Overgrown Inventories

I. Inventory

Entry 1. Surface: kitchen linoleum (beige, 1970s vintage, adhesive substrate). Species observed: common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), root penetration through adhesive layer to concrete subfloor, approximately fourteen hours from first visible cracking to full rosette. Leaves broad, spatulate, slightly oily. No planting, no watering. I woke and the kitchen floor had a lawn.

Entry 4. Surface: bathroom grout (Portland cement, between third and fourth tile rows above tub). Species: maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris), three fronds, each approximately 12 cm. Growing from grout as if grout were riverbank clay. The tile surround has begun to shift — I can feel it give when I press my palm flat. The fern is winning.

Entry 7. Surface: my left forearm, inner aspect, between wrist and elbow. Species: uncertain. A moss — not sphagnum, smaller, denser, with a blue-green tint that shifts toward copper in direct light. It does not hurt. It itches the way a healing scab itches, which is to say it itches like something finishing, not something starting. I have tried to scrape it off with a butter knife. The butter knife now has something growing on its handle.

Entry 11. Surface: the cover of this notebook. Species: liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha), flat thallus spreading from the spine outward, roughly the shape and speed of a coffee stain. I moved the notebook to a shelf, then a drawer, then a sealed plastic bag. The liverwort grew through the bag. I have stopped trying to contain the notebook and have instead started a second notebook, which I expect will last approximately one month before it, too, begins to sprout.

Fieldnotes on Anthophora domestica, or the Common Domestic Gardener

First described: no formal description exists. The following observations are compiled from residential inspection reports, municipal code violation notices, and one unpublished doctoral thesis (Bayard, 2024, withdrawn).

Habitat: urban-residential. Typically observed in rental apartments, where the host’s security deposit has already been forfeited. The organism — if organism is the correct term — demonstrates no preference for climate, altitude, or soil type, as it requires none of these. It requires only a surface and proximity to the host.

Physical description of host: female, early 30s, brown hair now largely obscured by epiphytic growth. Tends to wear long sleeves. Smells, depending on season, of cut grass, jasmine, wet bark, or turned earth. The smell is not unpleasant. This is noted because unpleasantness might make the condition easier to classify.

II. Dina

Look, I’m not going to pretend I handled it well.

The first time I visited her — this was maybe two weeks after she called me, not crying, which was worse than crying, saying “something is happening to the apartment” — I brought rubber gloves. Latex. The yellow kind you buy for dishwashing. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. Pull weeds? Scrub grout? I brought the gloves and a bottle of bleach and a roll of contractor bags and when I got to her door I could already smell it, not bad exactly but thick, the way a greenhouse smells in August, that swollen green pressure that sits in the back of your throat.

She opened the door and the hallway carpet behind her was clover.

Not scattered clover. Not clover-like. A dense, even, ankle-high meadow of white clover running from the front door to the kitchen, and in the kitchen I could see taller things — what I learned later were hollyhocks, five or six feet of them, growing from the spot where the dishwasher used to drain. The dishwasher was still there. It was wearing a hollyhock like a hat.

“Ava,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“Ava, this is —”

“I know. Come in. Watch your step near the bathroom, the floor’s soft.”

The floor was soft because the subfloor was gone. Not rotted — composted. Replaced, from beneath, by a root system so dense it had the structural integrity of compressed soil. Walking on it felt like walking on a forest path. It was springy. It was pleasant.

She had been keeping lists. That was the thing that scared me more than the hollyhocks. She had a notebook, the first one, and she was cataloguing the growth the way a naturalist catalogues specimens. Species name, surface of origin, rate of spread, sensory observations. The handwriting was steady. The margins were clean. On page twenty-three, a pressed clover leaf, flattened under a strip of tape.

“You’re documenting it,” I said.

“What else would I do?”

“Call someone.”

“Who?”

She had me there. Who do you call when your sister’s apartment is becoming a forest? When her arm is growing moss? The plumber came and stood in the doorway and said, very quietly, “I can’t help you,” and walked back to his van and did not send a bill.

I called the landlord. I lied. I said Ava had a leak. A persistent leak, yes, that had caused some water damage, yes, and some mold — we might need to talk about the security deposit. The landlord said he’d send someone. He didn’t send someone for two weeks, and when he did it was a kid in a maintenance polo who stood in the doorway and took a photograph and left without touching anything. Instead the landlord sent a letter, which I intercepted, which said Ava had thirty days to remediate or face eviction proceedings. I threw the letter away. Something grew from it in the trash can overnight — a pale shoot, stiff and curled, like the paper remembered being a tree and decided to go back.

Entry 19. Surface: living room ceiling (popcorn texture, likely asbestos-containing, painted off-white in approximately 2003). Species: English ivy (Hedera helix), though the leaves are smaller than typical and arranged in a spiral pattern I have not seen documented. The ivy is growing downward. Everything else grows outward or upward, following the logic of phototropism even in a room where the windows are now mostly occluded by wisteria. The ivy is growing down from the ceiling, as if the ceiling is soil and the room is sky. I have to duck under it to get to the bathroom.

Entry 21. Surface: the wooden frame of the bedroom door. Species: shiitake mushroom (Lentinula edodes), four fruiting bodies along the top of the frame, gills facing down. They appeared overnight. They smell like broth. I have eaten one. It tasted like a shiitake mushroom grown on a wooden door frame, which is to say it tasted good and also faintly of paint, and I do not plan to eat the others because the implications are too circular: I grow food from surfaces, eat the food, and my body — which is also a surface — grows more. I am aware of the feedback loop. I choose not to think about it at this time.

Entry 23. Surface: the second notebook. Already. I thought I had more time.

Reproductive strategy: unclear. A. domestica does not appear to reproduce in any conventional botanical sense. There is no pollination, no seed dispersal, no genetic recombination. Growth initiates through direct surface contact with the host and continues indefinitely regardless of whether the host remains in contact. It is as if the host’s touch reprograms the molecular structure of whatever she touches, instructing it to become soil, or to remember that it was, once, in geological time, part of a living system, and to resume.

One researcher (Bayard, now uncredited) described the mechanism as “epigenetic nostalgia” — surfaces remembering their biological origins. This terminology was not well received.

Rate of spread: variable. Observed doubling times range from 48 hours (bathroom grout) to 6 days (reinforced concrete). Human skin appears to be colonized at an intermediate rate. The host’s forearms are now entirely covered. Photographs from four weeks ago show bare wrists.

III. Dina (again)

I went back every week. Sometimes twice. Each time there was less apartment and more — I don’t have a word for it. Not garden. Gardens are intentional. Not jungle. Jungles are chaotic. What Ava’s apartment was becoming had the order of a garden and the density of a jungle and the patience of something geological.

By week six I had to bring garden shears to cut a path from the front door to the couch, which was now a topiary, roughly couch-shaped, covered in boxwood that Ava said she had not trimmed. It trimmed itself. The cushions underneath were still there. You could sit on it. It was more comfortable than before, because the boxwood was dense and slightly yielding, like sitting on a living hedge that had been upholstered.

“You have to leave,” I told her. Week six, shears in my lap, drinking the tea she’d made from something growing in the kitchen that she said was chamomile but that tasted like chamomile’s more serious older sister.

“Where?”

“My place. Mom’s place. Anywhere.”

“It’ll follow me,” she said. “You know that.”

I did know that. She’d come to my apartment once, early on, and stayed two nights, and when she left there was a trail of clover from the guest bed to the front door, and my bathroom mirror had a fern growing from the lower right corner, and the fern is still there, and I water it, and I pretend I bought a bathroom fern.

But Ava can’t pretend. She walks down the sidewalk and the cracks in the concrete fill with green behind her, not immediately, not while you watch, but an hour later, two hours, and the city has started sending work crews to her block without filing any reports because nobody wants to be the person who writes the report.

I sprayed bleach on the clover in the hallway and it died, briefly, and came back the next morning as something thicker, darker, with a root grip that pulled up strips of carpet padding when I tried to yank it.

Entry 31. The inventories are becoming harder to maintain. Not because the specimens are too numerous — though they are, I stopped counting individual plants at entry 27 and began counting species instead — but because the notebooks themselves are compromised. Notebook three has a root system. Notebook two I sealed in a mason jar and the jar now has condensation on the inside that I believe is a self-sustaining water cycle. A terrarium that I did not build. The inventory is becoming part of the collection it inventories.

I have begun dictating into my phone. The phone is fine. The phone is glass and metal and whatever it is they make phones out of now, and nothing grows on it, and I find this reassuring and also sad, as if the phone is the one surface that refuses to participate.

Entry 34. Surface: the bathroom mirror. The mirror has not broken. Nothing is growing on its surface. But when I look into it I can see, behind my own face, a tangle of green that is my apartment, and the green is so dense and so layered that my reflection appears to be standing in a forest, and I cannot tell whether I am looking at a reflection of what is behind me or a window into what I am becoming.

Entry 36. Surface: right hand, palm. Not moss this time. A vine — thin, pale green, with leaves no larger than a thumbnail. It grows from the center of my palm along the lines that a fortune-teller would read. The life line, the heart line. It follows them precisely. I don’t know what this means. I don’t think it means anything. But it makes it hard to hold a pen. The vine wraps around the pen and the pen sprouts.

I am running out of pens.

Social behavior: A. domestica — the condition, not the host — appears to produce isolation as a secondary effect. The host’s social contacts diminish over time. Visitors report discomfort that they struggle to articulate. “It’s not that it’s ugly,” one contact stated. “It’s that it’s too alive. You feel like you’re interrupting something.” Another: “She’s fine. She seems fine. But the apartment doesn’t want me there. I know apartments don’t want things. But.”

The host’s sister visits regularly. The sister’s continued presence may be significant. It may also simply be familial obligation, which in this researcher’s experience is the only force more persistent than botanical growth.

IV. Ava (Entry 41)

I have stopped numbering the species. There are too many, and some of them are not species I recognize, and some of them may not be species at all but variations, mutations, improvisations on the theme of plant that no taxonomy accounts for. A flower that smells like the word “Tuesday.” A moss that is soft the way a whisper is soft — not texturally but in its volume, its insistence on being barely there. A vine that grows only at night and retracts by morning, leaving damp lines on the wall like the tracks of a snail that was writing something.

Dina wants me to leave. She has wanted me to leave since the beginning, and she is right, in the way that people who love you are right about the things you will never do. I am not going to leave. Not because I can’t — I have legs, the legs work, the ankles are iffy — but because leaving would mean leaving the inventories, and the inventories are all I have that is mine.

Not the plants. The plants are not mine. They are the apartment’s now, or their own, or something in between. But the lists — the numbered entries, the pressed specimens (dissolving, composting, returning to the cycle, but still — I pressed them, I taped them, I wrote their names in my handwriting which is getting harder to read because of the vine on my palm but is still mine) — the lists are what I did about it. Everyone else called someone. Dina called the landlord, the plumber called his wife, the city sent crews. I wrote it down.

I think about Kafka. I don’t know why. I never liked Kafka. But I think about the part where Gregor’s sister plays the violin and Gregor, covered in dust and garbage and the remains of meals he couldn’t eat, hears the music and crawls toward it and for a moment the story is about beauty, about a creature that is no longer human being moved by something human, and then the father throws an apple at him and the apple lodges in his back and rots there for weeks.

The apple rots in his back.

That is what this is like. Not the apple. The rotting. The fact that something has grown out of you and it is going to stay there, and it is going to change you, and the people who love you are going to adjust, and the adjustment is going to look a lot like giving up.

Prognosis: unknown. No instances of remission have been recorded. No treatment has been attempted (none suggested). The condition appears to be ongoing. Continuative.

Addendum: the researcher’s desk, on which these fieldnotes were compiled, has developed a small patch of moss near the keyboard. The researcher has not been in physical contact with the host. The researcher has only been writing about her.

The moss is green and fine and smells of rain.

The researcher is choosing not to document this further.

V. Dina (last)

I brought canned goods — nothing fresh, because fresh things in Ava’s apartment orient themselves toward the nearest growth and join it. Tomatoes sprouting on the counter. Bread going to mold in an hour, not the bad kind, the green living kind that is just another colonist.

The boxwood couch was taller. The tea was ready — Ava doesn’t make tea anymore, the kitchen makes it, the kettle whistles itself, the water filters through whatever herbs have colonized the countertop that week.

“How are you,” I said.

“I ran out of notebooks,” Ava said.

“I can bring more.”

“Don’t.” She held up her right hand. The vine had grown past the wrist now, wrapping the forearm in a loose spiral, tender new leaves catching the light that came through the wisteria on the windows. The hand was still a hand. The fingers moved. She wiggled them and the vine wiggled with them, not fighting the movement, not directing it, just accompanying it.

“Does it hurt?”

“No. It itches.”

I sat on the boxwood couch and drank the tea the kitchen made and I did not call anyone and I did not bring bleach. The landlord’s latest letter was in my purse. I had not opened it. I was not going to open it.

I keep thinking I should feel something cleaner than what I feel. Relief that she’s not suffering. Grief that the apartment is gone. Acceptance, maybe, the way the articles about stages of grief promise you’ll eventually get there. But what I feel is more like the Tuesday after a funeral — not the sharp day, not the resolved day, just the ordinary day where the person is still gone and you go to work and the absence sits in your passenger seat and you don’t talk about it.

Out the window — through the gaps in the wisteria — I could see the sidewalk cracks down the block had grass in them.