Pilgrimage
by Rachel Torrance
Too many saguaros out here. My mother is saying something as we walk through the park. She is asking me what I want to do. With my life. The whole thing, all at once. I am gazing past her to the expanse of pale earth marked with green shrubs. She stops. We both wait for some sort of acknowledgment. I kneel on the path to examine a striped yellow and green Hornworm wobbling across the rocks. Every few steps he twists to the side, losing his upright angle. His rapid and miniature feet look pluckable, like tiny petals. I close my eyes and place my cheek against the hot and dusty path. This is the kind of acknowledgement I have been seeking.
You must act like a pirate if you want to survive in the desert. For example, Do not be hesitant, only brave and reckless. For example, Trust only secured and proven allies. You will think, these plants are only trying to hurt me. But, you must press on, to find the treasure these spines protect. These weapons are not ornaments for attracting mates, nor accidents of evolution. They are there to preserve that which everyone wants, the succulent itself.
My number one goal is to experience a succulent from the inside. I imagine it is cool, perhaps a bit slimy with the water it retains, perhaps, in time, healing its hollows to become smooth and sealed. I would like to stay, fetally curled, inside a cactus. If I were hungry, I could turn my head up slowly, and take very shy and tentative bites with my teeth. I would eat very little, as I am expending almost no energy for movement. I just need to maintain.
I have conceived two possible methods for achieving this goal. Method number one: I find a giant cactus. The diameter of the hollow must be at least two-and-a-half feet, because that is the diameter of my curled body. The cactus, therefore, must have at least a five foot diameter so that my hollow will not deplete too much of its sustenance ability. Method number two: I must become very small and then I can live inside any number of cacti, even in my neighborhood.
Several people have told me that they do not believe my number one goal is reasonable. Specifically, they believe that method #2 is impossible. To this, I say, when faced with grave danger, people have lifted cars off of their grandmothers. There are several grandmothers alive today because of a feat such as this!
When I stand up, my mother patiently waits for me to begin. She is very good at this. Imagine you do not want to answer something. She will make you, just by waiting patiently. It is difficult to say no to patience because it is so kind. Many people have tried. I say, I would like to continue waitressing, perhaps climbing up the waitress hierarchy.
What is at the top of the waitress hierarchy? she asks.
A very precise waitress, who can carry many food receptacles all-at-once in her arms, and place them on tabletops silently. In a word, grace.
I look down and notice two more Hornworms, with an identical drunken-tipping walk. They are thumbsized and silky. The large barbed horns on the end of their bodies waggle behind them. I cannot take these caterpillars seriously. They are falling constantly. They are no walking experts. One stops at a tiny plant with petal-like oval leaves. She pulls off the leaf and chews tiny bites in rapid succession down one half of the leaf, and does the same for the other side. She plucks off five more leaves and chews each one in the same manner, as if she cannot afford to slowly enjoy her meal. It must be difficult trying to get as fat as possible in a short amount of time. How does she know when to stop? How fat is fat? She may ask. Are my ballooning sides enough? How much food do I need to sustain me for a metamorphosis of which I cannot yet conceive?
My mother is insistent that I must make another choice besides a very good waitress. Choose something meaningful, she demands. Choose something you love. This is always what people are telling me. They say, Imagine someone gives you one million dollars. What would you choose to do with your time? There are many things I would choose. These activities would include: Looking through old atlases to see how people used to describe our world; Exploring the shaded alleyways between buildings; Pulling up the wall-to-wall carpeting in my room to see if there are any trapped secrets beneath; inventing plans of escape for a post-apocalypse world. Then they say, Now, figure out how to make money doing that.
I watch the hornworms, yellow-tinged-green and tipsily walking towards the west. There are maybe two hundred that I can see, crossing the park, between cacti and shrubs. They stop to eat, at times, and leave star-shaped dung in the dust. It seems to be some sort of caterpillar pilgrimage. They are seeking. They will devour. We can only tiptoe down the path, always watching our feet. We cannot look up because this could mean a sudden hornworm death. Some have died on the way, their shrunken dried skins remnants on the path. I pick up one of these carcasses and cradle it in my fingers. It is stiff and light.
At the edge of the park, several caterpillars are crawling across the asphalt road. I try to pick one up, to bring it to the other side, but it convulses violently, spewing a green chunky liquid on my fingers, and I drop it suddenly. I expect the liquid to burn my cuticles, but it doesn't.
My job as a waitress is unlike my struggle to survive in the desert. For example: we have ready access to an unlimited amount of ice-cold water. For example: in the desert, the plants wear their barbs on the outside. In the restaurant, a customer will say something like, "I thought the raspberry sauce would have seeds in it." And as a waitress, my job is to decipher this. Does this mean she would like me to bring her a side of the raspberry seeds we strained out of the sauce? Or does she just want me to regret that we even tried to bring her something delicious?
I will sleep in my cactus for several years. My entrance will close up and I will not be afraid in the darkness. We have protection. We have a complex system for gathering and retaining large amounts of water in our body. We have the ability to gather nutrients from the sun. When I have dreamed about everyone I knew in life, and when, through dreams, I have experienced the horror of all possible ways to be unprepared, when I have screamed and tried to protect myself, and fallen in love, when I have experienced each emotion we can name on the spectrum, and many we cannot, then my underused heart will pump faster until with both fists I can claw through the scarred and reconstructed skin of a cactus. I will be pushing spines out toward the world. I will emerge, pale and panting.
Rachel Torrance currently writes fiction at the University of Arizona MFA program. She lives in the desert with her brother and sister-in-law.