Grey stems twist and turn around each other like my grandmother’s curls. In its little pot, no larger than a grown man’s hand, the silver plant shines under the pale yellow sun: it rests tiny, bare, luminous. The shopkeeper tells me that people call it ‘barbed wire’. It grows small grey buds in the spring, she explains, and I can buy it for only five pounds.
I thank her for the offer, and turn to the plant once more - a little mass of grey everything that no longer seems so innocent, an amalgam of bendy stems, mad-scientist hair mixed with strings of wool, sharp wool, hair that stings, stems that bite the skin off your feet as you jump over them and fail to clear the edges, leaves that cut into your flesh like knives and let the blood flow freely, fleeing your body like your body flees bullets and hunger and death and barbed wire.
I buy the plant and make up my mind to rebaptise her. ‘Barbed wire’ - who would give such a beautiful plant such a horrible name? No, she deserves better, a name like Mikaella, a name like Lucrecia, a name like Nadia, or Sasha, or Adela, Frida, Monica, Tina, Barbara, Lara, Candela, Dana, but not ‘barbed wire’, never ‘barbed wire’ because there will be no blood in my house, no warzones, no dead children or massacres or starvation or poverty or plague. Those belong far away from me, and only far away from me, in some other country or continent where people jump over fences and a man with a gun shoots you down from a watchtower.
I take the plant home and call her Luna. On my dinner table, the barbed wire lives.
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