How to Reverse Decay
Pauline Holdsworth
The ghosts in the compost heap won’t stop bickering. They each want to have the final word.
Let’s face it, they’re doomed, say the eggshells. Their voices are broken porcelain. They pierce through the low moan of decomposing spinach, the acrid complaints of orange peels.
There’s still a chance for them, last year’s leaves insist. They remember when the man and woman in the blue house used to walk together every night, trading memories and confessions, trying to come up with things they still liked about each other. They’ve been here before, the leaves say. They know how to fix this.
***
Last spring, the couple made their first trip to the brink of extinction. The first buds were starting to unfurl when the woman started loading her car. The man tugged the overnight bag out of her hands. Just give me tonight, he said. Go for a walk with me.
She put her bag in the trunk, but she let him lead her around the block. He told her that on their first date, he’d ordered coffee because she did, even though he didn’t usually drink it. He’d stayed up until 3am, stuck in an electrified daze.
When they got home, she took her bag out of the car, and left it at the foot of the stairs.
The next night, he took them on a longer route. He told her he could recognize her sneeze in a crowded airport. He still liked the way she frowned. He couldn’t fry an egg as well as she could. He had never thrown out the movie ticket from their second date. He kept the faded stub of the matinee showing of Black Swan tucked behind his driver’s license, because he knew she would find it sentimental.
At the end of the second week, she still wasn’t smiling. He told her he was done singing for his supper. If you want to go, he said, just go.
But she didn’t want to go. The night before, when he retold the story of their honeymoon on the Faroe Islands, something inside her had started to soften. Listening to him talk about how she kissed him after he got seasick so both their mouths would be sour, she could almost remember what it felt like to want to share everything with him.
She tugged him out the door and around the block. She told him that on their third date, when he asked her what her favorite TV shows were, she panicked and said Star Trek TNG, because she’d seen it on his OKCupid profile. She watched reruns every night for a month, just in case he quizzed her on her favorite characters.
As she talked, he started to smile. The air around them shimmered with memories. It was easy to grab one and slip it on, to play dress-up in their old skins.
By mid-summer, the couple brushed against each other as they walked. They kissed like they were 19 again. The leaves were elated. The couple hadn’t just stopped decay. They had learned how to reverse it.
In November, when the cold snap came, the leaves fell to the ground without a fight. In the compost heap, they nestled in between the ribs of roasted chickens, the remnants of candlelit dinners where the man and the woman lingered long after the last bite.
***
The couple is silent now. In ten months, their smiles have worn thin.
Undeterred, the leaves take up the mantle of storytellers. When he broke his tooth, she pureed all their meals. They sipped spaghetti through swollen straws. Sometimes she wakes up in a fog, and doesn’t want to get out of bed. So he calls in sick and reads to her until she feels human again.
The leaves look around them. It’s not a receptive audience. The old coffee grounds have only grown more bitter since they got here. The bread has grown fur. The apple cores are beginning to lose their sharp edges. They’re surrounded on all sides by enemies, by worms digging tunnels through the fetid earth.
The leaves make another plea. I’m telling you, they’re going to last forever.
But the others have stopped believing in forever. They know that whatever hopes they had, whatever distances they’ve traveled, they will all end up in the same place. They will become dirt.
***
After a peaceful winter, the first warning signs arrived in March. One morning, the woman threw a pile of scraps into the compost before dawn. The newcomers - sour fettuccine alfredo, just starting to turn into slime - brought reports of dinners where the only sound was the clink of silverware, pushing food back and forth.
But that’s her favorite meal, the leaves said. He made it for her on their first anniversary.
The newcomers shrugged. They didn’t care about history. They only knew what it felt like not to be wanted.
The woman started making more trips to the compost, emptying bins that were only half-full. She sat on the ledge, hunched over her phone. By April, she was smiling more, but her smiles were furtive. She tucked them back in her pocket before she went inside.
There’s someone else, said the stale ends of bread.
She’s the one who’s become someone else, said the coffee grounds. The woman had stuffed her old selves back in the closet, alongside the flannel shirts she wore on their first hiking trip and the pale-green bridesmaid’s dress from his brother’s wedding. She’d packed her flexibility and nostalgia away with everything else she’d outgrown.
***
Then the first of this year’s dead leaves arrive, crisp and anxious. It’s brutal out there, they say. They’ve lived through a summer of crying spells and protracted silences. One night, they saw the man leave the house and slam the car door. He turned the engine on, then off. He sat there for a long time before he went back inside.
After that, the couple started going for walks again. They held hands dutifully, like school children following instructions. But there were no more stories. By the end of the month, the walks were over.
She’ll move out by Christmas, an old hair tie says. When she decides she’s done, she’s done.
But last year’s soggy leaves still believe in resurrection. They used to belong to trees who slipped into comas every winter, then woke up in time to be teenagers again, dousing themselves in pollen and perfume. Just wait, they insist.
Why do you care about these people? the ghosts of apple cores reply. Do you think they ever paid attention to you?
Of course they did, the old leaves whisper. They looked at us all the time. They know their bodies are failing. But they’re part of other people’s memories now, and memories don’t get old and die.
The fresh leaves at the top of the compost pile shift uneasily. They don’t like to see their elders reduced this way. When it’s their turn, they swear, they will go quietly.
Dust to dust, murmur the orange peels, frosted white and blue.
Life to life, the old leaves say. We’re proof of that. By next year we’ll be in the garden.
No one replies. They don’t have the heart to say that by springtime, the leaves will no longer know who they are.
***
By the time the woman moves out, just after the first robin wrenches a worm from the ground, there is no one left to mourn. The man has sacrificed his good memories. All he has left are chalk outlines, marking the places where happiness used to be.
He finds it hard to be hopeful lately, to invite friends over, to hold someone else’s gaze. Something in him has withered. He’s not sure it will ever regrow.
The compost heap is quieter now. I told you they would never last, the eggshells mutter, but no one responds. The old leaves can no longer speak.
In May, the man flips the compost over and fills a wheelbarrow with fresh earth. It used to be full of rage and longing and hope. Now it is something new. He tells himself this will be the summer he begins again. He will grow carrots and peas and lavender. He will invite friends over and throw open the windows to let in a breeze.
As he mixes the compost into the garden, he tells himself his heart is still somewhere inside his chest, even if he can no longer feel its edges. When he’s done, he runs his fingers through the fresh dirt. Something nameless reaches back.
Pauline Holdsworth is a writer and radio producer who grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction is forthcoming in The Forge Literary Magazine, and she was shortlisted for The Masters Review 2021 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers. She attended the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop.