Late Bloomer

by Kelly Murashige

You come out to your family over video chat.

It’s a Tuesday evening, and though your mother is the first to log on, your father doesn’t join her in the Zoom window until well past the agreed-upon starting time. She explains that he was busy bringing the plants in from the lanai.

“Is this a real storm,” your younger brother asks, “or will it turn out to be nothing?”

You study the sliver of a bookshelf behind his head. You have not yet seen his new apartment. You never even saw his dorm. While he left as soon as he could, you chose to remain, the sole thing keeping your parents from becoming empty nesters.

“They estimate six inches tomorrow,” your father says to your brother. “Up to fifteen inches by Thursday, and from there, who knows?”

You sit alone in your room, your parents’ voices filtering through the thin drywall. You know video-chatting from here does nothing to change the fact that you are well into your twenties and still living with your parents, but you like having a rectangular window of your own, separate from the shaky vertical video labeled parents (mom do not change this again).

“Fifteen inches,” your mother murmurs, echoing your father.

“Six inches,” your brother says. “Some of us have no idea what six inches looks like.”

You clench your jaw, ignoring your brother’s insufferable smirk. In addition to being the first to attend college—to leave the nest, to fly out of the country on a study-abroad trip to Japan—he was also the first to lose his virginity.

You wish you didn’t know this. Wish you hadn’t been the one to catch him and his first girlfriend hooking up on the couch, which, to this day, you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Wish you hadn’t blushed so furiously when he asked if you were going to give him The Talk, prompting him to then say, Wait. You’ve done it, though, right?

Sometimes, at night, you remember your long silence. The way it stretched between you, shattering when he laughed.

It’s true that you have no way of conceptualizing six or fifteen inches. You haven’t measured anything since freshman-year geometry.

“Is this a sex joke?” your father asks, his voice thundering out of his Zoom window.

You close your eyes, imagining yourself drowning in fifteen inches of rain. You wouldn’t even try to stay afloat. To tread water. You would open your mouth. Invite God’s tears in. Let them fill all your hollow spaces.

“Is it?” your father asks. “Is that what this is?”

“Honey,” your mother says. “Inside voice, please.”

Her children are grown, but she’s still a mother.

“Yes, Dad,” your brother says. “It is. That’s why she doesn’t get it. She’s basically asexual.”

“Not basically,” you snap.

The regret is instant.

You only just manage to catch the surprise flickering across your brother’s face before slamming the lid of your laptop and kicking your door closed with your heel.

“What is she saying?” your father asks from the main room. “She’s asexual? What does that mean? She reproduces on her own?”

Your mother, a former Women’s Studies and Political Science major, breaks it all down for him, keeping her voice low.

“No, she’s not,” your father says. “She can’t be. That’s not normal.”

“I CAN HEAR YOU,” you shout.

They fall silent for a minute.

Then, urgent whispers that creep under your door.

Your phone buzzes with a text from your brother.

maybe we should talk, he says.

You turn off your phone.

---

Though your father doesn’t believe in hanakotoba, having grown up in America with almost no link to his Japanese roots, you have always felt as though he speaks through plants anyhow. Twenty-something years ago, for example, after accidentally missing your brother’s birth, he showed up at the hospital with nine separate bouquets: one for each year he and your mother had been together.

About a decade later, after berating you for failing your road test on your first try, then quickly shifting gears at the sight of your teary face, he left the apartment and returned with peonies. Your favorite.

Your father stands in your doorway with a new plant, his expression apologetic and his hands clamped around the pot. Once he has set the plant down on your carpeted floor, he says, “Epipremnum aureum.”

Gesundheit, you think.

“Look it up,” he says. “It’s a fascinating plant.”

You watch him retreat, then do what he says.

Epipremnum aurem is considered a late bloomer, infamous for its reluctance to flower. It can grow quite tall if supported but rarely develops adult leaves.

It also, evidently, can be propagated asexually.

Another knock at your door. You slowly look up. Your father’s back in the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back.

“It’s resilient,” he tells you. “Can survive basically anything.”

Outside, the rain has started, splattering the windows.

“It’s different,” your father says, “but it’s beautiful.”

You watch him for a minute.

You’re so much like him.

Standing, you wrap your arms around him, your arms like thin vines. You cling to him. Hold him tightly. Feel him hold you in return. Stronger together, you wait out the storm.

---

Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, Kelly Murashige is the author of the award-winning YA novels THE LOST SOULS OF BENZAITEN and THE YOMIGAERI TUNNEL, as well as the upcoming adult novel MILKIVERSE (2027). Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Though she can be shy, she loves obsessing over books, video games, and strange animals.