Banana Tree Boulevard

"I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

1

When Ellie and Elijah moved into the house on Prescott Lane a few weeks after they were married, Ellie felt as if her life lay before her, full of promise. For the first time in a long time, she felt whole. They’d passed it on a drive almost a year before, and she fell in love with it immediately. That love was intensified by the FOR SALE sign in the front yard. She begged Eli to call the realtor listed on the sign. He took some reminding, but finally did it. They met with the realtor and were pleased to find that they could afford the house and the several acres of land. It would take some scrimping, some careful planning, but it was worth it. It wasn't a palace, or even that remarkable as houses went, but Elijah liked that Ellie liked it, so they started the process of buying it.

As they signed papers, the realtor—a slightly overbearing woman in a bright pink pants suit and too much makeup—nervously mentioned a series of disappearances in the area over the last few months.

It brought the signing to a standstill. Eli asked several pointed questions.

Two high school girls from up the road near Glen Lake disappeared one after another. One of the girls lived a few properties down Prescott on the other side. The other was from four or five miles further into the country. After some investigation, though, the police designated them as runaways, based on considerable evidence of terrible home lives.

Ellie and Eli stepped outside the realtor's office and chatted quietly about safety. Ellie’s love of the house and property burned brighter than her fear. They went back inside and finished signing.

2

Although not officially moving into the house on Prescott Lane until after the wedding and honeymoon, Ellie and Elijah started moving furniture and belongings in so that, when they returned home, it would be ready. Ellie also felt it would be good to get her pet ducks, Maddison and Bill, used to their new surroundings.

After a small but lovely wedding and a blissful honeymoon, they moved in and started their new life together, and everything felt as close to perfect as Ellie could imagine. She loved the house, the property, the little stream, and the space they had away from their neighbors. It wasn’t special. Plenty of people had big backyards, Ellie knew, but this chunk of land was hers and Eli’s to do with as they wished. They could spend their lives making it their own. She looked forward to that process intensely.

Only one part of their new property seemed strangely out of place. Behind the house, the ground gently sloped away to where the stream cut across the yard. The previous owners had carefully widened the otherwise deeply cut banks of this stream, and the water flowed into a wide, shallow riffle that both Madison and Bill had already claimed. On the other side of that shallow spot was a grove of tall, thickly planted banana trees that seemed to Ellie, vaguely menacing. When they visited the house in the winter, the trees had been brown and drooping, squashed by frost and cold, and the field and woods beyond could be easily seen.

Now, the banana trees were full and hugely tall and radiant green. Their wide palm-like leaves rustled together hypnotically, even when there was no breeze. 

Ellie, standing at the kitchen window and staring at the strange patch of tropical green, decided to walk down and visit with her ducks and get a closer look at the banana trees.

3

Tuesday morning, Elijah drove to Virginia to meet his cousin, who had an eight-hour layover before being deployed overseas. Ellie wanted to stay home and paint the guest room and get more acquainted with her new home and property. By eleven, she had completed the first coat but was developing a roaring headache from the paint fumes and so walked down into the backyard to see Bill and Madison.

Bill, a mallard, Ellie had raised from a duckling. Wherever she went on the property, Bill followed her around quacking contentedly. He even let Ellie pick him up and cuddle him, which she did often. Madison, a white duck, was more aloof. She hung around but was less fond of being touched or handled. She also sometimes bullied Bill, and Ellie tried to separate them when those disagreements occurred. Despite their quirks (Eli called them “quacks”) Ellie loved them both like her own children.

In the late morning light, the banana trees radiated a luminous, shimmering green. She stood and stared at them and wondered why they were there and why there were so many and what was on the other side of them. It was the only part of the property that she and Eli hadn’t yet explored. She wondered why she felt so unsettled by the thick boles. She felt that eyes were staring back at her as she gazed at them. A tiny but firm voice sounded inside her head. These were her banana trees; this was her property. She slipped off her sandals and walked through the ice-cold shallow stream and climbed up on the other side. The banana trees were so much taller up close, and their spreading palms created thick shade within their verdant stalks.

She glanced back at her house and felt a flush of happiness and joy as she reminded herself again that it all belonged to her and Elijah. That reassured her again that these banana trees were her property, too, and she stepped into their midst.

4

As a girl, Ellie had often played in the cornfields around her childhood home. She was used to the way space felt in the tight stems and waving leaves. She learned early on that it was important to keep a sense of where the sun was, so she didn’t get disoriented.

In the dense, leafy depths under the banana trees, there was space to walk and even stand up straight, but she had trouble keeping track of her position. It didn’t worry her too much, though, because she knew, eventually, she would come out the other side. The rest of the county wasn’t populated with banana trees, the internal voice said.

The air was thick with their odd perfume. Thin grass, tall but pale, grew between the boles. Ellie’s head felt strangely heavy, but she blamed the paint fumes.

She kept going forward, and as she did, a sense of unease grew in her chest. She wasn’t lost, but she felt as if she was trespassing on someone else’s land. She knew that this was her property, but it didn’t assuage the feeling of wavering displacement.

Finally, after a meandering walk, she could see grass beyond the palms and trunks. As Ellie stepped clear of the banana trees, she was startled to see that directly in front of her was her house, sitting on the other side of the wide spot in the stream and up a gentle rise, by Prescott Lane. Once again, Ellie had the strong feeling that something was off, but she couldn’t place what it was. Maybe, she thought, it was just the sensation of having gotten turned around in the banana trees.

She was across the riffle and moving back toward the house when she noticed that her sandals, which she had placed on the grassy bank opposite the banana trees, were gone. She didn’t see Madison anywhere either, but Bill was wandering in the grass to her left. She called out to him, but he didn’t move toward her. Frowning at this, she went toward him. He waddled away, quacking discontentedly.

5

Bill was her baby. Other people had dogs or cats and called them fur-babies, a term she hated, but understood. Ellie had her ducks. Bill from the egg had bonded with Ellie. Madison, they had rescued her from a trailer park when she was still young, but old enough to have been traumatized by hordes of unsupervised kids and dogs running at full tilt around the junky neighborhood. It had taken months for the white duck to get used to her new, quieter surroundings. Bill had helped with this, proudly waddling around his new friend and being mouthy at anything that upset Madison. They were friends, or whatever the analog to friendship was in duckworld. The trust Madison had in Bill didn’t extend to anyone else. The only reason that she sometimes let Ellie pick her up was that Bill seemed to think it was safe and okay. His gentle mallard personality and chivalrous heart made Ellie love him even more.

Yet, now he was as aloof as Madison. He continued to waddle away from her, and when she finally gave up, upset and hurt, she turned back toward her house. As she walked up the hill, she noticed a strange car in the driveway.

When she’d walked out into the backyard, only her small, spunky car was parked there. Eli had taken his pickup. Now, her car was gone and something immense—it looked to her like a hearse—was in her spot. As she got closer, she slowed and moved left, so that she was hidden behind the house. With Eli away, and Ellie still unfamiliar with their new surroundings and neighbors, she didn’t want to be seen just yet.

From the vantage of the back corner, though, she could see that the vehicle was a very old station wagon. It had to be twenty feet long, at least and a deep metallic blue with wood panels. Her father once told her that there was a term for antique cars and trucks with wooden panels, but she couldn’t think of it just then.

As she was considering what to do next, Ellie heard a strange sound coming from the front yard. It was as if someone was dragging or scraping something heavy along the cement driveway. She peeked around the corner and patted her jeans to ensure she had her phone. With a shock, she understood that she had left it on the kitchen table. Silently cursing her carelessness, Ellie leaned back around and gazed up toward the front of the house. The sound continued and she had a sudden realization of what it was. Someone was stealing their newly purchased porch furniture, and she was the dummy who left the house open, thinking it would be a safe way out here in the country. 

Her moment of passionate rage was doused by an icy stab of fear. At the front corner of the house was a person, back turned to her, dragging a large black trash bag on a furniture dolly toward the open tailgate of the wagon. 

They had a weird familiarity that she couldn’t place in that moment, and yet that she felt she knew them; the narrow shoulders, the particular stoop of the back, the hair tied back, but with a halo of flyaways wafting in the breeze. When the man stood and turned, she caught his profile and felt a swelling of nausea. Cold sweat broke out on her skin.

It was Elijah.

6

Her head filled with a thousand bitter and burning curses. The first thing that she wanted to do was run out and welcome him home and ask what he was doing. The scene before her didn’t make sense, but why shouldn’t she give her husband the benefit of the doubt? He was very pragmatic, and she knew he rarely did anything without good reason. He was never one to lie to her. If he said he was going to Virginia, then that’s what he would do, unless something else came up.

But then her mind swerved into other potent possibilities. Whose station wagon was this and what was he moving and why? Sudden and irrational questions filled her head. Was he robbing her? Maybe he had decided to leave her, fed up already with her and the ducks. She took a shuddering breath and tried to calm herself. She hadn’t given herself over to this kind of unmoored thinking in a long time. She put her hand on the back wall of the house and tried to still her suddenly rambling and unsettled thinking. It took a moment, but she started to calm down and quieter, more reasonable questions slowly suffused her thoughts.

She was almost ready to walk around the house and confront him, when she heard Eli curse. There was an icy tinge of brutal rage in his voice that she had never heard before. Ellie peeped around the corner again. As she looked on, what she saw dashed her newly found calm against sharp rocks of true horror. While trying to lift one of the plastic bags into the station wagon, part of the thin plastic had caught on the corner of the tailgate and torn open. As she stood there gaping at the scene, the contents of the bag spilled out. She clasped her hand over her mouth to stifle a shriek and sprinted back down toward the stream. Animal panic filled her and she could only think to run as fast and as far away from that torn bag as she could.

Forgetting her sandals, her ducks, and her own mind, she splashed across the riffle and up the other bank and into the banana trees. She was only a few steps under them before she bent double and vomited her breakfast into the thin grass beneath the waving, deep green palm fronds.

7

Ellie was no coward. She was also not prone to hallucinations. She didn’t drink alcohol, and she didn’t smoke weed. She didn’t do anything that altered her mind because she knew that the mind could be bad enough without all those added misdemeanors. As a child, she suffered realistic night terrors and learned the hard way that the brain could be a hateful place. To prove that the night terrors were not true, she had to dissect them in her mind by the cold light of what she knew was real and true.

She sat huddled under the banana trees, trying to get her very upset brain to replay the whole thing. Elijah, or someone who looked frighteningly similar to him, was lifting bags of something (she now knew what) into the back of a classic station wagon she had never seen before. One of those bags tore and spilled open, and she had seen the contents. At first, she thought that it was the arm and bare torso of a mannequin as they use in dress shops. The gentle bow and curvature of the bicep, the bending wrist past the forearm. The hand in the limp posture of sleep. The sweeping arch of a bare back. Mannequin arms looked like that, she knew, but mannequin arms weren’t that flexible. They didn’t bend like that, and their connective tissues were round and mechanical, not sheer red joints with the cut ends of bones and ligaments showing like she had seen when her butcher cut joints of meat. 

And mannequins didn’t have tattoos or acne scars.

Her heart thudded harder in her chest, but she forced it to settle with deep breaths. Why would Elijah be lifting human body parts into a car he didn’t own? Most importantly, though, why would he do it in the middle of the day, when he knew that she would be home? None of it made sense, and slowly, the urge to understand overwhelmed the fear and disgust, and slowly, carefully, she rose to her feet and wandered out of the banana trees and down to the riffle and across to her backyard. 

Oddly, her sandals were on the grass by the bank, where she had left them. Bill and Madison walked over to her and quacked affectionately. She picked Bill up and snuggled his feathery head to her cheek and scolded him gently for being so hard to get along with earlier. His calm, comfortable demeanor soothed her, and she took another deep breath and then, setting the mallard down, walked back toward the house with the intent of accosting Elijah, no matter what happened.

As she neared the house, she saw her car was in the driveway, not the station wagon. There was no sign of the nightmare contents of those bags, anywhere. No sign of anything that she had just seen, gazing around the back corner of her house.

How long was she in her daze under the banana trees, freaked out, upset, crying, wondering what her husband was doing? An idea came to her then. What if she had wandered through the banana trees and onto someone else’s property? What if she had stumbled on some horrible human who lived on the other side of her property? Maybe there was a killer chopping up women’s bodies across the stream and through the banana trees. That idea didn’t last long.

The man had looked too much like Elijah to quibble. She knew his profile anywhere, and better than anyone, except his mother. No, as reassuring as it might be to believe it, that wasn’t some other property, because everything had been too perfectly the same. The house was her house, the property was her property, and that had been her little mallard, Bill, too. If she knew Elijah’s face, she also knew that little duck’s waddle. True, she hadn’t seen his “bill”, because he’d been moving away from her the whole time, but that was her duck.

Then what, she asked herself, had she seen? Had she had a dream? Was it one of those weird seizures she’d read about? Would her reaction have been so sudden, so severe, so legitimate if it had been just in her head? And what did that say about her, if she was seeing such things?

She got to her back door and went inside and the tension, unease, and terror that she’d felt before washed out of her immediately. This was her house. Her home. She went in and saw a notification on her phone. It was a text from Elijah. 

Made it to VA. Miss you.

She started to text him back, but then thought better of it. She would make an excuse later, if she needed to, but she had to check some things first. She went out the front door and looked for any sign that what she had seen was real. As she suspected, there were no body parts, no shredded black bags, no sign of a struggle. She checked every room in the house, but there wasn’t a hint that there had been anything at all amiss from when she had gone to the creek and into the banana trees.

8

It was almost four o’clock when Ellie finally landed on the only explanation that fit. It was a stupid explanation, of course, and she knew it, but it was also the only one that made sense. She had gone into her bedroom to lay down, trying to get her mind off of what she had seen. As she lay staring at the ceiling, the revelation erupted in her head with startling clarity.

 It was so simple, so elegant, so perfect that she knew there was no argument against it.

She replayed the entire experience of that morning. She left her sandals on the bank by the riffle and waded across through the cold, shallow water. Up on the other side, she had wandered into the banana trees. How long had she been in there? She couldn't say, but she had walked for a while, marveling at them, wondering why they were there. She had been surprised to come out right back where she had gone in, even though she had no memory of turning.

On the other side of the stream, her sandals were gone. Bill had run from her, and a strange car was in her driveway. A lot of that was enough to confirm her theory, but there was more. The stranger who looked like Elijah. The bags of (her mind skipped thinking the words, but showed a picture of that pale arm, severed cleanly at the shoulder flopping onto the ground) an unspeakable horror being shoved into the back of a station wagon that she had never seen before. Everything, the house, the land, the property, looked the same.

What finally confirmed her theory was the simple question that kept circling in her head above all the others: Why would Elijah lie about going to Virginia, then move bags (full of body parts) in broad daylight when he knew that she would be home?

The only explanation was the one that made the least sense. And yet had to be the answer. She got up off her bed and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were clear. The young woman in the mirror looked back at her and mouthed three words.

The banana trees. 

9

By dinner time, she had made up her mind. She slipped out of her sandals and put on heavy wool socks and her waterproof hiking boots. She took off her flowing frontier-style dress and put on jeans, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a flannel over top, tucked in. It was mid-June and very warm for the time of year, but she didn’t want to risk anything. 

She put the pale-handled pocket knife that her work friend had given her on her last day before the wedding into her front hip pocket, and then took the cut-down baseball bat that Ellijah kept from when he tended bar in Greely, back before they had been more than friends. Burned into its side, the former bar owner had etched “The Mind Changer” in large, block letters. 

Then, tucking her phone in her back pocket, she went out the back door and, taking a deep breath of late afternoon summer air, she went down the hill, across the riffle, and up into the banana trees and into the longest evening of her life.

She wandered through the deeper shade under the banana trees and came back out, as she suspected, on the bank of the stream, facing the back of her house, or, this version of her house. She crossed the riffle and mounted the opposite bank. Bill waddled toward her. She looked down at him and nearly fell back into the shallow water. 

This was not her Bill. The duck's left eye was completely missing. Scar tissue covered where the eye had been, and streaks of scar tissue radiated out from the center like rays from the sun in a child’s drawing. 

Who, or what, could have done this to a duck as loving as Bill? More strangely, she wondered how tough this little mallard was to survive such mistreatment. Though she knew this wasn't her Bill, her heart filled with maternal rage, and she regained her footing, burbled something soothing at the duck, and moved toward the house, grasping the cut-down bat tightly.

10

The day was fading into dull grey, here, and the air hung still and flat around her. Ellie felt a sudden, powerful urge to turn back and run to the banana trees and to the version of home she knew and loved. Maybe, once Eli was home, they could cut them down, dig up their roots, and make that part of their property into a garden or a patio. Then, the feeling passed, and with it, the thoughts of damaging the trees. Something about it felt horribly wrong, as though she had contemplated burning down an orphanage or ancient cathedral.

The blue station wagon was parked in the driveway by the house. She moved against the back wall and leaned there, trying to form the motivation to run around to the front, catch the Evil Eli, as she now thought of him, and beat him to a pulp for the murder of the young woman in that bag and for cutting her into pieces and for mutilating the face of the duck, Bill.

Fury boiling in her chest, she raised the bat and walked up the slope along the side of the house.

11

Evil Eli was there, sitting in a folding lawn chair, smoking a cigarette. The station wagon was open, the bags on the tailgate. The one that had been torn was closed with silvery duct tape, but part of the tear was still open, and Ellie could see the pinkish blue skin of a body part inside

“Hey!” Ellie shouted. Evil Eli jumped up and threw the cigarette into the grass. He spun and looked her full in the face. Again, she nearly fell backward.  Before she had seen him in the periphery, and the shape of his head, the arch of his back, the way he wore his clothes and hair had all seemed like him. But this wasn’t her Elijah. Just like Bill, this man’s left eye was missing, and streaks of scar tissue streaked out from the vacant cavity in jagged whitish rays.

The look of surprise on his face faded to a smile that crinkled the scars and made him look even more sinister.

“Well,” he said. “You found your way through. We wondered how long it would take.”

Somewhere in her mind, Ellie heard the word ‘we’ and that part of her that remained calm even when she was at the edge of hysteria, understood what it meant. This version of her husband knew what she did about the banana trees. The rage that had kindled when she saw the contents of the bag flared and filled her. She stepped forward and thrust the bat straight into Evil Eli’s solar plexus. He made a whooshing sound as the air left his lungs and collapsed backward into the grass. She advanced, raising the bat over her head like a samurai. She intended to bring it down on his horrible, female-killing, scarred face.

“You’re prettier than I expected.”

The voice stopped her dead. It sounded more than familiar. It was as if she had spoken the words herself, but from somewhere else. She turned her head toward the sound and stared at her own face looking back at her.

12

What happened next happened too quickly for Ellie to properly manage. The other (Evil) Ellie stood there, wearing a faded denim jumper over a red-stained t-shirt and tall Wellington boots very much the same as what Ellie had in her own mud room. In one hand, she held a huge blood-coated cleaver, and in the other, she held a limp white duck by its webbed feet. 

Ellie, moving before her mind had made a solid decision, swung around hard with the bat, stepping toward her doppelganger as she did. The cut-down bat was too short for a solid impact, but Ellie wanted only to disorient her and get away. 

The edge of the bat collided with the other Ellie’s jaw. There was a sickening crack and the woman fell back from the blow, throwing both the white duck and the cleaver into the air as she collapsed. Ellie dove to catch the body of what must have been this world’s Madison, dropping the bat as she did. She caught the duck, but as she turned it over to look at the poor thing, she saw that its left eye had been removed too, and bloody streaks radiated around it, just like Bill.

“She didn’t survive the transformation,” she heard Evil Ellie say. Her voice was muffled, as though she was speaking through cotton, and when Ellie turned to look at the woman, she saw that her jaw was askew, jutting out where it had been dislocated by the blow.

Evil Eli screamed, “NOOOOOOOO! Don’t you touch her!” and pushed Ellie out of the way as he ran toward the woman laying against the front of the house. Ellie stumbled away clutching the dead white duck to her, and tried to regain her standing position. As she balanced and straightened, she felt Evil Eli looming up behind her with the cleaver that he’d caught up from where it had fallen from his wife’s hand.  Evil Ellie pushed herself up, clutching at her face, eyes bright with bloodlust.

“She’s going to be my very special friend, Elijah,” she said. “We will help her to transform after we have some newlywed fun with her.” She laughed, but it was a coughing, wracking sound through her mismatched teeth.

Evil Eli stepped back and raised the giant cleaver, point-first, into the air. Ellie scrabbled back, trying to get away from the encroaching psychopathic versions of herself and Eli. Panic displaced rage in her heart, and she felt this world settle down over her. Here, everything was painfully, overwhelmingly silent. Like the grave, she thought.

Evil Eli was coming toward her, the cleaver gleaming in the grey light. Evil Ellie tried to follow him, but she wobbled and threw out her arm to steady herself against the station wagon. Blood was coursing from her nose and tears streamed from her eyes, which she dashed at to clear her vision. She hacked, then, and her face turned sullen purple. Blood gouted from her ruined mouth and she collapsed back against the wagon, eyes rolling up. Evil Eli stopped, dropped the cleaver into the grass and raced back toward his battered wife.

Ellie took the opportunity to look at the mutilated corpse of Madison clutched to her chest. Tears streamed from her own eyes, as she stroked the white feathers. Who would do this to a creature, she asked the heavenless skies above her. Then her mind filled with images of the young woman in the torn bag. It was someone from her world, she knew. One of the girls that had gone missing. She set the duck down gently and grabbed the cleaver out of the grass. It was heavy, clearly meant to be used with two hands to cut large pieces of meat. Exactly what this nightmare duplicate couple had used it for, she knew.

She turned to face them, laying against the side of the station wagon. Evil Eli was clutching his wife to his chest and weeping and saying strange words Ellie didn't understand. She didn't care. Her mind went blank under a cloud of sullen, smoldering fury. There was only one thing to do, now. She raised the cleaver, hefted it...

13

...and heard a sound like maniacal quacking coming from around the side of the house. Her heart was so blackened with rage, with the dreadful things that these people had obviously done, with the mutilated body of Madison the duck, that she only thought about cutting them to shreds as they cowered there. They both deserved to die. She had that power here in her hands, and she fully intended to use it. Death was what they were owed. And here she was, fittingly, a non-evil version of one of them, ready to mete out that justice. She felt her heart turning black with longing to destroy these evil, filthy, maniac versions of her own life, her own family. She stood over them and brought the cleaver over her head. Evil Eli tried to cover his now unconscious wife and raised his arms to ward off her blow. Ellie tensed her midsection to bring the cleaver down, to cut, to kill, to...

14

...rend them...

15

The ceaseless quacking came closer on her right.

She stopped and stepped back. Ellie turned around and saw Bill—this version of Bill, with the scarred face—flapping and waddling toward her. He was looking right at her with his good eye, not moving toward the two people against the car, but right at Ellie.

She realized, in that moment, with a profound shock, that she had been bent on murdering them. Bill waddled between her and them and flapped his wings at her and charged, hissing. She was forced back and away from him. Her foot caught on the edge of the driveway and it snapped her sharply out of her trance. 

Bill turned away from her and waddled over to the people he saw as his family, now quacking gently. She crumpled, legs bending, until she was sitting in the brown grass of the front yard, almost weeping with the sudden force of her realization that she was about to commit murder. She flung the cleaver toward the road. It clanged and broke in two pieces on the macadam.

“Oh Jesus,” she said and felt herself shuddering. Bill waddled around the couple protectively, occasionally turning his scarred head to look at her accusingly.

She forced herself to her feet and ran across the driveway past the house and into the back yard.

16

When she crossed the stream, the daylight had almost drained from the dull sky above her, but the banana trees still glowed as if they were in full sun.

17

The sun hovered over the horizon, casting long, warm shadows across her backyard. Bill and Madison were waddling around near the riffle, hunting for bugs in the grass. Ellie walked over and cooed at them. Bill came over, and she scooped him up and nuzzled his feathery head. He made snuggly duck noises. She set him down and scooped up Madison, who fussed but then succumbed. Ellie felt tears slide down her face into the white feathers. 

Then she walked up to the house, dug around in their stuff, and found a wooden stake and some cardboard. She popped open a can of paint and carefully wrote a message on it, then stapled it to the stake, and went back out and down and across the riffle and up to where the banana trees stood. She pushed the stake down into the soft dirt and came back across the stream and turned to look at her handiwork.

18

As the sun set, she cleaned up the painting supplies and changed out of her adventuring gear, put on her pjs, and nestled down into her bed. A text from Elijah informed her that he would be home within the hour.

As she lay there, sleep slowly settled on her, and the world faded. She drifted into sleep. In her now peaceful dreams, she heard the distinct sound of the night wind ruffling banana tree leaves.