“Let It Breathe, Let It Blend” by Abbie Doll

let it breathe, let it blend

your compost pile reeks enough to drop me bedridden, but this attention-seeking stench, despite its needy character, isn’t what’s essential here. you are. you’re all i can think about: standing there, a flannel flag rippling in the wind with those loose, rose tufts of hair — each strand integral to the structure of we — framing your face, forming a nest, immaculately woven. it occurs to me, if we were to personify our focuses, say as sitcom roommates perchance, they’d for sure be mid-feud; i’m too struck by this portrait of you to pay any mind to your petty practicalities. but you grab my forearms and beg me to join you in this backyard bonding moment, urging me to sift through our trash like it’s unrefined gold. we both know i’m only here for you: i’ve never been a dirt-caked-beneath-the-fingernails kind of girl, so my mere presence is a downright romantic display of concentrated effort. but you love me anyway and, hey, if me rubbing the rind from the orange we shared for breakfast this morning will improve our long-term survival odds, then so be it. we dive in, let our hands transform into sensuous shovels because you always, always insist on garnishing everything with a personal touch. speaking of which, your hands reach through and wrap around my waist like weeds, but they’re a welcome distraction — not a nuisance, never a pest. we scoop through the muck and the slop together: crackly onion and garlic peels, enough to wallpaper the old victorian; skin-thin banana peels, browned by their quick maturity; blackened vanilla bean pods, scraped empty from your bake-off imitation endeavors; all peppered by smatterings of wet coffee grounds that resemble the earth at our feet — except these shards are abrasive in nature. as we continue to mingle with the discarded, my attention shifts away from you, but i don’t want it to. beneath the crud, there’s an orchestra of worms mashing and masticating, but their hungry-caterpillar energy feels faraway — forever a fairytale fantasy, some storybook secret snapped shut. likewise, we bunch and crunch our eggshells into cereal-grain fragments, all the while rustling through the layer of shriveled leaves at our feet. i’m immersed in this caviar-rich soundscape of our own for/a/ging when you earthworm-inch up behind me, scrunching our bodies together like the scraps amidst our grasp, and whisper a hedge-maze full of ways in which we’re destined to grow. i turn around and bury my face in your homey hive, admitting the beauty of decay. we’re taking the ‘f’ out of refuse, you say, and i reply with a hopeful eye, my desire for us to be processed in a similar way . . . when the time comes, of course. but not until then. not until we’re done tending each other’s gardens — done with our in-depth exploration of their delicate decadence and done harvesting the sinfully succulent fruit we were lucky enough to produce.

Abbie Doll

Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, Ohio, with an MFA from Lindenwood University. She is a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Door Is a Jar Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, and Pinch Journal Online, among others. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.

Headshot: Abbie Doll

Photo Credit: Staff