Two Short Stories: “Filaments” and “Tumbleweeds”

By Jessie Carver

Originally published in issue 39 of the print journal of The Pointed Circle • June 2023

Filaments

Riding the bus home late at night after her shift at the diner, her uniform sticky from other people’s maple syrup, Emma buzzed. The darkness wrapping the bus in a cocoon of steamy warmth, wet pavement glimmering softly through the foggy windows, neon lights flashing on storefront signs as they barreled down the streets, she could imagine the filaments connecting each person to the wider world, to each other, one giant organism pulsating with breath.

She remembered when telephone directories were still delivered to every house, and you could open the heavy book to any page and touch hundreds of tiny names printed in tidy columns like ants marching down the paper, linked alphabetically but also by a thousand invisible articulations waiting to be discovered.

The old man hunched in the back of the bus with a wooden cane and plaid scarf: decades before, he once held the door open for the bus driver’s great-aunt as they walked into a department store at the same moment. The sleepy mother, whose young son clutched her hand as they waited for their stop: Emma once served coffee and a slice of pecan pie to her cousin’s ex-husband. And so on and so on.

She might never encounter any of these people again, but echoes of their lives—each a distinct, interconnected galaxy in themselves—would reverberate in hers. Emma liked knowing that, long after she died, strangers would keep breathing in and out the same air that she did, that the bus driver did, and the same air would be recycled and passed around until the world ended or until humans ceased to exist. 

The day after that bus ride home, the old man would learn his chemo wasn’t working and his doctor would begin conversations about hospice care, the bus driver’s boyfriend would ask her to marry him (she would say yes), the sleepy mother would get a call from her estranged father, her young son would find a five-dollar bill crumpled on the playground and feel like he won the lottery, and Emma would leave for work as she did every Thursday, an ordinary day like the one before it, and when she would almost collide with a teenager entering her apartment building as she hurriedly walked out, looking down at her watch, she’d have no idea that one day, years later, her life would be saved by that beating heart while the rest of the now-grown teen’s body lay mangled from a car crash, Emma’s own heart failing from cardiomyopathy, only one of them to leave that hospital alive.

And so on it goes, each day ordinary and extraordinary in sometimes unknowable ways, that infinite web of filaments extending into the past and future and all directions and trajectories. All of us collectively, each of us individually, breathing, until we don’t.

Tumbleweeds 

The tumbleweeds started rolling into town that March, arriving with the blustery-fierce gusts of spring wind. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of tumbleweeds. They lined the streets, became entangled in trees and fences, filled doorways and arroyos, and hurtled across sun-cracked ground, a dizzying carnival of cartwheeling skeletons no one could contain.

All anyone could talk about was the tumbleweeds: where they came from, how to eradicate them, where they would go next. The religious residents proclaimed them a curse cast down upon the town by the devil and the atheists declared them an abomination of nature and the scientists scratched their heads and the government was forced to close the roads and the youth delighted in the delirious disorder, the air crackling with lawlessness.

Soon the river flowing through town was crowded with tumbleweeds so thick the banks began brimming over, bass and trout and minnows, even the reclusive catfish culled from the depths of the riverbed, billowing out of the water in glittering swashes of scales. At first the great blue herons and snowy egrets liked this profusion of food, but they grew tired of competing with the thorny boughs, erratic and boorish as tumbleweeds are, and they took flight for more hospitable land. 

The residents, too, started to retreat when it became untenable to battle their way to school or work or church or the grocery store or their mistress’s house or their grandmother’s bedside, and the town became a tumbleweed town, populated inexorably with invasive intruders.

But the residents left behind vestiges of themselves, remnants of abandoned kites and scraps of love letters and wisps of dead houseplants and forgotten photos and discarded trinkets and all the relics of lives lived, ghosts that slipped elegantly through the spiny forest of tumbleweeds long after the last resident departed.