’s darkness. His attention is trained on that obscured distance, and when Andre says hi he punches his hood in surprise.
“I stopped back because I left my house keys and…”
Tyler’s eyes refuse to focus, his glassy pupils floating in a web of blood vessels.
“What’s wrong?”
“It was awful. But they were so beautiful,” he says. When Andre steps toward the gate his voice shatters into a whimper. “Don’t make me go back in there.”
Andre unlocks the gate and throws the chain to the ground, the clatter welcoming him inside. He steps carefully to the furthest edges of the headlights’ reach, the shadows of all the broken perennial pots he’d spent hours picking up contorting into the night. The store is silent except for the collection of fountains dripping and refiltering like a metronome in the distance, ticking away at every footstep. Every heartbeat. His phone vibrates in his pocket, but he ignores it. He turns the corner into the darkness.
Then his shoe meets something soft. It gives way under his footstep and instinctively he pulls away. Andre frantically waves his hands above his head to trigger the gazebo lights, and they come on like a flood. Then he sees.
The squirrel army is decimated. Furry bodies coat the aisles, locked in jagged and misshapen positions as if they’d died midrun. Their eyes stare blankly into the night. Andre gags. He looks down at the tip of his shoe to the squirrel he’s stepped on, and from its agape mouth he sees the beginnings of a stem sprouting. Tendrils of vines sprawl out its ears and between its claws, blanketing its blistered, blooming body.
Andre kneels and snaps the stem, expecting water or sap.
But it bleeds.
Andre’s phone vibrates again. He grabs a cardboard box from outside the gazebo and hop-steps between the littered bodies toward the oak tree. The growths become larger as he approaches, stems matured to stalks and the earliest signs of the crescent fruits showing. Clouds of blow flies drone near the carcasses as moths pollinate the flowers.
What remains of The General rests at the base of the tree. Only its thick, bushy tail is recognizable, trailing to a thicket of thorns and violet flowers and the stem that has broken open the squirrel’s jaw and now rises eye-level to Andre. The fruits that hang from its branches are plentiful. More than enough to feed a small army.
Andre carefully places The General into the box and carries it back to the parking lot, the stem rocking back and forth and the overflowing thorns catching on every burlap table covering he passes. Tyler screams, threatens to fire him. That’s my property, he says, though it isn’t. We need to wait for this to be inspected by professionals. What if this parasite spreads? he pleads. You’re going to doom us all! But Andre keeps walking to his car, and Tyler doesn’t stop him.
He checks his phone after he leaves the parking lot. There are three separate voicemails from Ivan.
Andre, maybe you should come by and see Papaw.
Please, pick up, little bro.
Andre. Call me. I’m so sorry.