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Thanks to Clint Collide of Collide Press for highlighting the trailer for “Do I Sound Gay?” that came out 10 years ago, and points out an important question and narrative for some of us—here’s the whole film:
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When I reached out to James Worth about publishing his short story “Big Givers” he had written how this was a writing exercise that began with a “tingle, tingle, tingle,” and a call to action he received by inspiration while, in his words, “My fiction still resists me.” But isn’t that so often how it works? Inspiration knocks when we are at loose ends, no agenda required.
In this case, it produced a beautiful take on society’s assumptions and finding our own way. I was utterly charmed by this folk-myth about a leafling’s life from birth to manhood, and we hope you will be too.
Big Givers
by James Worth of Just Wonderin'
I was born a leafling and they panicked because I could not breathe in a way they understood. Under hospital lights, I was suffocating. I had this fragile pale body made of fresh wood that had not yet grown dark and hardy. They kneaded my chest like dough and dissolved my woody cells with surgical gloves. I had all these balled-up baby-leafs attached to all my green and glittering veins but they insisted I was of blood and brittle flesh and fibrous hair, all these things I had no interest in possessing. They pulled my face apart and told me here is a mouth and they breathed air into me despite my protests–no, I make air with my bones! I am meant to give life! Put me in the dirt, give me to the sun and I will breathe! But they held my stillness down, mistaking it for dying. I was born to be still while all else shifted around me but they pressed air into me until the pockets formed lungs and liver and stomach and my branches ballooned into gangly limbs and my leafs became eyes and nose and tender-tipped fingers and when I tried to exhale all of the air they’d filled me with, it came out a cry. They smiled and they cried, too. They told me I was alive.
I was born a leafling and they shaped me into a person because I could not tell them in my stillness what I wanted. To stay a leafling and someday grow sturdy and bright and spilling green like jewels from a drawstring purse. To be rooted in soil and have limbs cool beneath the earth and limbs reaching toward the big blue Giver in the above. To be tough and impenetrable and life-making and quietly wise, nurturing and nurtured. To be a bendy little leafling baby boy and grow into a tall and kind mothering man on the edge of a rolling plain and watch the people gather beneath me with their blankets and baskets, to feel the squirrels and their scurrying on the ridges of my body, to see green rise and fall and die and come back all over again, year after year and to be still. I was born a leafling and I was to be still and they made me to move.
I was born a leafling to a family of humans. The science does not track but it never does. Sometimes a leafling is born to a cloud or a mountain range or a raven’s laughter or a crushed moth’s wing sprinkling into the dirt. A leafling can be born to anything so long as there is water and a sun that holds and something beautiful not requiring a witness. There are many, many humans and so many leaflings are born to the humans and shaped into humans because they wanted more of themselves and they cannot recognize when a thing is meant to be a crawling vine or a spindly grass or towering oak or a plump gourd. A human can birth anything but they always shape it into a human because they also think that God looks like them. They do not think they are God but they know God is one of them and they’re just doing what they think they were designed to do.
I’m told I was a quiet baby. I never put up a fuss. I stilled to the movements of the world, mainly reserved to observing the passing of things and finding them beautiful only once they were out of sight. My eyes drank the bold blue of the sky thinking it to be water and my iris bloomed that same blue or just kept reflecting it once the sky had passed.
I’m told I was a quiet baby. I moved and grunted only when I was hungry. My toes wiggled toward dirt but could never find stake in that cool and loamy brown. I needed mothering and so I wriggled and made noises in the back of my throat because of course a leafling does not know how to ask for what is freely given by the sprawling brown Giver. My wriggling toward the earth brought me food in the pale hands of the person that birthed me. My tactless grunting brought me food in murky plastic and I wanted to hate the taste and the feel of the plasticky shape but I was hungry and a leafling soaks up all it is offered.
In photographs, my dumb baby hairs are blonde like daisies. They poked through my head in fits and tufts wondering why they were not leafs with pretty ridges and branching veins. They took on the color of the sun, the big yellow Giver, and held it close to me hoping the warmth might pull leafs from my fat neck or pudgy arms but there was too much skin and I stayed so small where I should have been sprawling.
My head kept pouring sunshine like honey and my big pool eyes swam with water and my toes struggled toward the earth but it was no use. They hadn’t given me a chance. I was born a leafling and their breath shaped me into a human baby and no matter how I tried to give myself all of my plant-needs, I could not push leafs from my blue-red veins through my pale, spotted skin. I could struggle all my life and still I would keep being this gangly thing with too much skin and so much stupid hair and eyes that must move to understand and I must give to myself more than others and that is how it is to live.
I’ve spent much more time being a human than being a leafling. I was taught many human things like pick stuff up, put stuff down, do not trust, look at screen, lock the door, it’s time to come inside, think about girls but play with boys, not enough money, need more money, winter is cold and winter is bad, respect your elders even if they speak stupidly, do not share. Some things are easier than others, like reading is good. I liked words and stories and I liked that they were penned on the thinned out bodies of other leaflings. I could feel their life in the pages of a fable and the smell, the feel, the story, made my human heart sigh and whimper. Other things came to me as strange and contradictory, like speak-up-when-spoken-to which is much different than be-quiet-the-grown-ups-are-talking. They do not like when I am quiet on purpose, only when it is a direction. They do not know I was born to be quiet and still. School was okay when I got to be still and listen but it was hard to learn things from whiteboards when there was moist earth right outside and bugs carrying whispers on their wings and so many Givers piling up their gifts and so many barriers between.
The most helpful human thing I learned is to keep things in, not like storing water in my thick trunk for when I need it, but like holding in all my balled-up leafs so that they never have to meet drifting disease or scorching sun or shriveling up and dying when the cold rolls in like fog. Keeping things in is a way of avoiding pain and it’s something humans are very good at and I became a good human when I started keeping things in. I turned my inclination towards quiet stillness into rigid silence. I stopped wriggling my toes toward the earth, I stopped taking the sky into my blue-bloom irises. My sunshine hair turned to a dark muddled brown not like rough, tender bark but like plastic shopping bags that say THANK YOU on them so many times that you begin to wonder if the bag doesn’t secretly hate you. I held in what can most closely be called desire. Desire to let my leafs grow, desire to turn my limbs to spindly branches, desire to root in the dirt and stretch toward the big blue Giver.
But the more I suppressed my leafling desires, the more human desires began to arise. I collected coins with all of the states pressed into them, because money is good and so are borders and nations. I craned my bone-dense neck up toward every screen I passed, wondering if I might be able to fall into it and how little desire there might be there. My voice rose and lilted and cracked and I learned I could use it to demand things–food, games, objectsobjectsobjects. Books spoke to me less. They recognized me less. I fell in love with objects. I looked at other boys and fell in love with them and then I buried that desire under more objects and screens and moneyneed and wariness toward others.
I became a good human with all the right desires squashing all the wrong desires and I got so good at it I couldn’t even remember that I’d been born a leafling and that I always would be a boy shaped from plant-stuffs. By the time I’d become tall and so human that I might never be mistaken for a budding green thing, I decided I was very good at it and I could get comfortable in the discomfort until my boy-body gave out.
But in all of my human learning, in all the sculpting others did to me and I did to myself, no one warned me. No one tried to tell me, prepare me for the moment that something might come along and crack me open and watch my ruby blood turn emerald and coax my brittle gaze back toward the big Givers and all their gifts. Nobody warned me that others could be boy-shaped leaflings too and that their breath could be a reminder of a lost shape and a deeply buried mode of being.
He came to me sweetly like helicopter seeds turning in loose spirals from the canopy above. He came from nowhere or maybe from a father starting a garden. He didn’t say much. He knew the sideways smile of selective silence. His hand was thin like paper and he led me somewhere green. His name was Lavender he told me without telling me. He laid my stiff-clay body down in a bed of dried out pine needles, rust-colored and coppery but rising with scent. There was a running, trickling thing spilling downhill from the place where the big blue Giver dusted the cold tops of mountains with white and the big yellow Giver kissed the sparkling white until, in its shyness, it fled toward the vast canyons between continents. His palms were dull green and his fingers tipped with purple, his softness tickling my chin as he turned my head up and up and up toward the crowns of the trees where branches like boy-limbs reached out toward one another. Leaves rustled like intimate conversation over steaming coffee. The sky that puzzled through the gaps in the caressing green filled my eyes with blooming blue. Sunlight melted like gold between the fingers of the canopy and the trees who have never felt greed let it drip drip drip onto my skin. And my skin gasped in reply! A terrible, rattling sigh through forgotten lungs, a breath that is held and never released.
He bent toward me like a willow and with his papery hands, he took mine and buried our interlocked fingers into the earth. Oh, he was kissing me. We were kissing deeply through our shared breath of sunlight and wet soil and silent audience. We were boy-bodies kissing with our plant-needs. The big blue filled up my eyes until I wept in fits and sobs, all my held in desire bursting forth and watering the dirt that I dug myself into. The human-boy of me did not melt away. He was too full of shape. But he remembered, too, being a leafling. I felt my balled-up buds of tiny green still swimming through the highways of my veins. I felt how my skin could be rough-hewn like bark in the rippling sun. I felt how my fingers could snake and wind into the big brown Giver’s earth and my whole boy-body could stretch toward the big blue and big yellow and be given to the giving if I let it. I felt the sweetness in being a boy-human-plant-body. Or just a leafling in the body he has.
I laid with Lavender kissing our interwoven breath and sharing what our roots pulled up. I laid with him so long, knowing he was beautiful only because I could feel him rather than see him. We closed our eyes tight and held our big blue inside because we would need it. The sun tilted haphazard in the sky, spinning its gold thread at rapidly melting angles. The more it melted, the shorter its reach grew and the more our boy-bodies slowed. We pulled each other close but the darker it grew and the longer the cold seemed to stretch, the more we found that we didn’t need warmth from one another. Our kisses were enough. The things our fingers shared with one another in the deep dark dirt were enough. The big blue that we’d stored deep was enough. The shared kissing-breath kept us sweet and we let ourselves slow when the big blue Giver began to give more white than blue. We let the stillness be good and the quiet important. We slumbered in a gangly embrace that lasted for so long but passed so quickly because it was good and lovely. The cold was its own sort of giving kiss. It allowed us deep, true rest.
So when the warm honey sunlight returned and the days grew longer, we had all the held energy to stretch our limbs. Lavender and I in those waking moments listened to birds return and critters crawl from their burrowed holes. The sun’s gentle kiss sent the shy white into the earth to replace the critters and we drank it up. I grew taller without really thinking about it. My skin cracked like pavement though I could barely remember what pavement was, and it turned hard and rough but beckoning. From my limbs, I felt my veins grow toward the blue and baby-leafed fists punched through the cracks and for the first time in my life I felt my leafs emerge from their forced hiding and they kissed the sun like the sun kissed the white like I kissed Lavender like he kissed the dirt. I grew big and oak-chested. I reached toward the big blue Giver and it raised me up through the decades in an instant.
Lavender kissed my feet and held me closely at the base. He did not grow tall with me but filled out his purple petals down low. Neither of us minded that we grew separately and differently. To the passersby, it might appear that we were nothing like the other, that we could never be boy-bodies locked in a perfect kiss knowing each other so intimately. But they could not see us all tangled up in the big brown Giver’s earth, speaking with our silence, kissing with our sharing, loving with the shifting seasons.
Life returned with the sun and its giving honey. Lavender and I stayed quiet and watched it all. The creek widening and laughing as it reached all the way up to the mountains it spilled from once more. Deer pushed their tough antlers against my tough bark and we laughed. Fat little caterpillars nibbled at my emerald green leafs–it tickled and we laughed. A hawk perched high in my crown and stayed still with us for hours until something called it forth and she leapt with a cry of joy like a child’s imperfect release.
People traipsed across the renewed field of silky green grass-like-hair and laid out blankets in my shade. They opened their baskets and spread their goods and their objects but they were good objects without vanity or greed. They enjoyed things truly and sweetly here. People came and went from beneath my shade. They talked of love and melancholy and difficult things like incompatible bodies and passion wilting with the seasons. Beneath my big branches and their settled leafs, the people found safety to sigh out their hardships amongst all that is given and to let it be released. Lavender and I listened and we talked without speaking.
A day came when two boy-bodies laid themselves out beneath me sipping dark-jewel liquids and devouring brittle crackers and soft cheeses. The boy-bodies took turns pushing Lavender to their nose and inhaling him deeply. We were all tickled and we all laughed. The two boy-bodies in my shade kissed and they did not know that mine and Lavender’s boy-bodies were also kissing. The two boy-bodies took off their clothes and let the big yellow Giver kiss their smooth skins with every kiss they gave one another. The two boy-bodies pressed into one another and Lavender and I looked away, knowing the best beauty is felt, not seen.
When they were finished and full of breath and color and leafy parts, they laid themselves out in the drying pines of my neighbors and sighed the seasons away, knowing that they’d found a place where boy-human-plant-bodies can be sweet with one another. Where desire is good and the held-in things can be held-out and offered up like gifts. Shedding the forced-shape and accepting all the gifts that the big keeps giving. The boy-bodies closed their eyes, took one another’s spindly fingers and buried themselves in the soil.
I opened my eyes and breathed through my human mouth. Lavender slept next to me still, his naked boy-body curled up into mine in the dirt and leaves. I rested my human head on a pillow of big brown and looked up toward the big blue and big yellow and held my boy tight. I laid with him for what felt like years of shifting seasons and when he woke and his purple-bloom hands traced my chest and my blue-bloom irises kissed him, we knew we’d found a place where two boy-human-plant bodies can be sweet with one another.
We’d stay human because we had to. The shape holds tightly. But we could be leaflings too. When the world gave to us, we gave to each other and then back to the world. And in turn, we could be boys and leaflings and lovers and trees and humans and plants and everything was Big Giving and every bit of love made more love.
I was born a leafling. I am a leafling. I am a man. I am a plant. The big world gives and so I give back. Slowly, with little-stillness, with big-quiet. Such is my way of chosen life.
James Worth is a writer in a state of constant searching. Whether it be for beauty, purpose, community or a sense of self, he is always creating with the intent of understanding the world around him. Though he considers himself first and foremost a novelist, he is also an ambitious creature and a lover of all forms of artistic expression whether it be poetry or short stories, collaging, photography or songwriting, James lives to create and connect. James lives in Boston with his fifty-odd plants, a massive vinyl collection and a handful of finished novels he hopes to publish in the near future. He'd love it if you'd join him over at his Substack page, Just Wonderin' where he writes whatever makes his brain tingle.
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Thanks again, James, for this wonderful story!
Thanks for the shout out!