It was a busy week of deposition hearings and subpoenas, and by the time Friday rolled around Lucy didn’t remember that something had stung her until in the shower she felt a momentary pull to the bath sponge, the faintest of resistance.  Her fingertips brushed against something strange to the touch, fuzzy and long, but larger at the top where she felt a waxy cap, not unlike the seed coat of a new plant. She observed it carefully in the magnifying mirror, a tiny green shoot emerging from her rosy steamed skin.

It was strange, certainly, yet Lucy marveled at it. On her body, this tiny shoot had found a way to rouse itself into fragile life. When she showed it to Tonya, she tried to make a joke: “There’s a tree growing out of my shoulder.”

Tonya, who was vacuuming the couch, neither laughed nor looked up. But later, while Lucy was frying eggs for breakfast, Tonya snuck behind her, pinched the tender stem between her two fingers and pulled.  Lucy was surprised by two things: the tug of angst that sent her spinning around, egg-spattered spatula in hand, crying, “Don’t touch it!” and the sharp pain she felt when the radicle, the seedling’s tentative root, was partially uprooted from under the dermis.

“Did you get it?” Lucy parted Tonya’s pinched fingers for evidence.

“I would if you’d stay still.”

“Leave it alone.”

“What? You want that thing in you?”

“It’s just a seedling,” Lucy said, cupping a hand over the droopy stem.

“That’s not,” Tonya said, grinning in a way that made Lucy want to slap her mouth.

A stubbornness took hold as she uncovered her shoulder to show Tonya. “What is it, then? What does that look like to you, professor?”

“It looks like something that wedged itself in your skin, a splinter, maybe. I’ll take a picture of it and show you.”

But Lucy did not trust her. The tiny wound throbbed, so she cupped it when Tonya came up behind her with her phone.

“It’s an ingrown hair,” Tonya said, although, as far as Lucy could tell, she had not gotten a good look, since Lucy kept covering the bump with her hand. “But it’s really swollen, and it’s turning yellow with pus.”

“Green,” Lucy corrected her. “Plant-green.”

“You think, huh? Well, let’s have the dermatologist look at it, then, wise woman.”

But Lucy wouldn’t call. She stood in the bathroom, staring at her naked shoulder with the cabinet door mirror angled so it would reflect into the mirror above the sink, though now there was nothing more to look at but a bump of swollen skin.  She could hear Tonya on the phone, making the appointment, but she bit back the desire to confront her, to shout, “I’m not a child.” Confrontation was her work. At home, she preferred compromise.

All week long, Lucy secretly checked the progress of her growth on her shoulder, taking photos with her iPhone. A new stem was pushing up and through the dermis. It itched a lot, but Lucy held back from scratching. She wanted the dermatologist to have the best possible sample to examine. Nature had done something to Lucy that she hadn’t done to anyone before. It was something certainly worth suffering a little itching and stinging.

The night before the appointment, Lucy dreamt of a tree, not one that grew out of her, but one that stood before her in a vast sandy desert, its fronds draping gracefully, filtering the bright sun into a lovely, pale light. It was a palm tree, and in the logic of the dream, she knew that it was the Tree of Life. She had always imagined that the Tree of Life would be a banyan or an oak, but the dream told her it was a skinny needle of a palm tree that shot up to the sky proud and erect, its fronds breaking the bright sunlight into jeweled beams. Lucy woke up, buoyed by the pleasant dream. She touched the shoot and thought about what the doctor would say, what wonder of Nature may be about to reveal itself to them all.

At the doctor’s, she and Tonya sat a long time in the waiting room, the air conditioning freezing while they waited to be called in. Lucy had worn a spaghetti strap dress to give clear access to the bump on her shoulder, but she needn’t have bothered. Once in the examination room, the nurse asked her strip from the waist up, which meant she had to take off everything but her panties.

“Let’s do a skin check while we’re at it,” the nurse said. “Is there a history of skin cancer in your family? I see a lot of cherry angiomas and seborrheic keratosis on your back.”

“I speak English and a little bit of Spanish,” Lucy said.

“You’re very fair skinned. You should stay out of the sun.”

“But what about the stem? Do you see it?”

The nurse jotted notes down in her file.

The doctor came in, breaking the silence with her booming voice. She shook hands, took Lucy’s medical history all over again, then asked, “What seems to be the problem?”

The doctor listened attentively to Tonya’s explanation. She occasionally looked to Lucy, but Lucy decided it was better to let the doctor see for herself.

The doctor picked at the bump with a tweezer. Lucy felt a pinch and a tug. Something in her chest responded as though whatever the doctor had pulled was connected to her lungs. The doctor held a fuzzy stem up to the light and said, “That’s curious.” She then discarded the whole thing in the trash. Lucy almost gasped, resisting the urge to dive in the garbage after it.

“Shouldn’t you examine that before you throw it out?”