The Fibrodysplasia Flower

• Chapter 1 The First Sprout of Stone
• Chapter 2 Tendons into Tendrils
• Chapter 3 The Diagnosis of Ivory
• Chapter 4 Seeds of Calcification
• Chapter 5 Pruning the Soft Tissue
• Chapter 6 The Greenhouse of Ribs
• Chapter 7 Roots Beneath the Skin
• Chapter 8 The Architecture of Pain
• Chapter 9 Petals of Marrow
• Chapter 10 Locking the Shoulder
• Chapter 11 The Sculptor's Curse
• Chapter 12 Silent Grafting
• Chapter 13 The Spine Arbors
• Chapter 14 Watering the Calcium
• Chapter 15 The Midsummer Rigor
• Chapter 16 Spores of Stiffened Grace
• Chapter 17 The Ivory Canopy
• Chapter 18 Solitude in Full Bloom
• Chapter 19 The Restricted Harvest
• Chapter 20 A Garden Unbending
• Chapter 21 The Penultimate Pivot
• Chapter 22 Fossilized Sunshine
• Chapter 23 The Statue's Secret
• Chapter 24 Entwined in Marble
• Chapter 25 The Last Range of Motion
• Chapter 26 The Eternal Bloom

The knot behind my left shoulder blade did not belong to the muscle. I knew my muscles well enough; I spent six hours a day coaxing them through heavy clay, lifting flat after flat of winter rye, and wrestling taproots out of unyielding soil. Muscle tissue was forgiving stuff. It stretched, it tore, it burned with lactic acid when pushed too hard, but after a night of hot salt baths and cheap liniment, it always surrendered back to pliable warmth.

This new thing did not surrender.

It had begun three weeks prior as a hot, tender knot—the kind of dull ache you acquire after carrying two fifty-pound sacks of bone meal up a damp hill in late October. I had assumed it was a tear, a minor spasm of the left latissimus dorsi. I treated it as I treated every other strain earned in the garden: I pressed a warm heating pad against it, swallowed ibuprofen, and kept working. But as the inflammation cooled and the dull redness faded from the skin above my scapula, the swelling did not dissolve. It hardened.

By early November, when the first frost glazed the glass of the smalllean-to greenhouse, the mass was the size of a walnut. It sat deep beneath the skin, lodged tightly between the ribcage and the edge of the blade, utterly indifferent to massage, heat, or rest. When I pushed my thumb hard into the soft flesh of my back, my nail blanched white against an obstruction that felt less like tissue and more like a river pebble.

I stood before the cracked mirror in the back hallway, twisting my torso to catch the light from the bare overhead bulb. There was no bruise left, no purple blossom under the skin. Only a small, distinct ridge that raised the surface of my back by a quarter of an inch. When I pulled my shoulder back to touch my elbow to my spine, the ridge caught against the underside of the bone with a dull, sickening click. It did not hurt in the sharp, urgent way a fresh injury hurts; it carried a dense, heavy ache, like a stone resting at the bottom of a well.

"Just a calcium deposit," I told the mirror. "A cyst. A gristle knot."

The house was quiet, smelling of damp wool, drying lavender, and the faint, bitter tang of chimney soot. Outside, the garden was settling into its winter sleep. The hostas had melted into yellow sludge, the delphiniums were clipped back to gray nubs, and the raised beds sat dark and empty under blankets of shredded bark. It was the season for rest, the time when everything organic contracted into itself to wait out the cold.

I reached up to grab a tin of tea from the high shelf above the stove. The simple act of extending my left arm overhead produced a strange, tight dragging sensation along my ribcage. It was not a muscle spasm; it felt as though someone had threaded a heavy, taut cord between my ribs and my shoulder, anchoring the two together. I had to tilt my chin up and swing my arm wide to reach the tin, a clumsy, jagged motion that lacked my usual fluid grace.

I set the kettle on the gas burner and leaned against the counter, reaching back to press my fingers against the knot again. It was colder than the surrounding tissue. That was a trick of the mind, surely, but when I pressed hard enough to feel the contour, the object had an unyielding density that made my stomach turn over. Soft things yielded under pressure. Humans were made of soft things—fat, blood, water, and flexible cords of meat. We were meant to yield. Bones were the structural timber hidden deep inside, safely wrapped in cushions of water and fat, never meant to wander into the garden of the muscles.

I brewed the tea and walked out onto the back porch. The air was crisp enough to bite the back of the throat. Below the wooden steps lay my five acres: a patchwork of vegetable beds, cut-flower borders, and the half-finished glass greenhouse I had spent three summers building out of salvaged sash windows and cedar timbers.

Gardening is, at its core, a constant battle against unwanted growth. You spend half your life pulling wild mustard, bindweed, and dandelion roots out of beds where you intended only to grow sweet peas or spinach. You learn to recognize the very first shoot of an intruder long before it flowers. You learn the sharp, pale look of a bindweed sprout pushed up through five inches of dark mulch, and you know that if you don't dig four feet down to get every inch of that brittle white root, it will consume the entire trellis by July.

Looking down at my hands, rough-skinned and stained permanently around the cuticles with dark loam, I wondered what kind of seed had settled behind my ribcage.

The next morning, the frost had turned to a thin, grey drizzle. Gardening in November rain is miserable work, but the garlic needed to go into the ground before the soil froze solid. I carried a wooden crate of seed garlic out to the lower plot, my boots sinking two inches into the wet clay with every step.

Every time I plunged the trowel into the dirt, the thing in my shoulder pulled. It was no longer just a passive lump; it had begun to feel like an anchor. Digging requires a rhythmic, twisting motion of the upper body—a push from the hip, a drop of the shoulder, a leverage of the back. By the twentieth bulb, the fluid rhythm had broken down entirely. My left shoulder was being dragged down, locked into a low, stiff angle that forced me to use my right hand for tasks I had always done ambidextrously.

I stopped, kneeling in the muddy aisle between the beds, breathing hard through my nose. Rain dripped from the brim of my waxed canvas hat, ticking softly against the back of my jacket. I reached beneath my shirt, shoving my cold, muddy fingers up under the hem to touch the spot.

The bump was larger.

It had not spread outward like a stain; it had lengthened. Where there had been a round walnut three weeks ago, there was now a narrow, hard ridge, nearly two inches long, running parallel to the inner border of my scapula. It felt like a small, smooth stick laid beneath the muscle. When I traced its length, I felt no seam, no break between the ridge and the bone of my shoulder blade. It seemed to grow directly out of the bone, a calcified root pushing its way up into the warm, soft belly of the muscle tissue.

I let out a short, wet laugh into the quiet rain. "Nonsense," I muttered to the empty cabbages. "It’s an exostosis. A spur. You bumped it on the wheelbarrow."

I remembered bumping it, or thought I did. Two months ago? Three? There was always a bruise somewhere on my shins or arms, earned from hauling flagstones or knocking against the wooden corners of the raised beds. The body of a gardener is a map of small, forgotten collisions. A scrape from a gooseberry thorn, a purple mark from a dropped log, a strained tendon from wrestling a stubborn stump out of the earth. You don't record every hit; you simply absorb them and keep going.

But bruises heal. They turn green, then yellow, then dissolve back into the bloodstream like melted ice. They do not turn into granite.

I sat back on my heels, the wet mud soaking through the knees of my canvas work pants. The cold was beginning to seep through my layers, settling into the joints of my hands and knees. Inside my back, however, the strange ridge felt hot—not with the bright, raging heat of an infection, but with the steady, quiet warmth of a compost pile in early spring, where deep, invisible processes were busy turning living matter into something dry, dense, and permanent.

I stood up, leaving the crate of garlic half-planted on the muddy earth. I walked back to the house, my left arm hanging slightly stiff at my side, moving not like a branch of living wood, but like a piece of seasoned timber that had lost its sap.

In the kitchen, I stripped off my wet coat and pulled my sweater over my head. The motion was painful now, forcing me to hitch my left shoulder unnaturally high to slip my arm through the sleeve. I walked into the small bathroom, flipped on the harsh overhead tube light, and turned my back to the mirror, holding a smaller hand mirror over my chest so I could see my own spine.

In the sharp fluorescent glare, the anomaly was obvious. Beneath the skin, which was pale and smooth, a distinct, pale-white ridge projected against the muscle. It looked like the root of an iris bulb pushing against the surface of a pot—firm, defined, and relentless. It had the precise contour of bone.

I reached back with my right hand and pressed down hard on the top of the ridge. Pain shot forward through my chest, sharp and clear, like a thin needle dragged across my ribs. But underneath the pain, the physical sensation was absolute. There was no cushion between my skin and the hardness below.

My body had begun to build something inside itself, without asking my permission, using material stolen from my own strength. It was making a sculpture out of my back.

I dropped the hand mirror onto the bathmat. It didn't break, but the glass chimed softly against the tile.

I leaned over the sink, staring at my reflection in the medicine cabinet. My face looked unchanged—the same dark eyes, the same spray of freckles across the bridge of my nose, the same stray strands of brown hair coming loose from a clumsy knot. I looked like a woman who grew vegetables for a living, who spent her days in the soil and her nights reading seed catalogs by the woodstove.

I looked entirely soft. I looked entirely human.

Yet beneath the skin, hidden beneath the familiar meat and blood that had carried me through thirty years of life, a hard, silent sprout had broken through the earth of my muscle. It was there now, quiet and unyielding, waiting out the winter under my skin.

By the third week of November, the frost had laid its grey, brittle fingers across the entire valley. The soil had shut down. If you plunged a spade into the earth of the lower plot, the blade hit a layer of frozen crust three inches down with a dull, ringing shock that traveled all the way up the shaft, shuddering through the bones of the hand and arm.

In response, my body seemed to be following the weather’s lead.

The hard ridge behind my left scapula was no longer an isolated pebble or an idle curiosity. It had begun to send out shoots. That was the only word I had for it, borrowing from the language of the green world because my own anatomy offered no sensible vocabulary for what was taking place beneath my skin.

Tendons are supposed to be slick, wet cables. They are meant to glide through lubricated sheaths, glistening like peeled willow wands, allowing the hand to cup a seedling or the arm to swing a heavy scythe in a clean, fluid arc. But when I reached across my body to pull on my heavy wool coat, I felt a distinct, fibrous tautness stretching from the base of the original lump down toward the spine, and another branching upward into the slope of my left trapezius.

They felt like the tendrils of a passionflower vine.

If you have ever grown Passiflora, you know how those delicate, curling strands search the air for structural support. They reach out in blind, questing loops until their sensitive tips brush against a bamboo cane or a length of galvanized wire. The moment contact is made, the tendril coils tightly around the metal, pulling the main stem upward. Over time, that tender green wire thickens, brown bark forms over its skin, and what was once a soft, flexible thread hardens into a rigid wooden anchor that cannot be uncoiled without breaking it.

My left shoulder had found its anchors.

I spent a Tuesday afternoon in the tool shed, sharpening the blades of my loppers and hand pruners with a carborundum stone. The shed smelled of three decades of accumulated garden work: dry peat, paraffin, rusted iron, and the sharp, turpentine stink of dried sap. It was usually my favorite place to spend a dark late-autumn afternoon, sitting on an inverted crate near the small woodstove, listening to the wind rattle the corrugated tin roof.

Holding the sharpening stone in my right hand was easy enough, but holding the heavy forged steel of the loppers steady with my left required an isometric grip that my back refused to grant. Every time I squeezed the handle, the tendon running down the outer edge of my latissimus tightened into a hard, rigid rod. It didn't stretch; it braced.

I set the stone down and unbuttoned my heavy flannel shirt, letting it drop to my right elbow so I could reach my left side.

With the tips of my fingers, I traced the line of tension. The original lump had flattened slightly at its peak, but from its lower margin, a distinct, ropey cord ran diagonally down my ribcage toward my spine. It was roughly the thickness of a pencil. When I pressed into it, there was no give. It wasn't the soft, springy knot of a fatigued muscle that could be rubbed out with a firm thumb; it was a calcified string, welded firmly to the underlying tissue.

"A tendon turning to wood," I said to the quiet shed. The woodstove hissed, a pocket of resin popping inside the cast-iron box.

I tried to stretch it. I reached my right hand over my head, grabbed my left wrist, and pulled my torso toward the right, attempting to force the tissues along my left flank to lengthen.

A sharp, blinding heat flared from my ribs up to my ear. It wasn't the dull ache of a good stretch; it was the tearing sensation of a dry vine being ripped from a wooden trellis. I gasped, dropping my hands, my chest heaving as I leaned against the workbench. Sweat, cold and thin, broke out across my forehead.

When I reached back to feel the cord again, it felt hotter to the touch, as if the physical force of the stretch had ignited an invisible fire within the fibers.

In the garden, when you try to force a stiff, woody vine into a shape it doesn't want to take, you crack the outer bark. The plant responds not by yielding, but by bleeding sap over the wound, forming a thick, swollen callus over the fracture site. Within a season, that callus hardens into a knot twice as thick and twice as rigid as the original stem.

I stood in the cold shed, listening to my own ragged breathing, and realized with a sickening certainty that my body operated under the same brutal arithmetic. Stretching wasn't healing it. Resistance was simply giving it something to build against.

To survive the winter as a gardener, you adapt your tools to the weather. You use broader wooden snow shovels for light drift, narrow iron spades for frozen ground, and heavy gloves lined with thinsulate when the wind turns north-northwest.

Now, I had to begin adapting my tools to my own changing physics.

By early December, my left arm could no longer be raised past the level of my breastbone without my shoulder hiking up toward my ear in a awkward, hitching motion. The left shoulder blade was effectively anchored to my fourth and fifth ribs by two distinct bridges of hard, calcified tissue. When the blade tried to slide across the ribcage—as it must for the arm to lift overhead—the new bridges held it fast. The bone was locked in its bed.

I could still use my left hand, but only within a small, semicircular field of motion near my waist. It was as if someone had clipped a leather tether between my elbow and my belt.

I spent three days modifying my equipment. I took my favorite lightweight birch-handled rake and cut the handle down with a rusty handsaw, reducing its length by half so I could operate it with one arm while resting the top of the handle against my right hip. I moved the heavy jars of dried herbs, canned tomatoes, and seed packets from the high pantry shelves down to the lower cabinets, crouching on the cold linoleum to stack them near the floor.

Every action required a calculated strategy. Picking up a fallen log for the stove meant squatting entirely with my knees, keeping my torso dead upright, and lifting with my right arm while using the left merely as a steadying hook.

If I forgot—if I instinctively reached out with my left arm to catch a slipping mug or grab a handrail—the punishment was immediate. The tether would jerk tight, pulling my chest into a painful, twisted spasm, and by the following morning, the inflammatory heat would return, leaving behind another fraction of an inch of stone.

One morning, a farmer named Marcus drove his battered green pickup truck up my gravel driveway to deliver two cords of split oak. Marcus was a man made entirely of gristle and leather, built like an old fence post that had weathered fifty seasons without rotting or leaning. He had been delivering firewood to my cottage since I bought the place seven years ago.

"You're walking sideways, Nora," he said, swinging a massive log off the bed of his truck and tossing it onto the stack by the shed. It landed with a heavy, hollow thud.

"Pulled something in my back," I said, staying near the porch railing. I kept my left hand tucked deep inside the pocket of my coat to hide the strange, crooked angle at which my arm now rested against my ribs. "Just an autumn strain that doesn't want to go away."

Marcus paused, wiping his brow with the back of a greasy canvas work glove, despite the frost hanging in the air. He looked at me with the slow, shrewd scrutiny of a man who spends his life looking at sick livestock and broken machinery.

"You look tight," he said plainly. "Like an old gate with rusted hinges. My brother had a mule like that once. Sweeny in the shoulder. Muscle just withered up until the leg locked straight out. Had to put the poor beast down when the snow got deep."

"I'm not a mule, Marcus," I said, offering a small, dry smile. "And I don't need putting down."

"Maybe not," he grunted, reaching for another log. "But you ought to let someone else haul those heavy oak splits into the house. You look like you're carrying a boulder inside that coat."

He didn't mean anything by it. It was just the plain, unvarnished observation of a neighbor who noticed when the landscape changed. But after he drove away, his truck engine whining as it climbed the icy hill, his words hung in the quiet air of the yard.

Carrying a boulder inside that coat.

He was closer to the truth than he knew, though it wasn't a boulder I was carrying. It was an arbor. A frame. An internal lattice that was slowly, methodically replacing the soft, red meat of my back with an intricate cage of bone.

That evening, I decided to conduct an experiment.

The house was cold, save for the small perimeter of heat around the kitchen woodstove. I stripped naked down to my waist and stood in front of the full-length mirror I had unhooked from the bedroom door and propped against the kitchen table, where the oil lamp provided a long, warm, raking light.

I took a soft tailor’s tape measure—the flexile yellow ribbon I used for measuring garden beds and sewing canvas drop-cloths—and held it in my right hand.

I wanted facts. I was a grower; I dealt in germination dates, soil pH levels, rainfall inches, and frost lines. Mystery was merely a lack of measurement. If this thing was growing, I needed to chart its canopy.

I pressed my right index finger against the origin point: the small, dense knot behind my left scapula. From that point, I traced the lower tendril. It traveled down and inward, crossing the space between my ribs like a diagonal brace on a timber-frame barn. It vanished beneath the skin near the sixth thoracic vertebra.

Length: four and a half inches. Width: three-quarters of an inch at the base, tapering to a quarter-inch near the spine.

I noted the numbers down on a yellow legal pad with a stub of pencil held in my right hand.

Then I mapped the second line. This one branched from the scapula, traveling upward toward the base of my neck along the anterior edge of the trapezius. It felt less like a solid rod and more like a row of small, hard beads strung together on a heavy wire—a line of calcified nodules waiting to coalesce into a single beam.

Length: three inches.

Finally, I tested the range of motion. I held my left arm at my side and slowly raised it to the front.

At thirty degrees, the skin across my back tightened, but there was no pain. At forty-five degrees, the diagonal cord went rigid, humming under the skin like a plucked guitar string. At sixty degrees, the motion stopped entirely. Not because the muscle was tired, but because bone hit bone. The new growth had struck the underside of my scapula, locking the joint like a stone wedge jammed beneath a heavy door.

I stared at the numbers on the yellow pad.

The numbers were clear, precise, and entirely remorseless.

I sat down on the wooden kitchen chair, the cool air of the room chilling my exposed skin. I reached over with my right hand and laid my palm flat against the left side of my back. Beneath the cold skin, the underlying structure was warm—distinctly warmer than the surrounding tissue.

It was the quiet, metabolic heat of construction. Deep inside my body, an army of invisible cells was busy taking the calcium from my morning tea, the mineral salts from my dinner, and the oxygen from my lungs, and using them to weave a taproot of pure bone where smooth muscle ought to be.

I closed my eyes and listened to the house. The timbers creaked as the night cold deepened outside. The wood in the stove shifted, falling into a bed of red embers with a soft, papery sigh.

In my mind’s eye, I saw my garden sleeping under six inches of leaf mulch out in the dark. Down there, beneath the frozen surface, the roots of the perennial shrubs—the lilac, the sweet clematis, the climbing roses—were sitting silent and dormant, waiting for the sun to turn. They were dark, woody, and unyielding, holding the soil together with a million tiny, fibrous fingers.

They didn't fight the earth; they became it.

I opened my eyes, picked up the pencil, and added one more line to the bottom of the yellow pad, written in my neat, clear script:

It is not an infection. It is an architecture.

The next morning, the sky was the color of lead, heavy with the promise of the season's first true snowfall.

I went out to the glass greenhouse—the half-finished structure I had built from salvaged window sashes and rough-sawn cedar posts. The glass was clouded with frost patterns, beautiful, fern-like crystallizations that looked remarkably like the tendrils currently growing beneath my ribs.

Inside, the air was slightly warmer than outside, smelling of damp earth, plastic nursery pots, and the dry, sweet scent of overwintering geraniums. I had fifty pots of rooted cuttings sitting on the wooden benches, waiting for spring.

I needed to clear the gutters on the roof of the greenhouse before the heavy snow arrived. If the gutters clogged with frozen leaves, ice dams would form, backing up under the glass panels and cracking them under the weight.

I set a short stepladder against the side of the wooden frame. In previous years, climbing this ladder was as effortless as breathing. I would carry a bucket in one hand, balance on the top rung with one foot, and scoop out the rotten leaves with a single, sweeping reach of my left arm.

Now, I stood at the base of the ladder, looking up at the six-foot height as if it were a cliff face.

I climbed slowly, taking one step at a time, holding the cedar upright firmly with my right hand. My left hand hung uselessly near my waist, clutching a small plastic trowel.

When I reached the top step, I found I couldn't lean forward over the roof edge. To lean forward, my back had to flex. But the diagonal cord running along my ribs held my spine straight, acting like a rigid splint bolted across my thoracic vertebrae. If I tried to bend, my hips swung back, throwing me off balance.

I stood on the top rung of the wooden ladder in the freezing wind, balancing precariously on my toes, trying to scrape rot out of a galvanized steel gutter with a plastic trowel held in my awkward, restricted left hand.

A gust of wind caught the side of the greenhouse, rattling the loose glass panes. The ladder shifted an inch on the slippery gravel below.

Instinct took over. I threw my weight forward to catch myself on the roof beam.

My left arm shot upward in an involuntary reflex to grab the timber.

The stone bridge inside my back met the resistance of my shoulder blade with a sudden, devastating impact. There was a sound—not a sound heard through the ears, but a wet, dull crack deep inside the dark vault of my chest, like a dry hickory twig snapping inside a wet mattress.

Pain, absolute and blindingly white, exploded through my left side. It wasn't heat anymore; it was an electric current, scorching through every nerve ending between my jaw and my waist.

The sky, the frost-patterned glass, the dark spruce trees on the ridge—all of it dissolved into a shimmering curtain of silver sparks.

I fell off the ladder.

I didn't fall far—perhaps three feet—but I landed heavily on my right side in the frozen mud of the path. The impact drove the air out of my lungs in a sharp, wet cough. I lay there on my side, my cheek pressed against the frozen earth, staring at a cluster of dead, brown clover leaves inches from my nose.

For several minutes, I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe in deeply, because every contraction of my diaphragm pulled against the shattered, angry tissue behind my ribs. I lay in the mud, smelling the iron tang of the dirt and my own warm breath freezing on the weeds, listening to the high, thin ringing in my ears.

Slowly, agonizingly, I rolled onto my stomach, using my right elbow to drag my torso upward out of the freezing mud.

My left arm was entirely dead weight now. It hung at my side like a heavy, waterlogged branch, completely unresponsive to the frantic signals my brain was sending down the nerves.

I dragged myself up onto my knees, resting my forehead against the rough, cold timber of the greenhouse frame. Sweat was dripping off the tip of my nose, freezing almost instantly as it hit the wood.

With my right hand, trembling and slippery with cold mud, I reached around to my back, feeling through the layers of my torn wool coat and soaked flannel shirt.

Where the lower tendril had been—that four-and-a-half-inch cord of calcified line—the smooth ridge was gone. In its place, I felt a jagged, swollen irregularity. The rigid shaft had snapped under the weight of my fall.

I pulled my hand away and looked at my fingers. There was no blood on the outside. The skin was unbroken, smooth, and pale. The damage was entirely internal, a quiet catastrophe tucked safely beneath the flesh, away from the light of the sun.

I stood up slowly, clutching my left arm across my belly with my right, and stumbled back toward the house as the first heavy, silent flakes of the winter snow began to drift down out of the grey sky.

Inside the kitchen, I didn't turn on the lights. I didn't make tea. I sat near the stove, still wearing my muddy boots, staring at the small yellow pad resting on the wooden table.

The pain from the fracture had settled into a deep, rhythmic throb that pulsed in time with my heart. Thump. Thump. Thump. A steady, relentless drumbeat measuring the dark work happening within the break.

I knew what would happen next. I had seen it a hundred times in the garden when a apple branch was cracked by a heavy load of fruit, or when a young oak was struck by a passing trailer.

The body—whether made of wood or flesh—does not accept a void. It hates an open wound.

To heal the fracture, my body would pour liquid calcium into the tear. It would send out armies of osteoblasts to bridge the gap, weaving a dense, tangled mesh of bone across the break. And because the repair process in my broken frame was broken itself, it wouldn't stop at merely fusing the fracture.

It would overcompensate. It would fill the entire area with new timber. The cracked tendril would broaden into a branch; the branch would thicken into a trunk; the trunk would throw out new roots across my back, binding my ribs to my spine, my scapula to my chest, my frame to itself.

I picked up the pencil from the table with my right hand.

Below the measurements I had taken just two hours before, I wrote a final entry for the day. My hand was steady, despite the cold and the pain thrumming through my back.

Tendril snapped at 11:15 AM. Winter snow starting. The callus will be thick this time. The tendrils are becoming a trunk.

Outside, the snow fell silently, laying a smooth, white sheet over the dead beds, the frozen paths, and the silent, unyielding earth. I leaned back against the wooden chair, keeping my back perfectly straight, and felt the dark, wet warmth of the new growth beginning to knit itself together in the dark.