Hothouse

By Maya Landers

THE TOWN

It isn’t pretty. The clouds hang low and we pass people my mom would call grit-mouths, from her West Virginia childhood, who scratch sores and spit chaw on the sidewalk. 

There is one Wal-Mart, one coffee shop, one good pizza place in the next town over. You can see Lake Superior from almost every street. 

Everyone Sara knows uses food stamps. They grow their own corn and eat roadkill deer. We sit at a rickety table and I ask them what they did that day. They say: I took a bath. I worked on the trailer I’m converting to a house. I took a boat out to an island. I fixed my violin. 

SARA’S HOUSE

Sara’s house is at the end of a long dirt road. Her kitchen is loose-leaf herbs, bags of acorn flour, jars of blueberry syrup and preserved tomatoes. At night, the crickets are so loud my ears feel like they’re ringing. The moon is searchlight-bright. I sleep on the floor under all her winter blankets because even in August, Wisconsin is too cold for me. 

LIAM AND NAN.

Nan wears a leather jacket and blunt baby-bangs and a ring of keys that jingle on her belt. She has a tattoo of an Octavia Butler line that extends from her left wrist all the way up her arm, across her collarbones, and down her right arm to her hand. She takes off her coat so I can read it. Behind me, Liam’s dancing with a girl in a tiny red shirt and snakey mullet braids, and Nan’s eyes keep flicking up. 

Liam gives the kind of hug that lingers just a second longer than really feels comfortable. He does this pull-back, arm-rub, eye-contact thing that feels too intimate for such a small town. Every time I look at them, Nan is looking at Liam and Liam is looking at someone else. 

THE BAR

It’s Friday night and there’s one bar in town. We’re here to see a show the bathroom flyer advertised as “anarcho-country folk punk grind.” There’s no cover because half the people only came here to drink. 

At the front of the room, a guy sits on a chair surrounded by wires and amps, holding some homemade instrument that looks like a long-throated banjo-guitar. His guitar case is propped open, holding CDs and zines.

Lindsey squeezes in to stand in front of me, wool sweater, corduroy pants, and a hand-stitched leather sheath that holds a hunting knife at her belt. We crowd around a dilapidated high-top, me and Sara and her rural radical friends. Everyone is polyamorous. No one buys a drink. 

To the left of us, eight Minneapolis punks sit shoulder-to-shoulder. Every single one of them is wearing a camouflage hat. It’s an unintentional uniform, a sign that even counter-culture has a culture that runs deep. A guy in cowboy boots and a tucked-in checkered shirt comes up to them, asks them to move their tables back, and proceeds to dance so intensely that their beer glasses slosh and jingle. He stomps and hops until the floor shakes and the tables wobble. More people join him, Sara and her rural radicals and the grungy gutter punks and three girls who look about sixteen, dancing in a tight circle, phones recording. Fifteen football parents troop in, blue and green shirts sweat-stained from the stress of the game. They order beers and circle around the pool table in the back, shout-laughing almost as loud as the guy playing guitar. 

BACK HOME

The next day, we drive an hour in silence. The trees are tall and we see only two other cars all morning. I’m heading back to a house in the city with twelve roommates I don’t like and a forty-hour-a-week job serving burgers to frat boys. 

At our first stop, we make sandwiches with the tomatoes and cucumbers we picked at Sara’s friend’s farm. I don’t want to live here and I don’t want to go home.