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Heliotrope

by Kelly Luce

The placenta began to speak a month into my affair with Nick. The baby had gone right down after his lunch—Tofu Pup, rice cake, cup of orange juice. The OJ was our secret. My sister didn’t like Beau to have juice because of the sugar, but I felt sorry for the kid. I believe in sugar.

The placenta said, “Cold.” At least that’s what it sounded like. Which made sense—it was in the freezer.

I opened the door and there it sat in its smudgy Ziploc, the blue-and-green-seal lips open at one corner. Was this Nick’s doing?

Nick was my sister’s husband. He was a vision researcher at Duke. Holograms and stereoscopes. “No matter how small you cut it,” he said, “the part contains the whole.” Once I joked that’s why he liked us both, but he didn’t laugh.

The placenta went through the proper linguistic stages in fast-forward. By two months it spoke in full sentences with subject-verb agreement and by six months it held forth on politics and philosophy. The placenta was a fatalist, like Nick. It rejected free will.

“Sounds like a justification for irresponsibility,” I said.

“Get a cooler, pack me up, let’s drive to Mexico.”

 “Don’t be unreasonable.”

In the end, we compromised. I buried it in the garden with a sunflower seed and later that year, after Nick had left us all, we sat and watched the flower’s face track the sun.

Kelly Luce's story collection received the San Francisco Foundation's 2008 Jackson Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Bakeless Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Gettysburg Review, and other journals. She was the Writer-in-Residence at the Kerouac House this spring, as well as a fellow at the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. 

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