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Creative Nonfiction

Fragile

Colette Love Hilliard
issue five

There’s too much pressure to keep this Christmas cactus going. It belonged to my grandma, whose death certificate read “failure to thrive.” And here I am assigning each of its blooms to her memory. The last time we visited, she showed me the building she used to think about jumping from. And we compared the sounds our ringing ears make. Mine is like microphone feedback. She heard cicadas chirping. I didn’t tell her I thought it might be the death of me, too. The cactus blooms are a peach color like the adobe homes where she lived in Pueblo. I want to repot the thing in a southwestern terracotta, but it’s too fragile, and I don’t want it to die, so I keep it rootbound and consider that she might prefer the feeling of being held tightly since her mother left her on a tall bed when she was four and disappeared from her life forever. It blooms, and another memory unfurls. This time, I see her in the desert looking toward the mountains instead of the camera, and I wonder how many times she stood at the edge of the black canyon looking down the barrel of the Gunnison. The plant needs long periods of darkness to bloom, so once a year, I tuck it into the corner of the laundry room and forget about it until the dreamsicle petals return and remind me of her smell, and I remember the blown-glass bottles of pink and gold that she used to dab on my wrists so I wouldn’t miss her when she’s gone.