germination | hank
She allotted him less that four feet of space in the greenhouse for his plants, a shabby corner concealed by a cardboard partition. Every year at least one girl was brave enough to seek him out to inquire about the sour, piney aroma that sometimes lingered in the room. They only asked for small amounts, never more than half an ounce, and Hank obliged. He enjoyed the extra income almost as much as he enjoyed the revolving door of beautiful young women, their brief interactions a highlight of his otherwise tedious weekends in the shadows of whatever Cordelia, her mother, the coven deemed important at the moment. He enjoyed any sort of attention, especially from the students with their full lips, sparkling with some fruit, adolescent lip gloss or stained a deep burgundy, and their bony thighs, exposed in skirts and micro shorts and sheer leggings with little cartoon hearts on the knees.
It wasn't that Cordelia didn't meet his needs. She was his soul mate, a creature of perfection in his eyes, but she often regarded him with the same flat, unaffected disposition that she gave her students or, even worse, her plants. She only touched him when she as ovulating, a clinical gesture that might result in the fruition of her dream to conceive a child.
Footsteps broke Hank's introspection, soft and hurried claps across the wooden floor. Squinting at the door, he waited for someone to enter, but the steps grew faint until it was silent. He poured a small amount of water into the Styrofoam cups on the table, carefully avoiding the sprigs of green sprouting from the center. After watering the adult plants, he checked the seeds. They were on a red paper plate tucked between moist tissues and concealed from the light with another plate. His brows furrowed as he peeled back the tissue, his thin lips pressed into a worried line. Most of them looked the same, but the one in the top corner had cracked open, a tiny stalk protruding from the slit. One seed had germinated, and a dozen more that would soon birth their own stalks and grow into trees with fragrant, spindly leaves.
The seeds made it seem easy, as if any idiot who wanted to be a proud member of his or her species should be able to procreate without any trouble. He and Cordelia had tried for months, seen more doctors than his paychecks could afford, and the fact that it might be impossible was beginning to seem likely. Cordelia hesitated to use any kind of magic, a trait he found grating and progressively obnoxious over the course of their marriage. He wished she possessed more of her mother's shrewd assertiveness, but that was the only trait of Fiona's he admired and longed to see in his wife, who somehow managed to be aggressive and feeble at the same time.