This Is No Garden
by Rebecca Ann Jordan
It started with her hair.
The little girl had in her hands a favorite book (in which the protagonist did not live in a skyline apartment or shop in stores with bright handbags); no, here were pictures of miles and miles of wilderness, with trees that stretched to the sky or grew along the ground like barky water. Places with gritty sand and endless fields of tall grasses: places without shelter from rain or wind. These were mythical places Mari had only dreamed of seeing.
As she read in the carefully-tended square patch of park, Mari’s hair grew into the ground, a patch of black curls that wanted to be grass.
Nobody noticed that at first. They noticed how she couldn’t sit up because the ends of her hair had twined with the ground. They tugged but the little girl cried and screamed for them to stop, so they did.
The family had started a garden as part of an extra-credit project, where they grew wisteria, devil’s walking sticks, morning glories, ginger, carrots, sunflowers, radishes, and “a lot of weeds,” as Mom said.
David, Mari’s brother, pointed at her head and said, “She looks like a radish.”
Nothing could be done without cutting off Mari’s hair. Someone found Auntie’s pair of travel cuticle scissors and snipped Mari’s hair as close to the ground as possible.
It was then that David pointed at the clump of black curls pretending to be grass. These tugged themselves loose from the ground and flew like a storm cloud into the sky.
“Mari’s roots,” David said.
Once her head was rubbed with minty soap and a foul mixture of creams that Mom’s friend, who they called Auntie, swore would help, the incident was rather quickly forgotten. Nobody wanted to talk about Mari’s roots or seemed to remember why she’d been given a botched haircut in the first place.
Not until it happened with her leg.
She leapt off a swing at school, flipped through the air, and stuck the perfect landing, except she fell to her knees. One knee, really. The other went through the ground and broke out of the linoleum at the nurse’s office, at least fifty feet away. The nurse screamed and darted to the administrative assistant, who darted to the principal, who sent an attendant darting to the playground. Mari looked up at him curiously. “I don’t know where my leg is.”
The attendant tried but failed to budge the girl. “There doesn’t seem to be blood. Did it just punch through the dirt?”
“Yes,” she said. “But where to?”
The nurse flustered out to the playground like a biting winter wind. “I tested her knee,” she said with a shake of her head. “I don’t understand it. Her reflexes are fine!”
“I know,” Mari whispered, worried what this might mean. “I felt it.”
Cutting her leg off was out of the question (once posed, the nurse almost fainted dead away). Instead, a team of kindergarteners played tug-o-war, one set on her arms and the other, mostly kids with anxiety and runny noses, at her misplaced ankle. This made Mari very uncomfortable. The boy holding her wrists abruptly let go when her brown lamp-eyes started getting wet and he started to say, “Are you okay?” But as anyone who’s ever experienced resistant forces will tell you, the lack of weight on her wrists made the sniffly kids in the nurse’s office fly back into the wall. Mari went with them, rather startled out of her tears. She patted her knees to ensure her legs were both where they ought to be (they were). This was a vast improvement over the afternoon.
She leapt up and laughed. “That was close!” She had almost grown into the ground once, after all, and had learned that that was not a proper habit for little girls.
Mom was called and Mari was sent home from school with a note from the nurse. Shortly after that, Mom decided that homeschooling would help her talented daughter bloom—away from prying eyes.
It happened more frequently after that. Whilst somersaulting, Mari accidentally stuck her head through the grass. It reappeared in Mom’s bedroom, at which point she learned about sex (Auntie was helping Mom get nakeder than Mari knew it was possible to get). She stuck her hand in the garden to pull out weeds and knocked over a vase in the house. And as she grew into the awkward stages of puberty, it only got worse. At the library Mari accidentally touched somebody’s feet with her toes as they wandered the stacks. At one of Mom’s parties she stuck an elbow through the ragdoll cat. The cat regarded this well enough but the hostess did not.
Psychologists didn’t help; they suggested that Mari’s unusual behavior was due to an extreme sort of depression. A “cry for help,” except nobody could figure out what sort of help she might need.
“Is it because she’s got culture shock?” Mom worried, wringing her hands.
“Perhaps, though she was probably too young when she moved into your fastidious care,” the psychologist said. “She seems otherwise well-adjusted. The problem seems to be physical.” He made a note, pushed his spectacles up on his nose and stroked his chin. Mari thought he must know what he was talking about, to stroke his chin like that. “Until you can figure out a way to maintain her solid state, I suggest you keep her in one location. Pets and children do better with familiar surroundings.”
When she was sixteen, Mari tried putting a foot through a sliding glass door after Mom had locked her inside to go on one of her outings. Mom was worried Mari might attract the wrong kind of attention now that she was an adult and “those tricks aren’t cute anymore,” but the trick did not work on glass, nor on insulation, nor fiberglass nor metal. With the wooden, antique table, Mari could only stick a few fingers through before her knuckles got stuck. Carpets were the same way; her toes always got stuck in the fibers. Cats apparently could tolerate the oddity when man-made materials couldn’t. When she was allowed to go outside, Mari slipped back and forth in the rich earth of the garden. She played tag with David—she always won, but he didn’t care—and helped him plant the seeds for the new season: mustard and peas and climbing wisteria and tulips and radishes.
Mom preferred berries and potato chips—an odd combination to be sure—to the wild things grown in the garden. She ordered French fries and milkshakes at restaurants (so David would tell Mari). She came home with microwave dinners, one with spring rolls, one with pasta, and one with apple pie, and she would mix them all together. She never ate anything out of David’s garden.
Mari was twenty, and had not gone from her own yard a day past her fifteenth birthday, when she saw it on the news:
“Today in New York, psychologist Carl Nubert discovered a strange growth on the outside of his office wall.”
The psychologist who had said she probably didn’t have culture shock was on TV, and he said, “I found it very odd. The gardeners usually keep this area very clean. It’s all eco-friendly, you see.” He gestured behind him, and the camera caught glimpse of red rocks mixed with white rocks, a single succulent cactus, and a set of thick stalks that stuck out of the rocks and were already halfway up the wall.
“Mari!” David, seventeen and beautiful in his gangly puberty (except for course for the pimples, which Mari teased him about relentlessly—“You look like a human volcano,” she would say, and David would stop picking at his face and shove Mari with, “If I was dark like you this wouldn’t be a problem,” to which she would answer, “Yes, we have it easy because we don’t get pimples,” which isn’t of course true at all, and then she would do her best to pop one of her hidden pimples in front of him), burst through the door, startling her almost halfway through the floor.
“What?”
“I got a girlfriend!”
Mari stared for a moment, and then giggled, rolling around on the floor and almost seeping through it. “Seriously? Who would go out with you?”
David ran to her and toed gently at her sinking shoulder and hazy hips. “You be nice to me for once. This is serious.”
“Show me a picture.”
He held up his phone. It was a photo of a girl from the chin down. “Her name’s Shalimar. We’re going to prom together.” David’s chest puffed two sizes too big.
“She’s an eight. You’re a four.”
David tried to look angry, but Mari only leapt behind the neat row of potted flowers and shoved her head and hands to the wrists into the soil. They popped out in another pot and she made wrinkled, surrealist, pinched, impressionistic faces at him until he laughed.
That was all before the wisteria.
Mom had work the night of all nights: prom night. She grimaced when Mari, as though asking to take a walk, offered to drive her overly-tuxedoed brother and his girlfriend to school.
“Alright,” Mom said, “but none of that funny business, with your—” She gestured helplessly at Mari’s digging fingers, her wayward toes, her misplaced elbows and most of all the short-cropped hair that never managed to stay in its place.
“Okay, Mom.”
“Straight there and straight back.”
Mari’s hands trembled. David babbled on about how he looked, but Mari focused on not veering the dead-green car off the road, hightailing it out of town to the country, where they said there was no asphalt or concrete or glass, just miles and miles of dirt and wild things that grew. But those were fairy stories, and even if she were a changeling of some sort, most changelings never returned home. So she drove.
She realized she had forgotten to wear shoes, but to turn back to Mom and to Auntie would admit defeat.
David’s date, the Eight, got in the car, moving her tongue around her mouth as she searched and destroyed stray crumbs. David blushed and gave her a corsage. “I know it doesn’t match your dress”—a severely orange sleeve—“but I thought white goes with everything.”
The girl held it in her lap and smoothed her hand over iron-pressed hair.
“You don’t have to wear it,” David said quickly. “Mom made me get it, anyway.”
“It’s great,” she said. “I’ll put it on at the dance, okay?”
“Okay.” David flushed with pleasure.
Mari pulled up, though it was like death to hit the break.
The Eight got out of the car. David followed. Through the window, Mari saw the Eight turn, look at David with concern, frozen between the car and the school gym. David offered his elbow to his date. Still she did not move, but licked her lips.
Mari put the car in park.
Another boy came and offered his elbow to the Eight. The Eight timidly laid her hand on his arm, and the boy laughed, tossed David’s boxed corsage over his shoulder. Another girl showed up with a paper crown from one of Mom’s favorite slow-suicide fast-food places. The crown went on David’s head. He didn’t move, like glass or like concrete, and stared at the boxed corsage.
Straight there and straight back. Palms sweating, Mari opened the car door to laughter. Laughter and rumbling. It echoed the anger, taut in her chest.
She had not noticed roots growing out of the planters and up the wall of the gym.
“Let’s go, David.”
The ground broke open.
The beast had roots in many places, and its keratin-strong tentacles lashed above the ground. They were scarred and pocked like hardened, twisting snakeskins, as thick around as Mari’s thigh and as thin as her hairs. And they grew, like the old adage, where they were planted. Unleashed, accidentally, by Mari’s rage.
The Eight’s apparent boyfriend let out a yelp, a tendril lashing around his ankle, and then he was dragged underground. His scream was cut short. The Eight, to her credit, did not scream. Her eyes simply rounded, and she looked at David, as if his false crown could save her. Then she, too, was gone with a flurry of purple petals.
David howled: “Shalimar!”
The roots gained ground. There was barely an inch of concrete to be seen, and all flat surfaces writhed with movement. Teenagers in flimsy, brightly-colored party dresses flitted here and there. One girl threw a shoe at an approaching root and raised the other heel like a sword.
Quite without thinking, Mari made to tackle the beast.
Mari crossed the wrecked concrete, a yawning crack in the foundation, and a set of pipes that spewed water. Her bare foot sank into the mud they collectively created.
And reappeared in the planter hanging from the side of the gymnasium.
The bare toes wiggled. Paper-thin roots, like veins, stretched up the wall and were caught, ape-like, in the toes. Mari wrenched her foot back as the roots reached to strangle her flesh, back through the hole in the ground, tearing the roots from the wall.
They wiggled, dying, on the ground.
David looked at her, wide-eyed among the screams and panic of his high school peers. “Mari,” he said, hushed. “Your—your roots.”
Surely she must wait for Mom, or the psychologist, or the school nurse to come and set things right. Order was their realm; chaos, hers. But one look at David knew what he expected of her.
She slipped into the dirt.
Her hands went first, deep, deep down into the hole. Mari felt nothing at first, nothing but the twisting earth. Her head ducked in, and then there was darkness, and an awful groaning that vibrated against her eardrums, like thunder that could not be muffled.
“Mari,” the roots seemed to groan. “Come with us…”
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Then her waist was in, and she felt David pulling on her ankles to keep her afloat.
“Mari…”
She thought she saw a flash of an orange dress, and then the upper half of her body had popped out in a manicured suburbia, each lawn trying to outdo the next. Wisteria roots clung to the walls, which crumbled in pieces to the ground. Red tiles shattered in every direction. People screamed out of their homes. Down the street, in a block of small businesses, psychologist Carl Nubert scrambled out, stumbled to his knees. He looked right at Mari, spectacles sliding down his face. A root wrapped itself around his ankle and made to drag him back into his broken offices.
Her arm was attached to her shoulder, and then it wasn’t, popping out of the good earth and freed from its shackles of concrete near Carl Nubert. It was a moment Mari had unwittingly trained for, those days when she had buried her hands in the garden’s dirt to tag her brother, hours spent slipping back and forth from one patch of earth to the other. She twisted her arm and dug plain fingernails into the starchy root.
The vine twisted, thrashed, jerked in her grasp, but at least it released her psychologist. Carl Nubert ran. There was no time to thank her.
Mari yanked on her arm, dragging the angrily thrashing root with her, and then she was back in the high school yard, David yanking on her ankles. The severed root roiled on the ground like a jilted debutante. A flurry of purple petals floated like confetti into Mari’s hair.
“Well?” David asked, wringing his hands together. “Did you find Shalimar?”
Mari sat on the ground. The wisteria vines had retreated back into the earth, leaving chaos in their wake. The only ones that remained were those ripped off by Mari’s toes or those cut by an enterprising sophomore.
“No.” She pushed herself to her feet. “But I think I know where she is.”
David picked up the fallen corsage. They raced to the car and Mari drove them home.
“I saw it on the news!” Mom grabbed David into an embrace when he came through the door. “That’s it, Mari, that’s the last time you leave this house!” Mari could almost hear her brains rattling inside her skull with the force of Mom’s admonishment. “Encouraging the plants to behave unnaturally like that. Someone could have gotten hurt!”
“Shalimar,” David gasped, fighting tears. “My date. She went underground.”
“Oh dear…”
Auntie appeared, wrapped in a damp towel with cuticle scissors in her hand. “Do we need to snip Mari’s hair again?”
Mari picked up the corsage David had dropped, pulled the pruned flower from its box. “David, she only brought you on a date to tease you…”
“I don’t care.” Tears made his oily face relatively clean. “I was in love with her.”
“You don’t even know what love is!”
The earth rumbled. The man on the television reported the appearance of creeping vines downtown.
Mom locked the door. “Get upstairs.”
The three of them bundled toward the hall, but Mari did not move.
“I’m going after her.” If she had somehow caused this beast to emerge, she surely must have a way to stop it.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Mom put her hands on her hips. “You’re still part of this family.”
“But my roots aren’t here.”
Mom screwed up her mouth like she’d eaten a bug. David went to embrace Mari. Auntie offered the cuticle scissors. “You’re going to need these.”
Mari pocketed the scissors and left.
She forgot she was still barefoot, but it was too late to return to the house where Mom would trap her again behind panes of glass and carpet.
By nightfall Mari had walked as far as downtown, its streets littered with dead branches and a few trampled petals. By the end of the next day she was out of town, and by the end of the week her feet had begun to bleed and she had reached the state line; by the end of the month her callouses had hardened and she had long since left the city, walking along the highway. To either side of her was, as the myths had promised, wilderness. This was no garden: weeds crowded each other, vying for drops of water that sometimes fell. Beyond them, harsh trees toddled like children with outstretched, furry arms.
Amidst everything, the wisteria rumbled and twisted, forging ahead like an endless train.
Mari sat to rest in the shade of one of these Joshuas, scant shade though it was. The earth beside her was broken where wisteria had shoved through, torn up other roots, and disappeared.
“I have long suspected,” she said to the other plants, “that there is nothing I can do about this. What am I? A single misplaced girl.”
The weeds bent with the encouragement of a breeze and kissed Mari’s hairy ankles.
Bony elbows rested on her knees. “Even if I find those people who were stolen, I’m not strong enough to fight a growing wisteria on my own.”
The Joshua tree rolled in the wind. Mari noticed its desperate eastward jerking and squinted. In the distance, so far it might be a mirage, a dust storm had whipped itself up. But the dust was not brown or tan or skin-colored or Mari’s skin-colored; it was violet and eggplant and grape and lavender and lilac and amethyst, spinning wildly above the desert.
Mari drew an uncertain breath and walked toward it.
The wisteria had twined and bunched itself near a shallow pool of water left over from the wash of a recent storm. Roots and thick branches had begun building upon themselves, creating higher and higher lattices; its leaves basked in the sun. The unopened bean pods wiggled to and fro, pleased with themselves, and more mature purpling flowers shook themselves gently, straining into the sun to set an example for the younger generation.
Beneath the lattices, in a patchwork of shadow and light, five people bent forward, heads half-buried in the dirt and hands up to the wrists along with them. The Eight’s short orange skirt rode up to her hips, showing plain white underwear.
Mari swallowed as the wisteria seemed to sense her presence, unwinding itself downward to shoot at her ankles.
Mari’s ankles sank into the desert and broke ground near the wisteria. Her toes strangled the thin roots that shot toward her.
“Let them go,” she said, because it sounded like something that a superhero would say.
The wisteria twined against itself, surprised. It wrapped around her displaced toes. Parts of the root slunk toward her, and she leaned away, expecting to be throttled. Instead the vine crept along the desert soil and began to twist into a shape that was increasingly recognizable as one long script: Our Garden. The end of the looping n pointed toward the humans planted in the ground.
The dark hairs on Mari’s arms raised.
The vine un-wrote itself and spelled out something new: Grow With Us.
“They’re not yours to grow,” Mari said, though her voice came out a tiny squeak. “Let them go.”
Your Roots Are Here.
So she had guessed: that she had been born, somehow, of foliage and verdant wild things, plucked from her home and adopted into an alien house. But this was not how wild things should behave. Or was casual cruelty in the nature of wild things? Would Shalimar, her revolting boyfriend, and the others decay into fertilizer? “If I stay, you have to let them go.”
The wisteria hesitated. The bean pods wiggled and the soft, purple petals turned to watch. The vine twisted into another set of looping words: We Are Your Parents, You Grow Our Sisters And Brothers Like Cattle In A Garden, and here more roots had to join, stretching out over the desert, Come To Where You Belong, We Will Teach You Everything There Is, You Have No Promises To Keep Among Humans Who Abuse You.
“They were just trying to help,” Mari said quietly, folding her hands in front of her lips. She wiggled her toes, letting them brush longingly against the wisteria roots. What would it have been like, to grow where she’d first been planted? Where she would be understood? Her cracked brown hands balled into fists at her sides. “I won’t let you kill them.”
The wisteria thrashed in rage and shot toward her. She leaned away, but could not get her feet out of the ground quickly enough. The porous roots wrapped around her legs, twined up her back, shoved her to kneel forward. A hole opened in the earth and in went her head, up to her eyes, dirt tangling with her untamable hair. Her hands followed suit, and then she, too, was part of their garden.
Everything was dark. Her mouth and nose had not been buried, and she gasped in the nearly moisture-less air as she felt the wisteria leave her, grind into the dirt, resurface to photosynthesize.
Only the wisteria knew how long she stayed like that, the roots grasping at her hair to tangle themselves with her scalp. She thrashed and writhed in an attempt to free herself, but only succeeded in flinging her torso further into the dirt. Supine, her spine protested, but as she grunted and continued to sink against the surface of the earth, something speared her hip. A cry of pain filled with dry, gritty dirt. Her hand sank automatically into the rough soil and reappeared aboveground near her waist to discover the source of the pain. In her pocket was something beveled, sharp, cold. She remembered then about the cuticle scissors. Her fingers rejoiced and clenched in the small holes.
She sliced through the earth, all the way to her head, and cut away the hair that had grown into it. The rest she ripped out, dizzily turning right-side-up as she staggered to her feet.
The other people had sunk deeper into the ground, writhing as they struggled to breathe.
Mari sank to her hips. Her legs shot out of the thickest part of a wrapping vine, knees locked around another section as she dragged the vines out of their careful lattice. The branches started toward her feet, which she drew back to the rest of her body, laughing. She raced across the ground, dove shoulder-deep into the unforgiving dirt. The branches reappeared near the roots and she grasped them, ripping them out piece by piece. The lengths writhed in silent pain as she dug like a mole, and when other roots came to their brothers’ rescue, Mari pulled her arms back to her shoulders and moved again, a rover who did not have the inconvenience of roots, though the air raked hot against her bare skull.
Her toes tore through the roots. Her elbows snapped the vines as they stiffened to maim her. Her fingers wrapped around the pretty flowers and tore them off, sending fluttering color into the monochromatic desert. The wisteria writhed and began to slip away, through the earth. Mari’s toes caught it, tangled in it, ripped it from its stalk. Only when the latticework was ripped apart, pieces of the wisteria rolling and drying in the desert air, or escaping through the earth, or writhing in pain, and the lavender flowers floating back and forth as they fell like almost-origami, did Mari go to Shalimar, grab her dress at the back and pull her out.
Shalimar spat pebbles and tendrils of roots. Her hair was still stuck in the dirt.
Mari cut the hair away with cuticle scissors, and the girl cried a little, washing dust from her face. As Mari moved to the boyfriend, Shalimar sat heavily, legs folded, not caring a whit for propriety. “Why did you save me?”
Mari shrugged. “David asked me to.” The Eight pushed her head into her hand. “And it was the right thing to do.”
The strangers were not as good at travel as Mari. They complained of rocks in their shoes by the end of the next day. By the end of the week they shuffled along, holes in their shoes. By the end of the month they had stopped complaining, too exhausted and glad to return to civilization.
“Mari!” David burst out of the house to embrace her. He embraced, more shyly, Shalimar when she ran and kissed him.
“I’ve saved them.”
Mom came blundering down the stairs, her hand to her chest. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.” She hugged Mari so tight Mari wished she could stick her head into the dirt and breathe elsewhere where it didn’t smell of blackberries and potato chips. “You’re staying right here, where you’ll be safe, my sweet girl.”
“I can’t stay, Mom.” She smiled sadly.
Mom regarded her, huffing up tears. Auntie laughed, shaking her head.
So Mari walked barefoot down the street. David waved, squeezing his new girlfriend’s hand. And Mari was not seen again (except for sometimes when there’s a weird wind, and David swears the black cloud far in the sky is a mat of curls, and they get a sweet scent of flowers that never lingers).
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About the Author
Rebecca Ann Jordan is a speculative fiction author and artist in San Diego. She recently won Reader’s Choice Best of 2013 for her short story “Promised Land” at Fiction Vortex and has published poetry and fiction in Flapperhouse, Yemassee Magazine, Bravura Literary Journal and more. Becca regularly columns for DIYMFA.com. Her fetishes include controversial grammar, mythological happenings and yarn-swapping. Quibble with her @beccaquibbles.
“This Is No Garden” © 2014 Rebecca Ann Jordan
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