The following is an excerpt from Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers. She is a writer and musician originally from Atlanta. Her fiction has appeared in The Baffler, The Massachusetts Review, Guernica, and elsewhere
Hothouse Bloom is about a woman named Anna who retreats to an orchard seeking solitude and communion with nature, but her old friend Jan disrupts her withdrawal, urging her back toward art and connection. As harvest looms and outsiders intrude, Anna becomes consumed by the need to make the orchard profitable, mirroring the obsessive patterns of her past. It is now available from Hub City Press.
5
Her failure made her feel weak, human. She was looking for the right way to interface with those trees, since sometimes, living hermetically beside them, she glimpsed a brief beam of something enormous and iridescent just before it vanished… how to capture it? And at the same time a new kind of loneliness was arriving alongside the burning of her muscles, weighing like a person’s hand in the center of her chest, and she was beginning to question her capacity to really adjust to complete solitude. She took photos of the farmstead—why? Just to prove she was there. Not to anyone else. She deleted every message, declined every call. She recorded a cat blinking slowly at the camera with its bubblecrystal eyes, the cat looking into the phone then squirming away under the porch as Anna stepped forward zooming in with two fingers, clumsy, turning on the flash to capture the cat crouching over kittens in the shade, seeing the tapetum glow back at her from the minerals in the cat’s eyes, minerals in the eyes as in the earth, and why couldn’t she rewire her origin to become part of the earth here too, like the cat who was born here and would die here? Redeye is red because of blood, she remembered. Nothing was alleviated.
Against her better judgment, in those days of confused fragility, she called her mother.
It was in the afternoon. They had opted to video chat. Her mother’s image lagged on the screen. She kept freezing in front of the empty wine bottles, unwashed dishes, filth.
“Well? How are you adjusting?” came the voice, emulsified by the poor connection.
“It’s beautiful here.”
“Give me a tour! The curtains look different.”
“I’m on a desktop,” said Anna. “And I haven’t done anything to the curtains.”
“Oh.”
It was an old computer with a bulbous monitor, like a bubble, like the cat’s eyes. Though the image was blurry, she could see the unfocused dead look in her mother’s face, sense the desolation of the rest of her apartment.
“I’ll take a video and send it to you.”
“Great.”
Her mother smiled at something off-screen, then returned to Anna and frowned again. The sunshine glared over her image like a net of light. Anna adjusted the curtains. They sat together in miserable silence.
“Have you met any of your neighbors?”
Anna pretended not to hear.
“Anna? I said have you met anyone?”
“A friend of his came over. He said to stop by.”
“Have you?” The voice was completely disembodied.
“Not yet.”
“Why not? Go visit!”
She promised vaguely that she would.
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
The screen flooded red. Then came chopped-up siren sounds. Her lagging face stayed blank. But blankness did not faze Anna.
“What are you doing out there? Honestly.”
The filth of the apartment was stranger. Her mother had always been a clean woman. Was that grief? Anna thought. Should I be deadeyed and crying too? I never even think about it. I can’t imagine a place like this living so vile.
Anna didn’t answer. She imagined what it would be like to do what her mother wanted, to abandon the orchard to move home, or at least to visit, the cobwebs reconstructing themselves, the newlyliving greenhouse plants withering, the summer bugs invading the trees…
“Call me once you’re done dallying. We’ll get it on the market and you can come back to your life,” her mother said before hanging up.
She turned the computer off. It was quiet again.
She felt strangely comforted. Loved a little. Sad too: or like a vessel emptied of liquid.
She spent a few minutes staring at the rug, trying to untangle those emotions. The colors of the world seemed overexposed, grainy. Her head hurt.
One sweet thing to this anonymity, she thought, to the nonsentience of these plants and animals: nobody passes judgment if I’m feeling lonely, nobody’s here to pity me. I can be full of rage in a silent world. It’s a different thing to be alone out in public in front of everybody, all the windows of the world looking down on a solitude as shameful as it is agonizing. The spectacular solitude of life-near-others.
This solitude is sweeter, gentler, deeper.
Then she felt angry with herself, since some internal movement was still trying to drag her back into the world. Why had she called her mother?
She stepped outside. Sound touched her like a balm. Little birds, so sweet on the ear. She saw them in the bushes. Little brown birds. Sparrows? Maybe some type of sparrow. And the bush was a buckthorn bush. She had learned. Here was a world that no longer appeared as a tangled and undecipherable wall of green, but as… the sparrows in the buckthorn.
Transporting her image outside the farmstead like that, revealing it to her mother…
Better for all of us to do as we’ve always done and retreat into our private graves.
But there was still a kind of tranquility. She exhaled. She went to mount the tractor, which she rode like a blue mechanical horse through the tall grasses of the orchard, hosing the first trees down with neem oil as though baptizing them.
I will gather up the courage to approach that paradise of beasts, she thought. Yes.
***
Afraid of trapezing through the underbrush like Gil she drove her car around the enormous block—a block of field and fruit, vegetables, metal machines and so on—to the sheep farm. It was morning. She drove through the gates and saw the empty fields of plain green grass. Then livestock began slowly dotting her field of vision, sheep and goats, some snug with blue and green fleeces over their wool; some isolated, some congealed like sticky rice. Dogs too. Black and white herding dogs, the colossal white dogs she’d seen from afar, a terrier… One by one they peeled off from their pastures to run and bark happily beside her car. She was scared to hit them. She slowed her car to a crawl. A squat shingled house painted green formed at the end of the dirt road, and when she parked and exited the whirlpool of dogs revolved around her and she laughed and stroked them and stumbled with their legs until Gil opened the door with a face as red and joyous as a cherub’s.
Inside they sat in plastic chairs around a large square table. It was dim. The television was on and dirt was scattered by the front and back door. Gil looked at her with bewildered happiness, as though afraid to speak.
“I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost!” he said finally.
“Just settling in,” said Anna. She tried to smile.
Gil sniffed and nodded. He took a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket, put them on, then looked again at Anna. His magnified eyes looked big and squirrely. He took his cell phone out of his pants pocket and quickly stood back up.
“Let me just phone my wife to tell her that you’re here,” he said.
He walked into the kitchen.
She looked around. The stream of sound from the television was tinny… it was only the weather channel, but the unpleasant whine from the speakers was forcing itself… she felt the ghost of a headache. The place was filled with… paper towels stacked up in corners, plastic wrappers from packages, the trash needed to be taken out, a vacuum cleaner stood grimy and omniscient by the door… cluttered, a bit dismal. There were rugs on the floor, blankets on the couch, unwashed dishes… She became aware of her face. She was frowning.
“Anna, coffee?” Gil called.
“Yes, thank you.”
She heard him pour water. She heard the gas stove ignite. The woman on the weather channel made huge windmills with her hands as she spoke. Gil returned.
“She’s on her way,” he said. “And how are you? How’s the orchard? Any big changes?”
He lingered on the final word.
Anna froze. Has he been watching me?
No, of course not: changes are what one makes. Still, she knew she did not want to tell him a thing. Her psychic interface with the apple trees, the baby buds, the moving waterfeathers of the ducks…
Gil grunted and shifted in his chair.
“It’s alright if not, like you said, you’re just settling in. See some bears?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“I think I heard one out there.”
Gil looked at her with those gigantic and curious eyes.
“Were you scared?” he whispered.
She was about to answer when the back door banged open. A woman with dark heavy long hair came into the kitchen. She shook dirt from her boots and brushed grass and straw off her pants. She looked almost as sunbaked as Gil, prematurely wrinkled, and she was such an enormous, broad-shouldered woman that Anna thought she must be wearing heeled boots or a shoulder-padded jacket or some other magnifying garment, but as she took them both off, her boots and her jacket, looking expressionless as one of the stony rams Anna saw that she was not. It was Tamara.
Tamara glanced into the kitchen.
“You left the whistle open,” she said hoarsely.
Gil looked at Anna, playfully rolled his eyes.
“I know. Tamara, this is Anna,” he said.
“You told me, Joe’s grandkid. The painter.”
Tamara went into the kitchen, then returned with three mugs. She blew on her coffee and didn’t sit down.
“How’s it going?” Gil asked her.
“Not yet,” said Tamara. “I’ll go back out there in a second.”
“One of our ewes is about to lamb,” Gil said to Anna.
Tamara looked at Anna too, with intensity and a bit of evil pleasure. Anna squirmed and took a sip of her coffee. She lowered her mug and the woman was still looking at her.
“So you’re going to paint here?” asked Tamara. “Paint the countryside?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. You won’t have time. Then what will you do?”
Anna considered what Tamara would want to hear. Her throat felt tight.
“Just work on the farm,” she said finally.
“Good.”
Everybody was drinking their coffee fast. Something in that woman’s tone made Anna shiver. She hadn’t stopped looking at Anna with that dark and amused expression.
Anna did not see the rigidity that was forming between Gil and Tamara. She was looking out the window at the meadow, instinctively fleeing Tamara’s gaze, trying to see if she could glimpse her own farm through the trees like she could see theirs from hers.
But she saw nothing. Green mass of leaves. Totally opaque.
“Um,” she said without turning her head. “I’m alright, though. I like being surrounded by plants and animals.”
“Good,” Gil said. “Hopefully it won’t get too monotonous!”
That last word rang out again. Well, how to get at this sideways, Anna thought.
She looked at Gil, who had finished his drink and was now smudging some of the coffee stain from his mug to lick it off his finger.
Monotony… she envisioned it: the repeated motion of twisting the black stem of an apple off its tree, five hours with an ax in her hand halving dry logs of firewood while hearing to the dull metal thud. Then piling up the logs and looking at their hundreds of gently brown rings, staring back at her like the steady eyes of animals. She wasn’t looking for adventure, how to explain? How to get at it sideways. Hopefully that wasn’t what Tamara thought. She was looking for a certain absolute stillness of psyche, branches like extensions of her fingers, roots like blood vessels. To build up a world from a few repeated actions.
“I don’t really mind being bored or finding things ‘monotonous,’” she tried to articulate. “I just want to get closer to a certain way of being.”
In fact, she thought, suddenly smiling, to act otherwise implied a certain absence of grace. Suddenly she felt very calm.
“That feeling of ‘monotony’—that’s what I want. That’s what I’m after.”
She glanced at them. They were looking at her wordlessly.
Faltering slightly, she tried to speak more to Gil than to Tamara.
“I want to feel the depth of pleasure in the orchard’s slow changes.” Already feeling uncertain and incoherent, Anna began gripping her mug. “I want to feel that ‘monotony’ down to my bones. Do you get what I mean?”
Gil looked sensitively down at the wood of the table, his chin in his palm.
Meanwhile Tamara’s disgust had spread across her face like a poison.
The woman on the weather channel droned on and on.
Anna tried to fold her impulse neatly back into squares. Tuck it away in some corner of her body. No coming back from this. Run away? There’s the door.
Gil lifted his hat and ran his hand over his thinning hair.
Tamara lifted her mug. She took a sip. Her sip had the cold elegance of a ballerina.
“Time to head back out,” said Tamara. “Why don’t you come along, Anna? I think it might do you good.”
She trailed behind them through the bluegreen day. She walked sullenly, because she didn’t quite understand what she had said wrong… Wasn’t it good she felt attuned to this life?
In the lambing pen a pinkfaced ewe lay contracting in the straw. She was extremely fat and her engorged belly was red like an exploding garnet. Gil bent down to feel her breathing, then they all waited for twenty or so minutes while Gil talked about the flock, the Merinos and the East Fresians, the dairy co-op, his favorite ewes, butter. Eventually the ewe tried to stand, Gil snapped latex gloves over his hands, and a bubble began to inflate from the ewe’s backside. A revolting yellow color. All the while Gil was speaking cheerfully. He squatted and watched the ewe. Tamara watched the ewe but she also watched Anna. Anna tried to watch. Anna tried not to vomit. Within the yellow a muted iron color was emerging, like the sheep was laying a stone egg, a painfully enormous metallic apple… she weakly bleated. She contracted again.
Gil reached inside the animal and tugged on something, still chatting, about what Anna couldn’t even say, she was just trying to suppress a gag, and the metallic apple was revealed as hooves attached to weak little legs that Gil yanked out like a pair of amberdrenched branches. He tore out the whole lamb.
The lamb was like a disgusting dark swamp of fluid.
Gil shook it by its baby face and dragged it around the front of the ewe, who began to lick it.
“That’s an easy one,” Tamara said. “You get used to it.”
Anna felt her face: it was contorted with repulsion. She tried to calm it, to look coolly interested. But Tamara had already seen.
“You know, we’re only guaranteed a profit on about a third of the ewes,” she said slowly. “Whenever we aren’t lambing, I work part-time at the slaughterhouse to make ends meet. I get up at three each morning to take care of someone else’s animals, all crowded in filthy pens, animals that live and die in darkness so that ours can live in sunlight. It’s borrowed happiness. You’re luckier. Working in crops, you don’t have these problems. Different problems, maybe. But there’s no money in lounging around, overlooking the pastures, dreaming of the passage of time, contemplating how the woods affect your soul.”
Anna looked at her. A slaughterhouse job… but she saw the repetition of its pigs like crops, identical, mutated, bred to odd sizes. The animal made plastic. So that’s what this is about? Hard to imagine a place like that, it was true.
Also hard to imagine a woman like that existing alongside Gil.
Gil glanced apologetically up at the two of them.
“Another one’s coming,” he said quietly.
Tamara looked down at him and as their eyes met both seemed to soften as much as stiff bodies could: like hardwood turning into softwood.
And now that she was free from her gaze, Anna was able to think: so they hadn’t understood.
I’m not afraid of cruelty, she thought. I’m not.
She made a point of crouching by Gil.
“I’ll help you with this one.”
“Alright,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to pull.”
But this lamb was arriving with more difficulty. The yellow orb burst early, not that Anna even knew what that meant, but the ewe was heaving and making sounds of pain. Anna studied it. There’s the lamb’s hooves and nose again, as though eager to descend into the ocean of the world. Or just one hoof? Just one hoof. She reached out her hand but Gil gently intercepted it and said it would be better if he handled this one. He reached in. Seemed to rearrange the baby in the birth canal. Anna thought: Not even born and already the world touches you. Gil pulled out the lamb. There was a lot of blood on the back of its legs.
She steeled her stomach. After all, all it is is a pretty pool of colors, right? Ochre and crimson and violet.
Without a word she took the lamb’s face in her hand and shook it as Gil had done.
She stared at Tamara as she did so. Tamara returned her gaze.
That’s right, Anna thought, though she was also afraid. This is my world too. I’ll interface with it on my terms. You won’t bully me out of it.
“Give him another shake,” she heard Gil say. “He hasn’t breathed yet.”
Still looking at Tamara Anna shook its face again. Tamara was still looking too. They remained. Finally Tamara’s look weakened and her eyes dropped.
“You’re hurting it,” she said quietly.
Anna looked back at the lamb. Its little eyes were squinting under her grip. It was shaking its head like it barely knew how. Gil removed Anna’s hand and shook the lamb a bit differently. Finally it moved its head on its own and the mother came around to clean it.
.
Back in the house Gil brewed more coffee. Everyone washed their hands and stood around the kitchen, looking for a way to restore some fragment of harmony.
Gil brought up the bear.
“Right,” said Tamara. “Greg’s wife told me they shot at one the other day but missed. It fled north.”
“That’s towards us,” Gil told Anna. “Poor thing.”
“There really was no need.”
Tamara’s eyes drifted to Anna.
Anna was looking at her coffee. Prideful, guilty.
“But I don’t think it would have come around if they’d had some dogs,” Tamara said.
“Dogs?” said Anna.
“I’m thinking of livestock guardians, though people use them for land in general. We breed and use them.” She pretended to inspect her mug. “Gil suggested you take two.”
“Careful she doesn’t gouge you! She sells them for four hundred a pup,” Gil interjected. “Some family.”
Tamara smiled thinly.
“No, we were going to give some of Toby’s litter to Joe anyway,” she said. “They’re Anatolian-Pyrenees mixes. Great dogs.”
Anna blinked. Tamara really did have enough severe clarity for the two of them. She spoke so quickly, so precisely. Something in her voice was airier now, like earth on wind.
“You’re giving me dogs?”
“Gil didn’t say?”
“No.”
“I meant to surprise her,” Gil said.
“It’s good you like animals. There’s a particular happiness in keeping dogs. Ducks and rabbits are fine, even sheep, but there’s something else in the company of a farm dog. You’ll see.”
“Sometimes at night they’ll all howl together and we’ll join on in with them. Won’t we, Tamara?”
He gave a little howl and Tamara smacked him lightly. Anna laughed. The three of them went out again to one of the sheds. The sun touched everything, the gloomy greenblue cut with new yellow. In the shed, a few young dogs were dozing in the hay and they raised their sleepy heads as the door opened. They must have been about six or seven months old, if Anna could guess, their brown eyes large and intelligent, illuminated, seeking something… they were dirty like wild animals. But unlike the lambs seeped in color, the dogs were pale like doves. Anna crouched down, rubbed a floppy ear with her finger. Good girl. Their little teeth. She smiled.
Still kneeling, she turned around to thank them, but silhouetted by the doorway light she saw that Tamara was relaying something quietly to Gil.
Gil started to say something, stopped, then tried again. Inaudible.
Anna turned back to the puppies.
Already they were spooling out happiness, already they seemed to hold the promise of alleviating the secret corrupting loneliness. It was what she needed. An inhuman companionship.
She chose a large female white puppy with fur like a king’s stoat mantle and a silly-looking male with big brown patches over his eyes. She named them without even standing, choosing the first two syllables that came to mind: Midge and Pell. So christened were the dogs.
“See you soon, I hope,” Gil said as they loaded the animals into Anna’s car.
“She’ll need help training them,” said Tamara, “so she’ll have to.”
Anna nodded, waved, and departed with the dogs. As she drove away she felt her body saturate with melancholy. There’s no sense hoping for another psychic erasure, she thought. I’ll have to live with the ambivalent impression I’ve made on other people. She gripped the steering wheel again, pensive, stern. Then she glanced at the dogs in the rearview. They were climbing over each other, tongues lolling, hanging their heads out the halfopen window and blinking their tiny eyes in the rough wind. She drove home. And after working all the next day, she lay down on the porch of the cabin and listened for the dogs probing around in the grass. She called them so she could stroke them as the sun set. They came one after the other, and sometimes from the nearby pasture they heard the other dogs bark.
Excerpted from Hothouse Bloom, copyright © 2025 by Austyn Wohlers. Published by Hub City Press. All rights reserved.