Creosote
Andrew Porter
In the small clearing behind our house there was a neat row of them. For a long time, I didn’t know what they were called. Then a friend of mine explained that they were called creosote bushes and that they tended to thrive in hot arid climates like ours. For almost a year after we’d moved into our house I had been admiring them, these strange vaselike bushes with their gray scraggly limbs, lightened in some places by dust, their solitary yellow flowers, which bloomed mostly in the spring, their distinctive earthy smell, especially after a hard rainfall, a smell that reminded me of my time in the vast deserts of West Texas and New Mexico, a trip I’d taken with my wife when we were first married, long before we’d had children and settled down in San Antonio, long before our lives had forever changed.
My friend went on to explain that creosote bushes were incredibly resilient, that they tended to do best in the types of places where other bushes didn’t, that they were known to produce certain types of herbal medicines, but that their branches should never be burned as they were said to emit toxic chemicals. He was telling me all of this one evening last summer after we’d both had a couple of glasses of wine, so I’m not sure how much of it was true and how much of it was being made up on the spot. My friend had shown up that night in a bit of a state. His partner of seven years had left him the night before – left him, he believed, in a permanent sense – and he was now in need of a place to stay, not because he’d been kicked out but because he couldn’t stay in their house anymore. My wife had taken our kids to the pool, so that my friend and I could talk about this, about the man he’d thought he was going to spend the rest of his life with, the man who had just left him, but my friend had not wanted to talk about this man in the end. Instead, he’d wanted to talk about our creosote bushes. Did I know, he wondered, that creosote bushes always faced the southeast? I stared at him and wondered if he was lying. Did I know that their greatest foe was fire, that they could probably take over virtually any ecosystem if not for fire?
He was staring out at our backyard now, at the sky darkening above the small row of creosote bushes. He had been so handsome when he was younger, so handsome that I’d often been jealous of him, but he was no longer as handsome now. I could see that suddenly, staring at him in profile, the loose skin around his jaw, the thinning of his hair, though I wondered why I’d never noticed these things before.
Did I know, he wondered now, his voice fading a bit, that creosote bushes were among the most adaptable plants in North America, that they could live for at least two years with no water at all, simply by shedding their leaves and sometimes their branches, that they often lived to be a hundred years old, sometimes even two hundred, that they were constantly shifting and changing, adjusting, depending on their needs, growing into all sorts of strange shapes, sometimes very twisted shapes, other times very beautiful shapes, sometimes shapes so magnificent – he paused then to look out at the darkness, as everything now was dark – sometimes shapes so magnificent, so extraordinary, you couldn’t imagine them, even if you tried.
Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the short story collections The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage Contemporary, 2010) and The Disappeared (Knopf, 2023), and the novels In Between Days (Knopf, 2013), and The Imagined Life (Knopf, 2025). His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, The Missouri Review, The Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, The Pushcart Prize, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.