The Garden

Content note: mentions of abortion and blood, gender-based violence

A

s she combs through the vines, she realizes there are no more flowers—at least none she can find. The peas are nearly done for the season; their small season of life ending, ready to be composted back into the ground. Her thoughts wander like the vines, her hands, leaves, flowers. His hands. Her heart rate. She straightens her back, takes a deep breath, a sip of coffee, another deep breath. Slow down. Slow. You are alone right now. You are looking at your garden.

The sun wraps around her body. To be held by warmth without flinching—feeling almost unrecognizable outside of the garden now.

She circles the beds, bending to pick small weeds as she goes. When you water one thing, you water others without even meaning to. She gives a glancing worry to the cucumbers. Where are the pollinators? So many flowers but so little fruit. She comes to the tomatoes, her favourite. Tiny yellow flowers marking all potential. Some of the Brandywines are starting to redden. She touches their curves, and they bend to touch her back. Deep inhale, controlled exhale, remembering starting them from seed in early March: the seedlings steady on their little heating pad by a cold window, snow on the ground, artificial warmth from the decades-old radiator.

As the caterpillar’s heart slows, so does hers. Almost back to normal.

The green caterpillars ravaged the garden this season. She picks one off of the tallest Zebra tomato plants and feels near tangible relief within the plant and her own body as the mouth detaches. “Sorry, buddy,” she says as she throws him into the resident spider web by the green bean trellis. She watches the caterpillar thrash, the web ripple, the garden spider’s deliberate bite. As the caterpillar’s heart slows, so does hers. Almost back to normal.

The back door opens—heavy footsteps. She squats quickly behind the trellis, her gaze fixed on the spider spinning the green body tighter, tighter. Her grip on her coffee tightening too.

“Where were you last night?” His shadow is small. The sun won’t meet him.

“Just out,” she says. She keeps her eyes fixed on the web. “I really don’t feel like talking right now.”

“Too bad,” he says. He steps between her and the web, crotch at eye level. She stands up and walks around him, toward the herbs. They are beckoning in the still, heavy air. She makes sure not to touch him. He follows closely.

“Who was there? Where did you go? What time did you come home?”

She stops surveying the basil. “Why does it matter?” She finally looks at him.

“Because I need to know,” he says, breathing hard.

“Please leave me alone.”

She tries to skirt around him, but he steps into her path. The plants lean toward her.

“Please move.”

“Tell me!” he yells. She does everything in her power to not flinch. Last night, when he put his hand abruptly on her stomach as they had rote, mechanical sex, she flinched then. She had yelped, then later, when she was alone, cried.

She is tired of flinching.

She hears the neighbours, hidden by the tall lilac bushes surrounding their porch, shift their chairs.

“Please keep your voice down,” she whispers and pushes past him. The cucumbers are tangled in the chain-link fence and need undoing.

“Tell me,” he says again. She says nothing, just sips her coffee and reaches toward the grasping plant. She cannot do this with one hand, she realizes. She sets her coffee mug in the grass and unwinds a tendril from the metal. It grasps onto her finger, the pressure a needed comfort.

He is suddenly next to her. He kicks the coffee mug like a soccer ball, and it flies across the yard, landing hidden in the mint that towers over other herbs. She only moves to place the vine in a different direction, far from his fury. A direction where it will be free to grow, to fruit, to live, unencumbered. The vine releases her finger with reluctance.

The morning he confronted her, he stormed into the basement where he’d demanded she sleep (“What have you done? What did you do?”). When she refused to look at him, he ripped the blankets off her body and swatted her phone across the room. He sat down on the edge of the couch.

“Do you even want me anymore?” he muttered, head in his hands.

“Yes, I just didn’t want to have a kid right now.”

“Will you ever?”

“I think so. Maybe. I don’t know. I just need some time.”

“Is that why you’ve been going out so much now? To have time,” he sneers.

“I’m allowed to have friends, you know. I’m allowed to see people that aren’t you.” Her clothes slightly stuck to the half-finished concrete wall as she straightened her back out, sat up tall.

Her newfound defiance, unearthed the same moment the pregnancy test showed positive. The stakes of her life heightened; she decides to look straight at him. Then he rushed in.

Now, in the garden, she looks away. She has learned. She lifts a leaf. There are a few small cucumbers after all, but the squirrels have been gnawing at them. She will buy some netting this afternoon for protection.

His movements are calculated, slow. He ensures there is nothing left to salvage.

She reaches for another tangled tendril, but he gets there first. He rips the entire plant from the ground. He destroys a flower between his fingers, staining them yellow. She stands up more slowly than she means to. Her legs are shaking; the leaves are shaking. He uproots another plant, then another, making his way through the entire garden. Her neck is aching, thrown to the floor, roots exposed, trembling in the air—precious parts that were never meant to be seen. The sun shines sharp and mean into the holes he makes. Staring at his fingers. His hands are so dirty. She’s never seen them like that before. The lettuce was crisp and clean. He stomps each tomato one at a time, and juice seeps out from under his shoes. Her abdomen cramps; blood flows into her underwear for the first time since the abortion. His movements are calculated, slow. He ensures there is nothing left to salvage.

She realizes she is near the porch now. She is backing away but reaching forward.

The neighbours go inside.

She stands there in the aftermath, gathering shards of lettuce, cloves of garlic, smashed bits of zucchini, yellow squash, the asparagus she let grow to astronomical heights. The air is fragrant with an array of herbs crushed under his boot and dragged through the grass. She picks them all up and drops them again. No sound except his screaming upstairs. Her heart isn’t even racing. Her heart is somehow as calm now as it’s ever been. The injured plants send weak signals, but she is too distant in her mind to hear them. We will be fine, they try to assure her, they whisper amongst themselves. But what about you? What about you?

His hand on her shoulder in the kitchen. She doesn’t flinch—a cold dullness has settled into her this past year, as if her body has accepted its conditions, as if her body has recognized that no amount of flinching keeps her safe.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, are you going to clean up all that dirt on the counter?”

She looks to her right. The carrots she is now gripping in both hands in the sink, the cold water running over them, left an outline where their bodies once lay on the grey countertop. The dirt is on her hands, in the sink, slipping down the drain. The dirt is everywhere. Of course she’ll clean it up. That’s what she’s already doing. That’s what she’s always done.

“Of course, yes.”

He doesn’t respond. Just walks away into the living room where he turns on the TV for the rest of the night.

She scrubs the carrots the best she can, but you can never really get all the dirt out. A little dirt never hurt anyone, though. She examines the dirt caked around her nails. It looks just like blood. She sets them into a colander to dry, wipes the counters down, then slices each one into a neat little coin. She is proud of these carrots. Last summer, when she had to clean up the evidence of his destruction, puzzle through what to tell her friends who stopped by and asked, “Oh my god, what happened to your garden?!” she kneeled where the carrots had been, raking her hands through the dirt to find the ones he missed, and this is where the calm seeped into her, impossible to erase. In previous years’ attempts, her garden’s carrots turned out tiny, warped, sometimes barely enough to eat. She used them to make stock, mostly. But this year, somehow, they were thriving. She had done nothing different, really, except let her hands linger in the dirt where they were to be planted for an inordinate length of time, losing track of the hours in the days and weeks after the incident, her arms elbow-deep in the soil. Except dump the contents of her Diva Cup into the plot in the middle of the night each month for the last year, mixing it in with her hands, making a deep red-brown slush. Dirt under her nails. It looks just like blood.

She makes a bisque, blending the carrots down until they are smooth and bright, and sets a bowl on the coffee table next to his feet. He doesn’t acknowledge her, but when she leaves the room, she hears the spoon clink against the edge of the bowl again and again.

“Why the fuck is there so much dirt on the couch?”

He stalks out onto the back porch where she is sitting with her coffee and a book. She looks up, confused.

“Dirt? On the couch?”

“Yes, dirt on the couch. That’s what I said—fucking listen.”

“I ... I have no idea.”

He pushes out a short, mean laugh.

“Okay. I’m sure it’s me then. Not you. Not the person who spends all their time and energy tending to their precious little garden.” He turns and stomps back inside, shutting the door heavily behind him. She looks out at the garden; the air above is both still and shimmering. The plants are thriving. Her hands are dirty. She smiles as she looks down at them, then stands up and walks inside.

He has brushed the pile of dirt from the leather couch onto the hardwood floor. It is thick and heavy, wet and sitting in clumps. He is standing impatiently above it, waiting for her to inspect what he is eager to blame her for. When she turns the corner, he grandly gestures to the loose pile on the floor. “See? How the hell did this get here? I certainly don’t play around in mud all day.”

Still holding her coffee mug in both hands, she crouches by his feet to get closer. The smell hits her.

“This is fresh manure.”

“And?”

“And ... I don’t have fresh manure in the garden at this time of year.”

He throws his hands in the air. “What are you saying? Someone came and dumped a pile of cow shit on our couch?”

She slowly stands and takes a few measured steps backward. “No, just that I don’t think this came from the garden.”

He steps toward her quickly, putting a finger in her face, and as he does, the same stench wafts toward her again. “I don’t care where you think it came from. You’re the one always bringing shit into this house. Clean it up, or the garden is gone again. Fucking ridiculous.” He bumps her shoulder as he walks past her, and her coffee sploshes over the rim of her mug onto the floor. Her heart is calm. Her dullness intact. The stench is lessening the further away he skulks up the stairs.

The sun touches her neck gently in the gaps between the lilac branches as she cuts long tendrils of oregano, rosemary, and sage from the herb planter near the back of the yard. She places them into the colander, watching as a small beetle makes a run up the side. She lets the scared bug crawl into the grass before she picks the colander up and turns to head inside, planning on prepping the herbs for drying. But he is suddenly blocking her path, holding his arm in her face—she didn’t hear him come outside. She stumbles back. His stench has gotten worse these past few weeks; she can hardly stand to be close to him. He presses forward, putting his arm closer.

“What do you think this is? Poison Ivy? An allergic reaction?”

She sets the colander down and takes his arm in her hands to examine it, placing one hand on his elbow and the other around his wrist. The rash covers nearly his entire forearm, from his wrist into the crook of his elbow. The skin on the edges of the rash looks dry, almost like it’s flaking away, crumbling, but in the centre, it’s moist and wet. Earthy. She moves to touch it, but he yanks his arm out of her grasp and pulls it into his chest.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“No, it’s just gross!”

“You should see a doctor. I can call for you if you want.”

“They’re just going to tell me to put some damn cream on it. I have some leftover stuff from when I got that weird rash when I went camping last summer. I’ll just use that.”

“I don’t know, I really think—”

He rolls his eyes. “You are always overreacting to every little thing. Not everything’s an emergency.”

As soon as he walks away, the sun reaches back out for her. The lilacs open up a space for the light to touch her, and for the first time in over a year, she notices the dullness inside of her begin to lift—just a little.

She wakes up one morning in early fall on the basement couch. The sun is just beginning to creep into the small windows of the half-finished basement, and she can hear birds chittering in the bushes that line the driveway. She rests in this moment before getting up and walking up the stairs into the kitchen. She makes a pot of coffee, pours two cups, and brings one upstairs, hoping he’ll remain asleep when she enters, like usual.

But this morning when she opens the door, there is a pile of manure in their bed, spilling out from under the covers. The dirt is on his side, on his pillows, down to where his feet would extend, reaching out like an arm across the sheets. It is crumbling onto the carpet; their double bed cannot contain it.

The stench is overwhelming, but she is not overwhelmed. She sets the coffee down on the nightstand, and opens the windows to air the room out.

She walks over to the mass of soil and picks up a handful. No hesitation. It crumbles through her fingers. The dirt under her nails—it looks just like blood. Worms are crawling through it already. She digs in both hands up to her elbow; they move through the earth without resistance.

The sun, the birds, the fresh air.

Her life.

She pulls her hands free.