Sprout

tent that was practically as big as our trailer. Truth be told, it looked more like a soap bubble than a nest, a giant pearl, a crystal ball, but “nidus” had been Word of the Day on Nov. 17, 2004, and, like I told Ty, I’m a geek. And Nov. 17 had been my mom’s birthday.
    He limped into the little enclosure warily. The plastic walls were as thin as, well, plastic, but the nidus still had a self-contained, almost otherworldly air about it. Moisture had collected between the layers of dropcloth, frozen now into glittering, paper-thin strips of ice that refracted the light into little rainbow raindrops. A healthy coating of mold and mildew added a greenish tint, and four years of fallen leaves mulching on the roof contributed their own dark shadows. The cumulative effect was of stepping into a cave on the bottom of the ocean, one that just happened to be furnished with the flotsam and jetsam of a suburban home. The outlines of everything in the room were softened by darkness and decay, but once your eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light, you realized it wasn’t darkness that had altered the furniture, or even exposure to the elements, but a more purposeful consciousness. I’m talking about me, of course, but as I walked into that room with Ty—the first time I’d ever entered it with another human being—I had a hard time believing I was responsible for the hallucinatory vision that swam before my eyes.
    For his part, Ty seemed to have a hard time believing it wasn’t a hallucination, period. Tapping the seat with his toe, as if to make sure it would take his weight, he sat down on the sofa, wincing slightly as his bruised butt made contact. He brushed at a twig that poked from between two cushions, then realized it was actually the stem of a young tree growing up through the sofa’s innards. Realized a second later that another one grew from the opposite end. Realized that in fact there were trees and vines growing through or coiling around most of the other pieces of furniture in the room. Realized, finally, that they hadn’t just grown there. That they’d been planted. That I’d planted them, in the same way my dad had planted all those vines around our house. I could see him fighting this chain of logic—could tell the exact moment he reached the part about my dad and the vines—but all he did was look at me. His tongue worried the scab on his lip and the fading bruises under his eyes made him look tired, so tired, but he didn’t say anything.
    I nodded.
    He turned to face forward. The TV had been set in front of the sofa on a pair of milkcrates. (“Broadway Dairy, Bay Shore, NY,” one of them read; the other was from Idaho, where, as far as I know, no one in my family has ever gone.) The thin brown husk of bindweed spiraled around the TV’s powercord and up the purely symbolic rabbit ears I’d made from a couple of coathangers. The rabbit ears were symbolic because, one, we’d had satellite, and two, the TV had neither screen nor tube. Instead a single fat book sat inside the empty shell, its moisture-soaked pages swollen like a spoiled can of food.
    “So, uh.” Ty paused to clear his throat. “Get good reception out here?”
    “Little fuzzy,” I admitted. “Lot of times no picture at all.”
    Ty nodded. He turned to the left, looked at the computer on the desk. The chair was half pulled away, as though the user’d dashed to the bathroom for a pee break in the middle of an all-night IM. Flower petals and beetle shells had been glued to the keys on the keyboard, which was connected to the terminal by a length of vine, and a suspiciously symmetrical bird’s nest sat in the shell of the empty monitor. On closer inspection, you saw that the nest was made of sparkly plastic swizzle sticks, No. 2 pencils, and something that looked like the inner filament of old-fashioned cassette tapes.
    “Spend a lot of time surfing the web, do you?”
    I shrugged. “Not so much, really. You ask me, the internet’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
    Ty nodded again, continued looking around the nidus. On the ground, moldy books had been buried spine up in a circle around the perimeter of the room, as if to form a ring of protection. On the ceiling, garland made from intricately knotted lengths of strips of old clothes hung from the ropes that held up the sheets of plastic. A half dozen framed pictures had been mounted to shorter and taller stakes around the room, and another dozen or so hung