Originally Published on Rosie Wagner's substack “If Friends Carry History” , a queer retelling of Pirkei Avot, an ancient Jewish text. This story is inspired by Pirkei Avot 3.10:
Dosa stood at the table, bent over the paper writing their letter, they wrote about just one crop, about the quishuim. They tried to describe what it feels like to hold a pile of the long green summer vegetables in their hands, fuzzy against their forearms and wet with water when they bite into one. During peak times they liked to just stay in a small shelter at the edge of the quishuim fields. The fields had a better breeze than where their house was closer to town. It was a little chilly at night but then they could get up in the morning and harvest and weed and do their things without anything else getting in the way. Then they spent a lot of the afternoon and evening in town. Or oftentimes others would come meet them in the morning and help out with the crops.
Dosa tried to write about being bent over in the felt, inching along, lifting up the soft floppy leaves to pull at the quishuim when they’re ready. Trying to beat the black and yellow beatles to them. Trying to chase off the rodents who eat them, the birds. They wished they had the long curling vines of quishuim to drape over their sukkah, but by sukkot these plants are always long gone. They only thrive in the bright heat of late spring/early summer. They need it dry enough to keep away the fungus but not so hot that they faint in the summer sun. It’s beautiful to watch them spring up all at once and all of a sudden everyone has too much quishuim and trying to pawn it off on everyone else, grilling it in strips and dicing it small in a salad and frying it and eating it over grains.
They wrote and they wrote about their deep devotion to this vegetable. Its abundance and its quirks, its paler green and its darker green and it’s little curving flowers. The person who would read it, Sam, already knew about quishuim, but not like Dosa did. Dosa had loved Sam two years before and they had been skittish with one another ever since, holding one another so lightly, as if they were dried and brittle leaves. They both wanted to be kind, not to crowd the other. They both had a desperate desire to flourish in the absence of the other. The letter was now going on so long Dosa began to wonder if they would really send it. Dosa drew diagrams of bisected quishuim around and in between the sentences and cited torah and told them all about their days and how the vines sprung up overnight like magic. How, especially in the wind, the rows look like a roiling sea and they liked to pretend they were swimming through the crops.
Dosa had spent years drifting in and out of the world, not sure they wanted to stay or go. But something had changed in the last few years: they’d grown to love, and be loved, and know and be known. And they’d survived a broken heart and they’d built a home and shared in this field they tended every day. Almost every day they played with children, almost every day they ate with their elders. They felt little tendrils wrapping around their fingers and toes, around the tip of their penis and the hairs on their nipples. Dosa imagined these tiny vines growing all over them, fastening them to their life, all their friends all tangled up with them.
They wrote and wrote, about irrigation and bitter melons and weeds and earthworms, bent over their small table, their lips moving silently: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Thank you for reading. “If Friends Carry History” is a queer retelling of Pirkei Avot, an ancient Jewish text. This story is inspired by Pirkei Avot 3.10:
He used to say: one with whom men are pleased, God is pleased. But anyone from whom men are displeased, God is displeased. Rabbi Dosa ben Harkinas said: morning sleep, midday wine, children’s talk and sitting in the assemblies of the ignorant put a man out of the world.
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