Liquidity

Flo had a passion for landscaping. 

 Even before she started grade school, Flo loved digging in the backyard dirt, churning up weeds, worms, beetles, and mysterious little treasures like buttons, coins, little green army men, thimbles, dice, and other surprises she placed in a little bucket for keepsakes. Other little girls might like jumping rope and playing dress-up, but Flo kept outside digging up dirt with a little spade her dad gave her as a birthday present. When summer came and all the other kids played their video games indoors, she stayed outside, digging up dirt and treasures. 

As she grew older, she discovered the wonders of planting seeds in the dirt and watching little sprouts popping up after a few days, then flowers that grew and grew into bigger flowers. When the flowers died, she got excited because they had lived their little lives under her care and supervision and she gave them little funerals, digging them up and burying them underground. She believed their little souls helped the next flowers she planted grow bigger and stronger. 

She got the biggest rocks she could carry and laid them out in a circle. She dug up some dirt and planted fresh flowers inside the circle. She placed her knickknack treasures around the flowers inside the rocks. She really liked the result, as if the flowers had their own sacred space. 

One time, her mom gave her a clay plot, some potting soil, and a small geranium plant. She dutifully put the soil in the pot and planted the geranium in it. The flower grew and it looked pretty, but Flo could not help but feel that the whole business was somehow like cheating. She regarded the potting soil as fake. She much preferred digging up dirt and doing the planting herself. 

In her teens, Flo easily convinced her parents to let her claim the backyard for her projects. The family lived in Baton Rouge near the mighty Mississippi, an ideal subtropical climate for luscious plants.  

Her dad helped her construct a bin of pallets to start a compost pile. She put all the kitchen scraps in it. In the summer, she eagerly took on the task of mowing the front yard in the spring and summer, catching the clippings in the rear bag of the mower, and dumping them into the bin. In the fall, she raked up leaves and added them to the bin. When she dug up worms, she added them too. She even took to shredding all the junk mail and added that to the compost. The next summer she used the decomposed rich, mealy result to mix in the dirt when setting new plants in the ground with glorious results.  

Her ideas for and execution of landscapes grew ever more elaborate and sophisticated with rocks, borders, timbers, and an ever-expanding variety of plants – red and yellow chrysanthemums, banana plants, whirled yellow rosinweed flowers, white and pink elephant ears, scarlet minbots, blue cornflowers, a pink crepe myrtle in one back corner of the yard, a magnolia with its magnificent white blooms in the other corner and so much more.  

When she graduated from high school, she knew what she wanted to do. Over the protests of her parents, she skipped college and went to work for the local landscaping company. She would work her way up, save her money and start her own landscaping business one day. 

“After seeing all these photos of your backyard, I must admit you have a certain talent for this kind of work,” the owner told her. “But I must warn you, it gets searing hot in the late summer. You’ll work long hours. You’ll be surrounded by a bunch of dumbass boys who just might have wandering hands. You think you can handle it, Flo?” 

“Oh yessir, Mr. Green, yessir, when can I start sir?” 

Sure enough, Mr. Green was right about the dumbass boys who couldn’t tell a peony from a dahlia. And sure enough, one of them slapped her on the butt when she was bent over a shovel and sneered, “Hey, I’d like to plant a big one right there.” She turned around and knocked him whomper-jawed with the shovel. “You must be a lesbian,” he moaned, and she kicked him in the groin. She did not have time for boys or girls, spending her free time poring over gardening books and experimenting in her greenhouse. 

She got a reputation, and no boy ever bothered her again. Once they learned to keep their distance, she warmed up and even had an occasional beer with them after work, teaching them about soil amendments, plants, and nutrients and so on. They came to like her too, and even improved their gardening skills modestly because of her. 

Flo quickly proved herself to be the best and most knowledgeable of the crew and Mr. Green named her crew leader after a couple of months. He even let her float landscape ideas to him, some of which he adopted.  

After a couple of years, Mr. Green even offered her office work, which she turned down. The thought of working indoors sent chills down her spine – literally.  

But ever since she was born, each summer got hotter and hotter. Rivulets of sweat became small streams puddling around her feet as she worked. Once she gloried in the sweat – now she came to dread it. Her clothes became drenched each day shortly after noon. When she got home, she took off her clothes and squeezed them into a bucket. Then she sat naked in front of a fan, the air cooling her soaked body, then stepped into a bath of cold water and drank an ice-cold Dixie beer. She had stopped using air-conditioning long ago to better acclimate her body to the heat. She slept naked, slightly dampening the sheet with a spray bottle before lying down on top of it. She slept the deep sleep of warm exhausted bodies. 

She kept losing crew members to heat exhaustion and wondered how much longer she could hold out. From time to time, she even entertained the heresy of breaking down and doing office work – but if she thought about it very long, she felt like she might hurl, the betrayal to her true self being too overwhelming. The crews grew smaller and smaller, and she worked longer and longer hours. 

~~~ 

One evening, Flo pulled off her suffocating boots and socks and could not believe her eyes. Water covered her feet, thick and solid, not spilling to the ground. She could not tell if she even had regular feet at all! She stood up on her bare feet, or whatever they were, expecting the water to slide off and splatter, but no. She took a step, then another, then another. To her astonishment, she was walking on water! Water feet! How was this even possible? How did the feet hold their form? Stiff water? She pulled the boots and socks up, walked around the house, pulled them off and … still water! She undressed to take her usual cold bath and could not even distinguish her feet from the bath water. She got out of the tub, dried off her body and, yes, her water feet too.  

I must be dreaming. In my dream, I will lie down and go to sleep and wake up dry. 

The next morning, Flo awakened, yawned, stretched, and stood up to go the kitchen for the usual morning routine – whole wheat toast and chicory coffee. It wasn’t until the toaster popped that she looked casually at her feet – after all, it had only been a dream, no reason to panic. 

Yikes! Now my ankles are water too! Feet and ankles! Yet I stood up and walked to the kitchen without even thinking about it! Am I a water goddess? Atlantis? Anuket? No, that’s the Nile River. Am I the goddess of the Mississippi? Calm down, calm down! Think! 

Thank goodness the boots and socks covered up her liquid feet and ankles. It would be so hot inside, maybe the water would melt away and her regular feet would reappear. Instead of the usual shorts lest the water kept creeping up her body, she wore jeans. 

“What? Are you crazy, wearing blue jeans in 100 plus-degree weather?” Mr. Green exclaimed when he saw her. 

“Don’t want my legs to blister,” she replied and hurriedly grabbed a shovel and started digging. Would her liquid feet hold up as she pounded the shovel into the dirt? They did.  

That evening when she undressed, the water had crept up to her knees. 

Day after day, the water crept up her body – knees, thighs, nether regions, waist. As each body part liquified, she pinched it to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Each time the part she pinched scrunched up then rippled and smoothed out and each time she said ouch.  

Every bit of her water body functioned as expected and she did not know what to make of it. 

To be safe, she started wearing long sleeves and gloves all day to her crew’s astonishment as the temperature slowly climbed day after day. And day after day, the water kept up its ascent up her body, abdomen and spine, breasts, hands, forearms, upper arms. When the water reached her shoulders and clavicles, she started wearing a scarf. With the temperature touching 114 degrees, everyone thought she was batshit crazy. So did she. 

When her chin turned to water, Flo had to confront whether she wanted to don a ski mask and knit cap as the temperature inched its way to 117. Batshit crazy indeed – boots, blue jeans, long-sleeve shirt, gloves, scarf, ski mask, knit cap – it was all too much. 

She did not go to work again and did not return calls. She stayed at home in her improbably solid water nude body until every last strand of hair had converted. 

She studied her body each day in the mirror as the alteration of her body progressed. She had never cared all that much about her looks, but now with the conversion complete, she had to admit she is beautiful, stunningly beautiful, a faint shimmery blue aura enveloping her, velvety green eyes taking it all in. She shook her head and her hair cascaded about in exquisite slow-motion. 

So beautiful, yet Flo shuddered to think about anyone seeing her. Always an intensely private person, she could not bear to become an object of unrelenting curiosity as she knew she must be should she reveal herself – an instant celebrity; an object of endless fascination; endlessly pursued by hawkers of fame and celebrity; looky-loos; would-be handlers; hangers-on; cameras everywhere; paparazzi; a phenomenon to be probed and prodded by doctors, scientists, and mystics; men and women who just HAD to know what would it be like. There seemed to be no end of horrific scenarios playing out in her mind – the more she thought of, the more unbearable it became. 

Suddenly, it came to her, and she knew what she had to do. At midnight, Flo, The Goddess of Water, left her house, walked into the Mississippi, and sank into her dreams.  

She floated in the Mississippi currents and dreamed of deserts filled with huge blue agave, perhaps because cactus does not do well in the heavy humidity of the lower Mississippi. As she passed New Orleans, she dreamed of rich silt soil and deltas. She floated along the Gulf Coast until she reached Florida and dreamed of white sand beaches and turquoise water. As she passed the southern tip of Florida, she got caught up in the Gulf Stream which ferried her to the Norwegian Sea. From there, she joined the Great Ocean Conveyer Belt of streams, floating in cold water past the South American coast down to north of Antartica proceeding west, then up to the narrow pass between Russia and Alaska, where she turned South past the southern tip of Africa and back up the Atlantic to the Norwegian Sea and starting all over again in a continuous loop. 

Flo flows flows flows along gently with the streams 

Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream. 

Copyright © Johnny Clack 2022