The Greenhouse, by Ashten Luna Evans

​     One of the upstairs bedrooms in the house on Holly Street was filled with trees. Affectionately referred to by the Mother who lived there as “The Greenhouse,” the room  was filled with sunlight each morning that poured in from the large, East facing window. The  Mother cared diligently for the trees (all bonsais, all much older and easier to manage than her  only child), pruned them, misted them with tepid water, tamed them toward the light, molded  them into shape with guiding wires and rubber bands. She loved the trees and how they bent and  moved with her will, with the firm kindness of her direction. Under her care, the trees thrived. The Daughter who lived there, tucked away in the next bedroom – the smaller one with a  smaller window – hated the trees. 

     At one point, after she had gone away to college and moved into a dorm room that had  not one but three windows, the Daughter thought that perhaps what was wrong with her all had  to do with the light. Her bedroom at her mother’s home had faced North, and the space was  always dim and bathed in shadows. Growing up she had not been a kid who rode a bike or  kicked a ball or ran through the sprinklers on a hot summer day. She did not particularly care for  prickly grass under bare feet or the feeling of sweat collecting along her hairline in the heat like a  bothersome halo. The Daughter was bookish and pensive and generally fresh air-avoidant. She  had probably spent too much time in that sunless room, squinting at the text of worn paperback  novels, scribbling in her journal, counting the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars stuck to the ceiling,  and failing to thrive.

     Perhaps, she thought, she just hadn’t received the proper amount of light that children  require to grow into normal, functioning adults. If she had, perhaps everything would have been  different. If she had grown up in The Greenhouse and not just her Mother’s house, if she had  been pruned and molded properly. If she had been given enough water. It would be several more  years before she learned that there is a difference between not getting enough water and refusing  to drink. She would write that phrase down on the back of an old fast-food receipt and tuck it  into one of her books so she would remember it. 

     But she wouldn’t. The breakthroughs never stuck. 

    During the winter and summer breaks, when she returned from school to the house on  Holly Street, her bedroom seemed so abysmal she could hardly stand it. How she had lived in the  dark for the first eighteen years of her life she couldn’t imagine. The Mother would knock on the  bedroom door and ask The Daughter if she would like to see the progress she’d made on a few of  the bonsais. The Daughter would stare back at her with large brown eyes (the same caramel color  as her Mother’s) that were suddenly brimming with something turbulent and frightening and The  Mother would feel uneasy. But then she would blink and smile, and the storm in her gaze would  be quelled. The Daughter would follow the Mother to The Greenhouse and peer at the tiny trees,  aligned in neat rows on tables of varying heights and each with its own label. Like infants in a  hospital nursery, the Daughter thought. She wondered if the little trees liked their Mother, if they  felt they had anything in common with her. She wondered the same about herself. 

    One summer, between her freshman and sophomore year, the Daughter returned to the  house on Holly Street with her dark brown hair cut short and cropped close to her head. The  Mother told her that her pixie cut looked beautiful, and the Daughter replied that the term “pixie  cut” was only used by insecure women who weren’t confident enough to describe themselves in anything but dainty, little girl terms. The Mother had not known what to say to that, so she said  nothing. The Daughter did not want to elaborate on how she had cut off her ponytail during a  night of drunken despair with her roommate’s nail scissors, bit by bit. It had taken more than a  half hour to cut it all away with a tool so impractical it was comical. She had laughed at the end,  a startled burble of sound without humor, when she looked in the mirror at her uneven crop of  hair, at the long, tangled strands coiled in the bathroom sink like a pit of snakes. The next day  she had gone to a hair salon to try and salvage what was left on her head. 

    Yes, it all came down to the light, the Daughter thought. The light she didn’t get and the  water she wouldn’t drink, and the soil under that house on Holly Street that had been soured with  death and divorce spanning generations. She thought this as she sat on a cold metal chair in the  university’s health center, waiting. She had actually forgotten why she had gone in on that  particular day. It must have been another thought so intrusive and violent and compulsive it had  terrified her enough to walk here. Yes, she was waiting for someone to talk to her about this. 
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   A counselor came eventually, a kind-eyed, middle-aged woman with a mild and  forgettable manner that reminded her so much of her Mother that she no longer wanted to tell the  truth. Instead, she told the counselor that she was tired, and stressed about exams, and nervous about finding a summer internship. She was given a pamphlet about the importance of caring for  your mental health and a bright yellow stress ball with a happy face on it and sent back out into  the world. 

    The Daughter stood in the parking lot in front of the university health center and realized  she did not know where to go next. There was nowhere else to go. That’s just how things were  going to be and it was probably because she didn’t get enough sun. It was probably because she  hadn’t eaten her vegetables, hadn’t gotten any exercise, hadn’t ever had more than one real friend at a time, hadn’t gone to a school far enough from home to feel like a true clean start, hadn’t started her Milton essay due in a few days’ time, hadn’t told the boy who said she was beautiful and tenderly brushed her awkward, overgrown pixie cut out of her eyes anything that was true. It was probably because of one or all of those reasons. 

    The only reason that she couldn’t bear to consider was that it was for no reason at all, and  that when she was born there had simply been a screw loose in her head. She was never going to  be happy and there was nothing that could be done about it. 

   It would be several more years before the Daughter learned about the difference between  surrendering to pain and healing from pain, and how there really isn’t a difference at all, it just  depends on how you look at it. And things like that look different all the time. Anything can  change the look of something, even silly things, like the amount of light in a room.
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Ashten Luna Evans is a writer, editor, and a romantic to a fault. She recently relocated from New York City to a quiet suburb in the Midwest, where she lives with her husband and their two unruly cats. She is the author of a children's book, And Off You Go to Change the World (Ulysses Press, 2021) and her poetry has appeared in Beyond Words Magazine. You can often find her sipping a martini, reviewing the brain dump chaos of her notes app, and waiting for a cosmic sign.