Fiction | January 13, 2026

Endings 

Jeanne Rogow 

Making her way uphill in a green blouse and red skirt of tiered and ruffled tulle, Joya might resemble Aloe arborescens ready to bloom. At least, that’s what she was going for when she found the skirt in a vintage shop last week and bought it, having an excuse to dress up and thinking, as she often does, about plants. A pollinator and medicinal, the A. arborescens is one of her favorites, with its conical red blooms blazing like torches above the sword-shaped leaves. Along this stretch of Euclid Avenue, the steepest part, where the sidewalk hugs a rock face, yellow flea bane blooms in the crevasses, and lush borders of agave, yucca, and golden yarrow line the curb. Across the street, the houses have views out toward the bay and bridges. A whimsical cottage with a bougainvillea-laced garden gate and a stone path sits next to a newly constructed glass box, like a denuded terrarium, perched on steel rods anchored to the winding hillside.  

Two motorcycles whip around the blind corner, revving engines as they climb. Joya reflexively sidesteps and scrapes her shoulder against the embankment, rubbing the spot like a worry stone and feeling the familiar sting of doubt. Her undergraduate degree in English led only to a job creating training content for an AI start-up in Mountain View. Spending her days languishing in a cubicle and nights laboring over her novel wasn’t how she pictured the writer’s life. Trusted friends read her story and asked, “What is it you’re wanting to say by ending it in that way?” She’d meander around, offering muddled answers. After several years chipping away at mounting student-loan debt, she abandoned her epic tome and, like a heliotrope, turned toward the sun—her version of it: a graduate degree in genetics and plant biology.  

In one of her early writing classes, the professor gave them a prompt to write about themselves metaphorically. “If you were a____, what ____would you be?” She hadn’t needed to think. She would be a plant, the night-blooming cereus, with its incongruous mix of woody, desiccated vine and fragrant white flowers blooming only in the dark of night, once a year in June. Like her, there is something diffident and retiring about the cereus, as if it is saying, “I may show you my glorious flower, but just this once, and then I will shrink away.” It’s not a literal match, but metaphors aren’t supposed to be literal. It amuses her that she can relate more to these alien-like pods bursting with potential than to her fellow graduate students. And, like the cereus, she can be prickly.