Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia’s pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist—holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew—moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

A car shoots down the street too fast, a fifteen-year-old future ex-con at the wheel, tires squealing as he turns the corner onto Victoria, actually burning rubber, as it’s called, and the recovering terrorist drops her watering can. Reeking fish fertilizer slops over onto her sneakers.

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She has written letters to city hall requesting a traffic circle (a speed retardant, as it’s called, putting her in mind of the large, soft boy with slivered moons of dirt under his fingernails who shuffled around in a slow-moving cloud at the back of her third-grade classroom before being taken away to wherever children like that were taken away to back then). She has circulated a petition that her neighbours have eagerly signed. They all have small children and animals, as does the recovering terrorist. They are teachers and enviropreneurs and directors of small NGOs that help build medical facilities in developing countries. They’ve promised to fill the traffic circle with indigenous flora, promised to guard against graffiti tags, to ensure it doesn’t become a new neighbourhood dumpsite for used condoms, syringes, Twizzler wrappers, and the inevitable orphaned muffler. But the city just keeps putting them off, citing a litany of bureaucratic impediments. The recovering terrorist has telephoned, again and again. She’s been told, redtape redtape redtape redtape. She’s said, “Look, it’s a traffic circle, a speed retardant, we’re asking for here, not a water filtration plant.”

The recovering terrorist has a name that sounds like fresh fruit, an ingénue of a name. Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names—Squeaky, Patty, Julie—as if they can’t quite take themselves seriously enough. When she first stood up @ group, about three years ago, and said, “My name is ____ and I am a terrorist,” she felt none of the relief the small ad in The Georgia Straight had assured her she’d be flooded with.