Blast | April 07, 2023

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  At the center of Rachel Kowalsky’s fiction about an idealistic but anxiety-ridden deli owner in New York City is an old-fashioned love story.

God’s Green Earth

Rachel Kowalsky

 

Deli was not the right word. It was a house of plenty, with rows of golden kumquats, shining apples in their skins of unabashed red, peaches pale and shy. Thaddeus was emperor here, caretaker of the sacred: not just a man with a deli but preserver of the American table, purveyor of abundance for all who crossed the threshold of God’s Green Earth.

Pashkin brushed past him in grimy high-tops, carrying a box of butterhead. “How’s Marisol?  You going over there on Tuesday?”

“Maybe.”

Pashkin rolled his eyes. “Terrorists holding you back?

“Fuck you,” said Thaddeus, meaning, yes. He had a set of rules for avoiding terrorists. For example, they did not perform acts of terror in August (the city was empty), or in the rain (logistically complex). Grand Central, Times Square, and rush hour were to be avoided at all costs. The cardinal rule, to be broken upon pain of death, was to never go too deeply underground. This took many subway stations off the table: the 1 at 168^th, the 7 at Hudson Yards, and the entire Second Avenue Subway.

Marisol, his bookkeeper, lived off the deepest subway station in New York City: 191^st Street. It was a cruel joke, putting a woman like her at the end of such a potentially deadly passage. To get to Marisol’s apartment, she of the blue-light filtering glasses, who took her produce as seriously as he did, one would have to descend 180 feet into the earth. If terrorists struck, he’d be crushed beneath the rubble.

“Take the bus,” said Pashkin.

“That’s an hour and a half!”

Pashkin nodded sympathetically. Ninety minutes on public transportation could be as dangerous as 180 feet underground. “That’s a tough one,” he said.  “But it’s only Saturday. You have time.”

An hour later, as the sun came up, Thaddeus and Pashkin hunched over a new display: wine, brie, crackers. The best displays signaled abundance, even if this meant adding a few empty wine crates or cracker boxes to the mix to grow its footprint. Shoppers liked plenty. It made them feel secure.

Nothing had been plentiful in his childhood home, nor was it lovely or fresh. Food was yellow, canned, or absent; dinner was often Lucky Charms. His mother’s life revolved around projects. She worked frenetically, pulling the creeping Charlie from the yard or dragging rocks across to the curb, then slept for days in her dark, cramped bedroom. So he loved fruit, its beauty and promise, the potential life it contained, and the cyclical nature of its grow, burst, and harvest.

“What are you thinking about?” said Pashkin.

“My mom.”

“Feeling buzzy?” Both men took Lexapro for anxiety. Thaddeus’s medication list stopped there, but Pashkin’s kept on going.

“Yeah.”

The Lex helped a lot. He imagined its molecules drifting through his brain, blanketing and quieting his fear like snow.

***

Pashkin, walking into the deli six months earlier to apply for assistant manager, had asked why it was called God’s Green Earth?  Was he—Thaddeus—a religious man?

No, he was not. On the contrary, he’d chosen the name because every religion, regardless of its godhead, contained a story of a green earth. It was his declaration of neutrality, of nonaffiliation and therefore nontargetability by terrorists. God was whichever god you liked, or you could move the apostrophe over to spell gods’, plural, if that was your thing. Just don’t shoot.

At first, since Pashkin was a stranger, Thaddeus had only said the “no” part. He had said the rest five days later as they inspected a new shipment of bananas for stowaway spiders. Nobody liked to find a spider in their bounty. “Is a spider in God’s Green Earth like a snake?” Pashkin asked. “The thing that ruins paradise?”

“Nothing ruins paradise,” said Thaddeus. Then he thought a moment, leaning over another crate, half expecting beady eyes and a hairy spider leg, feeling the buzz begin. “Maybe terrorists.”

“What terrorists?” Pashkin leaned back on his heels. He listened attentively as Thaddeus listed the Nazis, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, whoever was next after Osama bin Laden, the man who’d pushed a woman onto the subway tracks the previous month, Jack the Ripper, the Unabomber, the man who ran a truck into a concert, the man who shot up a nightclub, the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon, all the school shooters—he could hardly bear to say it, “school shooters,”—a man he’d seen in the January 6 footage with a scraggly beard and a weak nose, smiling into his own camera.

When Thaddeus had finished (he never finished this list, but he was done talking), Pashkin said, “As I understand it, you are afraid of an early and senseless death.”

This rang true, thought Thaddeus, absolutely, because there was so much at stake. He had bought the deli as a young man in 2008 and grown it with love over the last fifteen years. He hadn’t been good at school—not math, not English with its godawful sledding disasters and boys marooned on islands—but here, in the deli, he excelled. He brought the rain and the cool, the light and the dark. He controlled the weather for the vegetables: the shiny purple ones, the deep reds, the round and the squat and the leafy green. Conducted an orchestra of fruit.  He lived above it all in a clean, well-lit apartment that he paid for on time each month, in full.

Life was like a physics theorem involving height and trouble: when it was good, there was farther to fall, more to lose.  The thought made him buzz; he reverberated like a jackhammer.  Through the light-headedness and sweat, he explained to Pashkin how he’d named the shop.

Pashkin nodded. “When I feel anxious,” he said, “I cut and paste. I love my dog, so I think about her, and I cut and paste those feelings—how it is when she looks at me and licks my nose or crosses her paws in her sleep—onto the present moment.”

Pashkin was taking time off from Brown until he got his medication straightened out. He was a good worker, also smart and sensitive. Thaddeus secretly hoped he would not go back in the fall.

***

Shortly thereafter, the bookkeeper left for an MBA program and Marisol applied for the position. “Are you religious?” she asked at the end of her interview, and Thaddeus said he was not. She looked disappointed, as though they were playing charades and he’d come up with the wrong answer.

“So why did you capitalize God?” she asked. “God’s Green Earth.”

“It’s a proper noun.” He was no English major, but everyone knew proper nouns.

“You could have used all lowercase. Like amazon or ebay.”

He hired her. She came on Mondays and Fridays, and these became his favorite days of the week.

***

Marisol asked a lot of questions, like why were the oranges $2.99 last week but $1.99 this week? Was the price most reflective of distance traveled, quality, or the need for profit?

She did not believe in Orion or the Big Dipper, which, she patiently explained, helping unload a truck in the morning dark, had been imagined by other people, on other days, but not by her. She saw different things in the stars: a pack of wolves, a butterfly.

“Where is your observatory?” scoffed Pashkin. “Mars?”

“191^st Street.”

Thaddeus nearly dropped the crate he was swinging to the ground. Marisol was swinging crates too, as was Pashkin, working beside the delivery man for maximum efficiency. “One hundred and ninety-first Street?”

“What’s wrong with that?” She fixed him with strange eyes.  Did anybody have eyes that violet hue?  Were they contact lenses?

Thaddeus explained about the subway’s impossible depth.

Marisol worked quickly, her movements strong and sure. “If you trust in God,” she said, “you’ll have less nerves.”

“I’m good without him,” said Thaddeus. “Or her.”  Him, her, who cared?  It was a godless earth. And this made life sweeter, the universe more spectacular, because it was so singular, everything such a chance occurrence. For all of this—the large and small, thick and thin, red, orange, green, bruised, yellow vegetables and fruits in this truck—to have come about by chance was an ecstatic concept, much better than a shadowy man in the sky.

Pashkin leaned against the truck and wiped some sweat from his brow. “The terrorist is always a stranger, right? So if we share our histories up front, no more stranger.  We’ll all have less nerves. He used Marisol’s word, nerves.

“How?” she asked. “On an app?”

“No,” said Pashkin, “in a personal manifesto that locates our forebears on a map, says who we fuck and what we think god looks like. Like, hey, I’m a liberal White guy from Chicago.  I like girls and I’m Quaker.”

“And just walk around holding it?  Like a sign?” said Marisol.

“You tattoo it on your head,” said Pashkin.

“Ha,” said Thaddeus. “Then there would be nothing to talk about.”

“Food,” said Marisol. “We could talk about food.”

Thaddeus nearly fell to his knees. Who was she? His face flushed hot with positive regard.

“Looks like we’re just about done here,” said Pashkin, even though they weren’t. He made himself scarce.

***

After that, Thaddeus cut and pasted Marisol, her noble and sustaining essence, onto everything he feared. Cut-and-pasted Marisol trailed suspicious characters down the cereal aisle, patted them down, and declared them harmless. She stood at attention when he crossed the street to the coffee shop, scanning high windows for gunmen. She even appeared in his dreams, arms upraised like a Themis of 191^st Street with an abacaxi pineapple in each hand.

In his dream, he wanted to get closer, ever closer to her, but a jungle appeared, grew tall and enfolded her, a bobcat bared its teeth at him. Finally he sat beneath a tree and watched monkeys leap from branch to fruited branch. He awoke melancholy, stood and stared out his window at the street, then eased himself to the floor and rolled under the bed, facing up at its crossed bars and the pilled underside of the mattress. His mother had done this once, hid beneath the bed and refused to come out for days, during which time he had lived on Lucky Charms, Mallomars, and dust.

***

“Nobody wants to blow up the grocery store,” said Marisol a few days later, when Thaddeus asked her whether they could budget for a metal detector.

They were indoors at the front of the shop, she seated at her desk, Thaddeus standing before it like a schoolboy. She was wearing her blue-light filtering glasses, so her eyes looked even larger and more intelligent; they took in the world.

“Why not?”

“Because we all have to eat. And this food is organic, clean; the best food, the least disrespected food.”

But Thaddeus feared it was hubris: the succulent tangerines, the organic watermelon in winter, the fattened, seedless grapes.

“Consider this,” he said, tidying the display of flashlights and batteries by her desk. He tidied them often since hiring her. “The terrorists come to New York to blow us up, and what’s the first thing they do? Stock their fridge! And they see all this.”  He spread his arms, indicating the abundance. “Imagine the anger in their hearts.  The jealousy.”

“What terrorists?”

“They know who they are.” His list would scare her away.

“No metal detector,” said Marisol.

***

Marisol was unlike anyone he knew. She wore her beauty loosely. It was incidental, offhand, unintentional.  She didn’t care about it, though she listened seriously when he enumerated her qualities: sensible, kind, smart, and lovely, the loveliest woman he’d ever met. Then her violet eyes converged on him with curiosity.

After their first kiss, he fell into a deep depression.

“Hey, man,” said Pashkin. “You can always walk there.”

“Seventy-five blocks? Not sustainable.”

“For love?”

He didn’t answer his friend, just kept spraying the lettuce.

“What if she’s the mother of your babies?”

Buzz. Any child he had with Marisol would risk perilous beauty.  Her wide eyes and fine lips, plus his strong chin (he’d always been told it was attractive)—disaster.

His children had to be plain.  Children nobody could target—not lovely or ugly, not olive or yellow or black or pale pink.  He needed a generic child, as common as a kidney bean. What color would such a child be?

“Dude, you’re drowning that lettuce.”

***

On the appointed Tuesday afternoon, Pashkin told him to leave early.  “That way, no matter how the hell you get to Marisol’s, you’re there by six,” he said. He’d close up the shop.

Thaddeus had dressed in jeans and a white polo. He wore comfortable sneakers in case he wound up walking and also in case he had to run. He had checked his black hair in the mirror several times, combing it this way and that, and examined his face for dirt; his skin was the color of a mushroom, dull beige.

He stepped out of the deli. In a few strides he was at the entry to the 1 train, staring down into its yawning depths. College kids loped past, completely unaware of the immediate peril, checking their phones and calling out to one another over the din that came from below. He cut and pasted. There went Marisol down the stairs, trailing sweet perfume in her wake.  Here she came up the stairs, violet eyes large behind her glasses; a wink, she loved him. He cut and pasted his feelings for her: admiration, desire. It was no use. The more he loved her, the more he was afraid to die, and the more terrified he became of getting on the subway. He leaned over and threw up into a garbage can. then walked down the stairs into the pit. This fear was absurd.

He felt the medicine mobilize, steady little flakes of quiet that spread out across the territory of his mind.

In the airless twilight beneath the city, he scanned his comiserables, looking for signs that they wanted to live and therefore would not blow anything up. A fancy watch, designer sneakers, or a shopping bag were reassuring: they’d bought in, voted yes for capitalism. A child in tow was equally comforting. Because surely nobody would—shit, too awful, buzz.

Someone laughed too loudly, a teen goofing off with his girlfriend. The laugh unsettled him.  Danger signaled. He about-faced and climbed back up the stairs into the welcoming light of the outdoors, stared up the avenue in the direction of 191^st, then down at his sneakers. He could still walk.

But the buildings were making to fall, there was a plane in the sky that was too low; it was going to plummet to earth. There would be an explosion, flames.

Perhaps a taxi? But what kind of man was he, that he couldn’t get uptown without a taxi? Humiliated, he shuffled back into the deli.

Pashkin looked up from the register and shook his head.

***

Thaddeus texted Marisol: “Can we meet closer to the deli?”

No response.

“I . . .” he wrote. Then couldn’t think of the rest.

A mother and daughter came through the door. His brain, still abuzz with fear, flashed electricity down his spine. There was something off with the duo. The child—a girl of five or six—was too neatly dressed and coiffed, overly curated for so late in the day. She should be mussed. The mother was sneaky, sly, her eyes unknowable as she picked up a brie, put it down, picked up another. Thaddeus looked sideways at Pashkin as the pair wandered through the shop, the child slow and deliberate, brushing against the shelves with her enormous backpack. And yet—school had been out for hours.

“She has a backpack,” he whispered to Pashkin.

“Fuck off,” said Pashkin. “Everybody in the city has a backpack.”

“Even at quarter to six?” He stepped behind the register in case he needed cover, squeezing up against Pashkin in the tiny space.

“I’m not answering that question,” said Pashkin. “Move the fuck over.”

“I wish we had a metal detector.”

“I wish you had gone to Marisol’s.”

How could he explain himself? He longed to strip away the layers of flesh from language until he got to the bare seeds of it. To speak his dread from a place that was unencumbered, naked and sincere.

***

The explosion could be felt for miles. Thaddeus later described it like lightning, or fireworks. It rocked the ground and shook the walls of the deli. He fell to his knees behind the register, covering his head as the wine, cheese, and crackers display rocked on its sparsely weighted foundation, listed towards the register, and crashed. Glass shards struck the floor and flew through the air; burgundy liquid seeped into the tile. Towers of fruit jostled loose and collapsed. The lights flickered and went out.

Here was the moment he’d always known would come, the end of the line, his inhumation; the earth would swallow him up. He didn’t feel fear but rather disappointment that Pashkin would have to die and that his wonderful produce—his heart in metaphor and truth—would perish now. The deli would be decimated and rebuilt as a dry cleaner’s or nail salon.

His phone vibrated. The screen was cracked, but Marisol’s three words were legible: “Is there hope?”

Since he was not dead yet, he crawled out from behind the counter. “Don’t shoot,” he said, still blubbering but now wondering if there was indeed hope, a thought which increased his tears. “Please don’t shoot.” He felt his way to Marisol’s desk, cutting his hands and knees as he went, then reached for the flashlights that hung there. Flicked one on.

In its circle of light, the mother was helping her child up from the floor. She emerged from a mess of artichokes like a chick from an egg and kicked a crate delicately away with her sandaled foot, with the deft carelessness that, he reflected, only a child could manage, particularly in this circumstance, with the dust and glass settling around her, the artichokes rocking forward and back on their green haunches.

Later, they would all check their phones and learn that the explosion had been in the public housing down the block, a gas leak. Even later, while he and Marisol and Pashkin moved about the shop sweeping up glass and drinking the rest of the wine, Marisol would hold forth about the social inequities that had conspired to fuel the blast, and Pashkin would say, “The terrorist is never who you think it is.”

But that was later. Now, the child picked her way through the debris toward Thaddeus, recognizing that he was in charge here, the man with the light, and held out a plum to him. It must have been in her hand at the moment of the blow, and now, her face serious, she held it up, a strange gesture after such a fearsome event.

“How much does it cost?” she asked Thaddeus, who, rising to his feet, looked away from her face to her backpack which was still intact and imprinted with unicorns, hung with unicorn keychains and figurines and clearly the possession of a unicorn lover. Then he looked back to her face, her large and serious eyes, her hair which was now quite mussed.

“No charge,” he replied, voice shaky. “It’s free.”

The girl looked down, regarding the purple fruit with gravity, maybe considering how it came to be, the deep earth that fed it, the kindness of that earth, the breeze that is only here for now that blessed her plum, the hands that picked it and the truck that carried it, bumping and belching over the potholes on the FDR with the whole city spread out alongside like the carcass of a great, fine animal that is maybe not dead but only sleeping. She smiled, she held it aloft in her small steady hand, she held it out to him.

***

Rachel Kowalsky is a first-generation Guatemalan American writer and pediatric emergency physician as well as a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the New England Journal of Medicine‘s short fiction contest. Her stories and essays appear in Atticus Review, Orca, jmww, the Intima, HerStry, and several anthologies. Her work in a New York City ER constantly demonstrates the tenacity and vulnerability of human life.  She lives with her family and dogs. (Author photo by Ian Londin).