Detox Brew

There had been just the one knock at my door, and my reflex had been to blame the wind. I went to check nonetheless and saw that her forehead had thumped against the wood when her legs gave out. When I opened the door, she fell headlong into my chest in a swarm of frustrated mumbles, and I carried her to the couch. She’s still there now, her legs plugged in and charging, the gorgeous sweaty porcelain wetware of the rest of her twitching in uneasy dreams.

She stayed awake for a good twenty minutes after I tipped her onto the couch cushions, light-headed with a curdled cocktail of fear and frustration that spilled out of her in a jumble until her tongue went dry. He was an upstanding man, clad with wealth, a warm oil in the headiest of societies. The mantra that he wanted the best for her had been murmured so often that it had written itself in roots in her brain.

I swung the hanger away from the fire and unhitched the small pot. It was still warm from the evening’s stew, but I scrubbed it clean and cold and filled it to an inch from the brim with water. I had stacked a motley armful of logs still shaggy with moss and dirt by the fireplace, intending to brush them down later, but it was time for a couple of them to go onto the fire. Watching the flames muddy felt appropriate: tonight, we would burn through the dross until only healthy wood remained.

She stiffened for a moment; I paused and waited for the tension to pass and for her to slump back into the subconscious process of bleaching her poisonous thoughts. They always gave you diet instructions when you are fitted with Ivy legs: you have to have the right balance of electrolytes in your system, in order to allow the prosthetics’ nervous system to interlace with yours and to gain some echo of feeling in the alloy struts that would now gleam as your new limbs. Her fiancé had loudly sung the praises of a low-salt diet. It was important to keep her blood pressure down, he had said, vibrating with the whisper that it was important to prevent her legs growing too athletic, in case she decided to run.

Some of the ingredients for this tea needed to be measured out with a drug dealer’s precision. They were pungent, sour, salty and dangerous. They were also buried at the back of one of my more unspoken cabinets, in case any of the squirrels, magpies or stray cats that wandered in through my windows decided on a snack and finished wizened and twisted in torture fifteen minutes later. Some of the ingredients needed to be fished out of their protective grease by the tip of a spoon. On my chopping board, I built a magazine of crackling black seeds, roots that glinted with inchoate power and leaves pressed as flat as a razor. Everything would be tipped into the pot, to be tossed in the savage boil and surrender its virtues toward the greater concoction. As I passed her on the way to the fireplace, I tugged free a strand of hair that was working its way down her throat.

When I crouched in front of the pot and scraped the contents of my chopping board into the angry water, suddenly, I felt powerless. I saw myself as a child, kneeling in confused wonder beside my grandmother as she performed the same motions but charged them with incantations that she held close to her heart until it stopped beating. I could still see the terrifying brightness of life in her eyes. With more intention than conviction, I mumbled the words of the spells I had scraped from bargain grimoires and mind-altered evenings in dark apartments. Steam began to rise from the water’s surface, slick with vapors. A hermit bone at the base of my skull heard the jeremiads of the dead swell through the foam.

I swung the pot off the fire. The tea was ready, and it was time to rouse my guest. She was still trembling gently as the build-up of imposed behavior wriggled its way out of her system. I needed to warn her before she committed to drinking: this tea would light the touch-paper for a salvo of invigorating fireworks that would reach every inch of her body, but their blossoms would be scorching. She smiled through her delirium as her eyes snapped open. This was the moment of quiet communion, where two stunted souls could reach out to each other. I spun her a tapestry of glory for her future that was free from the squat anchor of her fiancé, free from weakness and free from whatever lashed her to her past. She kicked out in defiance with her legs dripping with power but still stiff; the tea should prod those neuronal roots to foray forth into her thighs. I sat on the edge of the couch and coached her through the process. Feeling that your nerves were scalding was part of condemning your past to ashes and watching the sky clear. Her eyes raised a timid toast to me as she brought the mug to her lips.

The next few minutes would be difficult. I perched myself on the edge of the coffee table and let her grind my knuckles between her fingers as the infusion took hold. I swept up the debris of words that tumbled out of her mouth about how he coiled himself around her like a serpent and squeezed until there was no more room for even the scent of freedom. I sang to her in a low voice about how she would rise bathed in strength, able to run for days through neon alleyways and freeway gullies and fields of golden, abrasive corn, toward a horizon where he would never catch her. She shivered through the fever and I watched the threads of lights down her calves kindle themselves into life.

Even if I scrunched my consciousness down into its sharpest crystal, I could not see where her future lay. The expansiveness of her energy sang of open plains and vast, jagged swathes of forest far from the city noise; she had a fresher, wilder copy of my soul. My house was hers for as long as she needed it, and I welcomed the thought of her cracking the seal of my fridge at three in the morning to cram cold cuts and hunks of cheese down her throat without pausing for breath. I knew, though, that her own peace lay far from here, if only because this landscape had been indelibly stained by her ex-fiancé’s voice. I threw a knitted plaid over her, heavy but soft, and slowly withdrew to my own bedroom. Tomorrow, she would awaken freezing cold, famished, full of energy and free.