A Tale from the Waterwood

Previously posted to my DeviantArt page, along with an illustration.

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The Indarin say that when the Wizard of the Waterwood wished to select his heir, he summoned his three disciples, that he might set them a task which would judge between them. On his bed in the mere the Wizard lay, wizened and old beyond count of years, with his gray beard-tangles clambering down the bed and floating out every which way upon the shallow water around his bed, like the very roots of the willows which grew all around his house, bowing their heads and their boughs in protective reverence towards his dwelling. Candles there were upon his table and upon his mantle and upon his hearth; for no fire would the Wizard have of wood, but burned coal only, which gives warmth and heat for cooking, but poor light – and an eels'-oil lamp hung smoking from his low ceiling; by the light of these did his disciples gather, and knelt about his bed.

“Answer me this question,” he charged them, as he had begun oft before – “whence issues the source of the Waterwood?”

For a day and a night the disciples kept vigil together, as was their custom, fasting from all but thought to consider what their master meant by this. Then they made ready as for a journey, each to follow the course suggested by his own mind, seeking the place from which the Waterwood sprung.

After a week and a day the first disciple returned. “I have the answer!” he declared. “I have traveled to the four corners of the Waterwood, by beast and skiff and foot, mapped its secret routes and slept by its hidden pools. I went from the southland swamps, north to the place where the hills bubble like boiling land and the river runs in rills between their steep sides and all the trees are blooming white, east until the land is settled and smooth and floods in the spring between the tall straight trunks, south again to the deep waters where the trees climb like spiders out of the water and tower overhead as if to block out all thought of sunlight, west once more to your house.” Such was his boast, for the Wizard and his disciples know tricks of traveling very fast through the Waterwood.

“And?” asked the old Wizard, raising himself a little on his elbows.

“The source is here, in the mounded earth and flooded vales beneath our feet,” answered the first disciple, stamping his own in the mud. “Out of these do the great trees draw their strength, and give sustenance and shelter to all else in their turn.”

The Wizard sank down upon his bed. “It is a good answer. We will wait.”

After a month and a day the second disciple returned. His skin was very pale, and the scent of strange earths clung to his clothes. His voice was low and he seemed a little wild, as if he had spent too much time away from the company of men. “I have the answer,” he said softly. “I, too, went north and east, and I followed the course of the rivers until they united in one river, the Crouis, which flows through the plain from the mountains. And I followed the river, followed and followed, scenting always which was the young Crouis and ignoring its tributaries. I journeyed high into the mountains, and I found the lake which collects the molten snow and from which the Crouis issued.”

“And is that your answer?” asked the Wizard, knitting his weedy eyebrows together in a scrutinizing glare.

“No,” the second disciple shook his head wearily. “For I traveled around the lake, and I found water from the spring that feeds the lake, trickling from a crack in the rock. And I followed that trickle as deep into the mountain as I could go, until the way narrowed to the size of my hand and I heard the water bubbling out of the dark, out of the living rock.” He swayed, and knelt in the water beside the old Wizard's bed. “The source of the Waterwood is in the heart of the mountain.”

“Hmm!” returned the Wizard, lying back with a smile.

They waited a year and a day for the third disciple to return. When he did he sat in silence for some time.

“Well?” demanded the Wizard.

“I wandered,” the third disciple answered slowly. “I went home, and found it no longer my home. I broached the edge of the trees and looked out on the plain, and I descried the broad and dry channel through which the Crouis used to run, when the Waterwood was only a wood. I returned, and spent many days and nights punting on the trackless waterways among the trunks of the trees, with none but the the winding eels and dragonflies for company. I went to the Indarin, and sat at the feet of their elders to ask your question, Master. I was told a curious story.

“I was told that, long ago, the River grew very hot from traveling so long upon the Plains. Looking all around, River saw the Forest with its many tall and mighty trees, dark and cool. Surely there, thought River, I will be able to hide from the Sun for a time. And so River turned aside from his course, and came to wander among the trees of the Forest. After a time, under the leaves' pleasant shade, River began to feel sleepy, and lay down to take a nap. And as he lay asleep, his waters slowly spread throughout the whole Forest.”

“Oh yes, and someday the River will wake, and will return to its path, and the Waterwood will dry up, is that what they told you?” the first disciple interrupted impatiently.

“That is but one version of the Indarin story,” the second disciple interjected, his tone a mild rebuke. “In another, the River woke again, many ages ago, but could no longer remember the way out. And so he wanders here and there among the trees, looking for the One who will show him his way to the Sea.”

They looked at the Wizard, but he did not speak, only gestured for the third disciple to finish.

“I have heard both of your versions of the story before,” the third disciple said. “I have also heard a version in which River woke, but met Kiamadh, the Trickster, on his way home, and it was Kiamadh who led him by confusing ways back and forth among the trees until River was exhausted and bewildered, then vanished, leaving him here. But I was told none of these by the Indarin elders.

“Instead I was told that when River woke, he had to walk the whole Forest to find everywhere his waters had gone. And everywhere he went he saw that the Forest had changed; that many new kinds of trees had grown up, and that the old trees had grown thick, and strong, and tall as mountains. He saw the many strange and wonderful creatures that had come to live there, the winding eel and the dazzler-fly, fishes and frogs and diver-bats, and the beautiful plants, the whitecups and hanging bells and the fiddler grape. He saw how the Indarin people had become a people of the water as well as the trees, that now they wove nets as well as ladders and their children learned to swim and to handle boats as soon as they learned to walk and speak, and that they relied on the eels and the wandering trout for food. And when River had found all of himself, and seen how all things had become in the Forest, he knew he must remain. For while he slept, much life had come to the Waterwood, and much death would come if he left. So River patrols the Waterwood, doing what he can for the life of it, but his secret longing is still for the Sea.

“On the warmest nights of summer, they said, or if ever a seagull enters the Waterwood and its cries reach River's ears, his sighs of longing rise as mists high into the trees.”

The third disciple fell silent, and the Wizard was silent. The first and second disciples were silent also, fearing to interrupt again, glancing at their master from time to time. At last the Wizard said again,

“Well?”

But the third disciple only shook his head.

At this the Wizard groaned from his bed, as if with his last breaths. “You shall be my heir then,” he declared to the third disciple, “and these two shall be your disciples. For I,” his words rattled in his throat, “do not know the source of the Waterwood, either.”

Writing Exercise

I do this kind of thing from time to time, just to keep limber.  Wrote this awhile ago, typed it up last week.

A Forest Described

The forests were dark green, elegantly replete with tall firs so that the young leaves of oak, rowan, beech, maple and poplar could not cheer their sobriety, but instead only sombered further the forest floor, far below.

Where the sunlight did successfully tumble through the vernal crown, it fell on the faded discards of last season's growth, and glinted on the dust motes that rose to dance in its warmth. Such places where to be found scattered throughout the forest: glittering ground-level beacons, punctuating the green dim. Fungi shrank from the dazzling gold, or melted if it had sprung up there on a cloudy day, while woodland flowers and berry bushes crowded near.

The forests were shy of undergrowth, preferring instead the company of small ferns, mosses, mushrooms, or simply dead leaves drifted deep enough to wade in.  It was a perfect place for being quiet, and being still, even if your feet were on the move.

Invitation

For as real as it felt, I may as well have been on a set, on a dark stage.  Two black windows with dark red velvet cushions on the windowseats framed by three lengths of matching curtain had become the background.  A wall perpendicular intersected the windows' plane just to the left, and in front of the windowseat was a high table of wrought-iron garden style that you might just as easily have seen out of doors, and a high bar stool was between table and windowseat.  A little pale light gleamed dully against the polished black boards of hardwood floor below, and made out just the bottoms of two legs of a counterpart stool on the far side of the table, presumably unoccupied.

The figure of a woman reclined arrogantly in the bar chair.  She wore a black bowler hat and black lingerie - a ribbed bustier and something minimal underneath - and tall white gloves so that only the tops of her arms were bare.  She had her arms behind her, and her posture otherwise was a confusing tangle of shadowy limbs.  She seemed to be sitting in several positions at once.  Her legs were together in a coy side-saddle; they were spread provocatively, they were raised, slightly parted, so her knees were level with her shoulders, she had one foot propped against the curtain between the windows while the other swung carelessly beneath the chair.  The effect was unsettlingly arachnoid.

Entered a man stepping up from somewhere below, wearing a black top hat and black tuxedo jacket but otherwise nude, save for black boxers.  His skin was the smooth cool pale plastic sculpting of a mannequin skin.  He stood in front of the right-hand window, and bowed to the lady.  As he did this his right hand went to his top hat, in a gesture caught between a polite tip of the hat and fear that it might fall off his bald head during an unfamiliar act.

"My name," said he, "is Uninterested Desire."

She slid forward, her limbs resolving into the expected silky bipedal form as she stood in the light, such as it was, tall and impossibly long-limbed, eyebrowless.  She offered a hand absent of wrinkles, even at the knuckle, fingers accented by pink nails a little too small.

"Pleased to meet you, Mister Desire.  I am Invitation - Unstaunchable Invitation."

"I am looking - I think I am looking - for the Hostess.  Do you know her?"

She laughed a brief and narrow laugh.  "There is no such person!  She is but an old wives' tale.  I think you are looking for me.  It was I who beckoned you in."

He widened his arms to embrace her then, making the jacket look silly even though it was buttoned, head a bit too far forward, gaze too low, step too slow.  She returned the embrace in a manner that was somehow full of knees and elbows, though I could not see how, and he slumped back with a groan, half out of the light now, bent backwards against another table, apparently in the throws of orgasm.  His jacket fell open.

She had turned half away and was dabbing at her eye with a bit of cloth, holding a little pocketwatch as if it were a mirror.  One exposed girlish hip was thrust towards him, in case he cared to look.  Her arms, pulled forward, bunched her artificially symmetrical bust together.

"But the Hostess," Desire said, craning his neck without rising.  "You are not her?"

She faced him, standing with parted legs.  "Do you wish me to be?"

At this moment someone, attired similarly to the man, came up and served them drinks from a tray he carried, and swung away out of the light.  As he left I could see his back was hunched.  Invitation and Desire were quiet.  Invitation sipped her drink.

Desire let his head fall back on the table.  "I wished... I wished her to be."  Hesitation. "You?"

"What of me do you want?" she asked, setting aside her drink and doing that thing again with her legs.  Hands on hips, legs wide, pressed together, one foot raised so ankle touched knee, leaning to the left, best foot forward.  Noticing any one posture reduced the others to shadows, summonable to the mind by giving them any measure of attention.  If I watched her painted eyes she almost appeared aquatic.

"I want - I want you," Desire muttered, looking her up and down.  Then he stood, and straightened his hat.  "I want to take my leave of you," he repeated, firmly.

She seized the red curtain and swirled it about her, so that it hid all her clothes and her face up to her eyes, which became, for a moment, deep and human.  "Come back," she offered, "come back anytime.  Come back tomorrow."

The scene fell dark, solitary points of illumination on her black polished shoes as she clicked four times against the floor back to her chair.  Her hands, visible inside their dusky white gloves, where locked around her raised knee, itself unseen.

After a moment, a pinhead-sized prick of coal rattled to life with her inhale, and its counterpart appeared in the dark window, as if a firefly were looking in.

After another moment, all light disappeared and the scene went completely black.  The vanishing sound came from Desire's footsteps down the hall.

A long while later, Invitation gasped something unintelligible into the dark.

Meditation on Roads

When I was a boy...

long ago

Men working by command of the magistrate from a city so far away its grandeur was legendary came and built part of the King's Highway, so that it ran past our village, not three miles distant.

I remember

It was our favorite subject for all the months the work of smoothing earth and laying cobbled stone atop was in view of the village, and then more besides. Long before it was done, we had already worn a path joining to it by the quickest way, and the fields on that side of the village were so well grazed they might have been the lawns of a manor-house – so spoke those who had been to Market – and the copses on that side of village were favored by the woodcutters over the copses elsewhere, though their trees grew broader and nearer the sawmill. 

We talked of putting up a sign, by the joining of our path with the Highway, with the name of our village written on it and an arrow pointing the way – but there were none among us who could write, and though the little inn was full of discussions of it for a fortnight it was at last agreed that erecting a sign with only an arrow on it would be daft. But, said those who were 'for' the sign, we would conscript the first man of learning who stopped over.

We boys would go out to the Highway whenever we could find the excuse, on good clear days as many times as we could manage, and stand staring, hands shading our eyes, first one way, than the other, that we might be the first to discern any sign of Travelers coming past. Then we would run straight back to the village green, shouting about it as soon as the first house hove into sight, and in their own excitement our fathers would forget to whip us for this not-so-subtle admission that we had been out shirking chores. “No need to go out minding the Road when there's the cow to be milked,” I heard almost every day of my childhood. But they were all as excited by it as I.

All sorts of people came by that Road, some even stopping over at the village inn – tinkers, and craftsmen, traders, and messengers, twice a year a circus with three big wagons, and once I saw, only once, a knight-errant on a war-horse, with his boy riding beside and bearing the lord's standard, red and yellow and proud in the breeze that blew across the moors from the mountains far distant. I stood and stared longer than I ought to have before running back to tell the rest, and by the time anyone else got to the Highway he was just a man on horseback in the distance.

And we – as we got older – we went all sorts of places by that Road! It made getting to Market much easier, and more of us went now, with wagons full of things to sell and lists our fathers promised our mothers they wouldn't forget (and that we must remember if they had more to drink than was right, and forgot) to buy, if any was to be had for a fair price. We could go to Fairs, and maybe, someday we could even go the other way, to the city that was so far away and so large and grand. The King's Highway meant there was freedom, brought practically right to our doorstep, to go and explore the world anytime we wanted – even if we never did.

Most of us, as you may guess, did not. We were apprenticed round the village, or learned our father's trade, and if things got hard we thought of the Highway, thought of running away, and the thought that we could have done it was enough.

Just as we might have been thinking of leaving in earnest, nearing the end of our apprenticing, the girls of the village were – quite suddenly, it seemed – indeed something worth looking at. We never stopped “minding the Road,” but now we took them with us when we could, and it wasn't just the Highway we were watching. But still, if anyone spotted a thing moving, we'd all look and strain, run towards it maybe until we could make out what it was, and go running back to report the news, and the girls must keep up or be left to come as soon as they were able.

And we grew up, and were married, and had children to watch the Highway for us, while we busied ourselves with our crafts and talked of the Road at the inn come nights, and placed wagers on what it might bring on the morrow.

But now

The Road, all roads, come up straight to my door. To work, I must go out on them, along with everyone else, and we all maneuver over scraps of pavement and scream at our neighbors' cars because we cannot move as fast as we would like. The screams are ineffective; we are wondrously encased in metal and glass; we are all unheard. We are trees falling in the forest with no-one nearby. Conflicts arise between myself and another's machine, but not between myself and another man.

Every day of every week of our lives we are travel-weary, without having gone anywhere. We are disenchanted, believing all places to be alike, because no place remains as it was – it is constantly being re-developed. We are always on the move and our homes are always changing and everything around our homes is always changing. We push even the hills over here, over there, put up buildings and later tear them out again. No place is allowed to have or to keep its own essential character; everyplace is the Highway. On every road might come every excitement at any time, so no excitement comes. On every road we might go every place at any time, but when we return to any place we find it has changed. Everything is always being made new, and so nothing is new. I live scattered over a thirty-mile area of heaving earth, trying to be somewhere that is somewhere.

Why is it there was something more honest about the horse, or even about the iron horse, than the present lines of thin-shelled dragons puffing fumes into the dark, vying for God knows what?

From my car, I cannot even smell the approach of rain on the wind.

The Moral of the Metalmancer

One chilly Autumn's day, the Metalmancer was busily at work crafting things in his dark laboratory deep underground, when the noise of a great weeping and lament from someplace not very far away, yet not very near, began to disturb him at his work. It was the fairies who lived in the woods that grew above him, lamenting the coming of winter, as was their yearly custom. The Metalmancer did not know this, however, for he lived deep underground, where it was always warm because of the fires of his forges, and he had no windows and so took no notice of day and night, nor kept a calendar to mark the passing of seasons; he just worked, ever busy, inventing things and copying things and making still other things, all to sell to the men in the towns nearby. All he knew about the fairies was that, from time to time, they made a great fuss and wept and wailed and played mournful tunes on their pipes and fiddles, which distracted him and kept him from working as he liked.

Well, on this day, he got full fed up with their noise. Sighing many an exasperated sigh, he set his tools and his work aside and went and fetched his domesticated mantis and hitched her to his chariot (pausing, of course, to consult his enchanted mirror about the weather, to make sure it was well and truly cloudy outside, for he was very allergic to direct sunlight and would turn to rusted iron wherever it touched him). Then he rode forth from his laboratory, passing through each of his three gates in turn. His first gate had once been covered in glittering copper, but had turned green and blue with time, for he had no-one to polish it. The second gate had once been sheathed in baleful bronze, but was now dark and brown, for he had no-one to burnish it. And the third gate, highest up and closest to the world, was made all of steel, and it was dull and cold. Through each of these the mantis pulled his chariot, up and up and up the long dark tunnel and out into the forest above.

The first people he met was a troop of little elves, crying and singing farewell to a flock of red-breasted robins that was departing for warmer lands. These fairies were dancing somberly upon the green hill among tufts of tall grass, or flitting up on clear wings to throw big wreaths woven of chrysanthemums as high into the air as they could. If they managed to throw a wreath just so, one or another of the robins would dive down towards it and shoot through it with his wings held against his body, just like a dart, and then fly back up to join the main procession.

"Confound it all!" grumbled the Metalmancer, driving up to to them in his chariot which the mantis drew, "what is the reason for all this terrible noise?"

"tck, krick, krrrr!" said the mantis, turning its head around in funny ways so as to examine the elves with both its enormous multifaceted eyes.

Then of course all the elves stopped their songs and cries in fright. But when they saw that the mantis was harnessed securely, and the servant of a grumpy bearded gnome not much bigger than themselves, they were at last persuaded to exclaim in many voices:

"Can't you see we are lamenting that our friends are flying away south for the winter!"

"Is that all!" answered the clever Metalmancer. "That can be easily mended!" And standing up to his full height, all four inches of it, he waved his magic walking stick - which was all made of knobbly iron, just like a real walking stick - and three of the robins passing overhead were instantly transformed by his art into perfect little metal figurines, exactly like robins. Their backs and wings were made of darkest bronze, feather upon feather, and their speckled breasts were gleaming copper. Their yellow beaks were changed to gold and their black eyes to flecks of iron. But of course they could no longer fly, but fell; and the Metalmancer urged his mantis to raise itself on its four hind legs and catch them as they fell. The mantis, being an excellent hunter, lunged upwards and caught all three - one in his fearsome mandibles and one in each great claw. But mantises, I am sorry to say, are not very good at catching things gently. Misjudging her own strength, she shattered all three figurines.

At once the elves began to wail twice as loudly as ever. Casting themselves down upon the earth, they wept bitter tears for their friends, the robins, who had just been killed.

"Why, o why did you not leave them alone!" they rebuked the Metalmancer. "They would have come back to us in the spring, but now they will never more chirp sweetly or fly freely or hatch chicks from blue-shelled eggs!"

At that he grew very indignant and purple in the face. "Well! I'm sure I'm very sorry that they broke," he said, in that tone of voice that is used only when one is not sorry at all, but feels one should apologize anyway, "but you can't pretend you told me they'd be coming back, and anyway I was only trying to help!"

But, as he could barely make himself heard over the noise of the fairies crying, he gave up and went on his way, shaking his head and more irritable than before.

Soon he came upon another troop of fairies, all joining hands in a long line and marching solemnly around a pond. They looked at one another with big, sorrowful eyes, and took turns uttering loud sighs filled with longing.

"What is the problem here?" demanded the Metalmancer, reigning his mantis to a halt. "I see no birds flying south!"

"tck, krick, krrrr!" said the mantis, settlings its wings.

At first the fairies only blinked at him, then at last one said: "O! We are lamenting about our friends the fishes and the turtles, who will go to sleep on the bottom of the pond and the mud and the water will freeze and we will not be able to see one another, or even our own reflections, because of the cloudy ice!"

At this the Metalmancer actually laughed. "Is that all!" he said, chuckling cleverly. "What a silly thing to care about! But fear not, and cease your solemnities! I can enchant the water so it will be clear through and through!" And, taking a piece of silver from his purse, he sent it skipping deftly across the pond with a flick of his fingers. One, two, three times it skipped! At each spot where it struck the water's surface, the ripples spreading out gradually to the edge of the pond transformed all the water to mirrored glass. The fish and turtles, which had risen near the surface to bid farewell to their friends the fairies, were caught fast and could not move in the slightest.

Immediately when they realized what had been done, the fairies sent up a howl of grief and began crying twice as loudly as the others had been about the metal robins.

"Why, o why did you not leave the pond alone!" they exclaimed. "In the spring it would have thawed, and our friends would have woken up and swum about and played games with us again! But now they cannot even move, and we can never drink from the pond or swim in it!"

At this pronouncement the Metalmancer rolled his gnomish eyes, and shrugged his arms with an air of long-suffering. "Foolish people! How was I to know that all would be made right again in the spring, the way you were carrying on? After all, I only meant to help!"

With that he climbed back into his chariot and slapped the reigns upon the mantis' back and drove off in a glowering fury.

Before long he came upon the largest group of fairies of all, singing and playing farewell songs, and making toasts with mugs of foaming beer, and reciting poems and chants and odes more loudly than any of the others had been. They were arrayed all up and down an enormous old oak tree that grew there in the deeps of the wood, wearing acorn-caps for hats that were too big for their heads and darting here and there among the branches. Its large leaves had just begun to turn orange and brown, but had not yet fallen to the forest floor.

"What can it be this time!" exclaimed the Metalmancer, leaping from his chariot and tossing the reigns aside impatiently. "Why do you make such a noise!"

"tck, krick, krrrr!" agreed the mantis, stamping her four barbed legs as if she wished she might be turned loose to catch one of the fairies for her dinner.

It was some time before the old gnome could make himself understood, for the fairies nearest the ground were mostly drunk, and at least half asleep. Meanwhile the fairies higher up were loudly reciting poems of lament and not keeping to one place for scarcely more than a minute. At last the Metalmancer gathered that they were having this solemn party in honor of the old oak, whose leaves must soon fall and who must shiver through the cold winter, naked and alone, while the fairies sought shelter from the snow among the hemlocks. Upon hearing this, the Metalmancer actually bent double from laughing at them, so that his long beard almost touched the loam, and slapped his hands upon his knees.

Before he had quite recovered himself, he managed to gasp, "Fear not, o people who weep at the silliest things! I, the Metalmancer, know how to prevent the old oak from losing its leaves ever again!"

(You see, he had quite forgotten how disastrously his other attempts to interfere had turned out.)

He stomped over to where a root of the oak protruded from the ground, and stamped upon it. Once, twice, thrice he stamped; at the first stamp the oak's wood was turned to steel, at the second its bark became scales of brass, and at the third its leaves changed to beaten copper and its acorns to bronze.

The faeries' wits were rather clouded with drink, but even so it did not take them long to realize what the Metalmancer had done. At once they cried out in rage and grief and shame, and shouted with anger: "How dare you lay a hand upon Grandfather Oak!" (for so they called him), "In the spring he would have flowered, and budded, and put forth new leaves and clad himself in a green robe more splendid than this year's was, and grown taller than he or any tree in the forest has ever stood before! But now he will be colder than ever all winter, and so hot in the summer that neither bird nor fairy will be able to set foot on him, and so smooth and hard that no squirrel will be able to climb him. And he will produce no more acorns, and raise no more children, and feed no more creatures in all the merry woodland!" And so saying, they snatched up the bronze acorns and began throwing them at the Metalmancer. They were deadly shots, even when drunk, and he was obliged to wave his iron walking stick over his head to fend off the well-aimed missiles and run home as quick as ever he could; for the fairies made certain that his mantis was squashed by falling acorns, and so she was killed without having any dinner, and he had to be quick on his feet and let his beard flap behind him in a most undignified fashion, and so he left in a foul mood and was not even able to argue in defense of his action.

He went straight back to his laboratory, slammed to all the gates behind him, and fashioned himself a pair of earplugs first thing, to block out the noise of the fairies' lament, which was now thrice as loud as it had been before his misdeeds. Then, safe (as he thought) from the fairies he had angered, he set about fashioning a very grand new chariot, and a marvelous clockwork mantis to draw it. The work took many months, and he did not even get to finish it, and I shall tell you why:

In the spring the earth thawed, and the rains came and made the ground soft, and the storms came and rushed passionately throughout the forest. But the old oak which the gnome had changed to metal could no longer sway in the wind, and its roots could no longer grip the ground the way it had been able to before, and were brittle; and so the great tree fell, and destroyed many smaller trees that were still alive and happy, but unlucky enough to be growing where it had to fall. One of its branches smashed the glass pond to bits no bigger than fairy-tears, and one of its long, long roots pulled out of the ground and tore open the earth above the Metalmancer's laboratory. Then, before he could get further underground, the sun came out and he was caught in its rays and turned all to rusty iron, and flaked apart in little orange pieces whenever it rained, until there was nothing left of him. So in the end he was paid out for his unneighborly ways, and the fairies danced spitefully around the edge of the pit that had his ruined laboratory at its bottom. But the robins and the pond and the oak did not become unshattered, and every year at Autumn's end the fairies mourned their memory with a different sort of mourning than that with which they mourned their friends whom they would see again in the spring.

Blank Pages

Blank pages are twin-edged: brimming with unfocused potential, yet so serene in their purposeless virginity as to numb and daunt any immediate creativity that confronts them.

They grin at writers like clever idiots, at once taunting us with the knowledge that we might make them anything and overwhelming us with half-imagined examples of what “anything” might be.

Woe to the writer who seizes paper and pen “to write”! –for the blank page is an imp that cannot be tamed by the pen, but only by an Idea. It is a truth confirmed by common experience that an Idea and a Blank Page cannot long abide in one another’s presence.

Niata's Garden

Niata’s Garden

for Charles de Lint, and D. H. Lawrence

for my Grandma

& for anyone who has ever tended a garden with me

1

The garden is what ultimately sold me on that particular boarding house. I almost walked past the place, the first time I was down here – jet-lagged, trying to sort out the bus schedule of a new city while keeping the addresses I’d found on craig’s list (but neglected to write down) in my head. I was about to round the corner from Bacon Street onto Carey when the townhouse seemed to unfold itself out of my peripheral vision and into my tired consciousness, and beside me I realized was the sign proclaiming that here there was room for rent.

I had thought that that particular type of boarding house arrangement had gone extinct back in the 90’s – that all the downtown townhouses being rented now were either rundown or owned by men in their 30s hoping to turn a profit through remodeling and tax-funded urban renewal. Little old ladies who took in boarders after their husband’s death had, I thought, all passed away or retired to a doting daughter’s household or a nursing home. But Niata was still here, and she didn’t look old enough to be considering retirement yet. Now that I know her, I somehow don’t think she was ever married, either.

Niata’s nationality evaded deduction. She had a unique tone of nut-brown skin, not unlike whites get when they overtan, but hers was plainly natural. She was smooth despite her age – just a few wrinkles in her palms, at the base of her thumbs and elbows. Deep crows’ feet by her eyes, around her mouth – she once told me her laugh lines were longer than her life lines. They were certainly more pronounced. Most of the time she wore a dress and, if she was outside, a brown leather ‘aussie hat’ over her black hair, all locked in dreads loosely bundled to just below shoulder-length. When I signed the lease she shook hands in a clasp more callused than my whole body and said, “Well, Daniel Sommerset, I’m glad you’ve come.” She emphasized the word ‘glad’, like a warm grandmotherly landlady might to any new tenant, but at the time I couldn’t help feeling that there was something personal in it – that she was really emphasizing the pronoun, if I could just hear it right, like she’d been waiting.

Later I decided that that was just Niata’s way – she could make anyone feel more important, more wanted, than anyone else I’ve known. You had to be able to listen, though – listen enough to her to notice she was really listening to you.

For the first two weeks I was barely there, moving things in and out and running around when anyone else was awake, working mostly at night. I kept forgetting and referring to her as ‘Anita.’ But though Niata spoke fluent Spanish I don’t think she had much Hispanic blood in her. My only defense is that ‘Niata’ and ‘Anita’ are anagrams of one another, as is ‘Tiana’, which was the wrong name I used during the third week. ‘Tiana’ sounded like an African-American name to me, and Niata might have been half. Later, when I googled her name, I found out it was probably Greek – but even that seemed to fall short of Niata’s story.

I don’t know if Niata spoke Greek. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she did – Niata seemed to speak every language. She could move between at least two dialects of Spanish, English, German, Creole, even the local brand of Ebonics. She was a wonder with accents, and would slide gradually into the same one whoever she was talking to spoke with. It was never so brusque they really noticed, but it seemed to make people more comfortable with her – like they were from the same place. I only got standard American English out of her – my accent was as close to that as growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. could make it. When I commented on her multilingual talent she told me it wasn’t a gift for tongues, just for talking with folk like they wanted to hear. I wondered about her, though. Once when I got in very early in the morning from meeting a courier at the airport, I found her sleepwalking in the downstairs foyer. As I opened the door she called out, in a voice she might have used to play a character in Roots, “You do it, mboy, you weed mah garden! If you don’t do it good, I’s gwon tell ‘em you’s old enough for de fields, and den you sees what real weedin’s like!”

I called her name, not knowing what else to say. She seemed to come awake then, and at the same time to faint. I caught her – mostly – and succeeded in rousing her at least enough that she could get back to bed before going upstairs myself. Her nightgown left the smell of rosewater on my dress shirt.

I still don’t know what to make of that night. Niata was certainly too young to remember that time, though not too young to maybe remember her own grandma saying something like that. Maybe she had been an actress of some kind. Or maybe she was just dreaming, her imagination tripping on some dramatization she’d seen on the History channel.

It must seem like I’m fixated on her, and I guess in a way I am. I’m realizing that I’d known her without knowing anything about her. At this moment I’m grasping for anything that might help explain why she did what she did when she died.

2

The house itself was oddly laid out – narrow and deep, with four floors and very steep staircases. At each landing, two doors opened diagonally into separate bedrooms that shared one bathroom. Niata lived on the first floor, occupying both apartments jointly. I never knew they weren’t separated like the upstairs floors until much later – while she was alive, Niata never left so much as a door ajar into her own rooms, and never asked anyone further in than we already were, as lodgers in her house. The upper floors had no hallways besides the staircases – after the landing, one either went up or down – but on Niata’s floor there was a hallway that wrapped around to the back door, and beyond the door was the garden.

It was a formal garden, which is an art form that’s gone the way of the personal letter. In the suburbs everyone seems to want free-form foundation plantings that only look good in pictures for real estate listings. Gardening, like letter-writing, is too inefficient to suit the contemporary lifestyle. Niata’s garden took up her entire plot, such as it was – a rectangle bordered and quartered by boxwood hedges and pebble paths, each quarter a little offset from the others by height and further subdivided into one- or two-plant sections. It was a specimen garden, really – boxwood used to accent a few types of flowering shrub. I loved it as soon as I saw it – not just for its own sake, but for what it said about the woman I’d be renting from.

See, there’s a big difference between a gardener’s yard and a landscaped yard. Often the gardener’s yard is less striking, not quite as well put together. That’s because a lot of gardeners follow the English garden model – intentionally natural, occasionally chaotic, even messy – rather than the more manicured French look that Niata had chosen. A landscaped yard, even when completed in stages, follows a preconceived plan and is eventually ‘finished’; all the work after that is ‘maintenance.’ A garden is an eternal work-in-progress. It grows, not always as intended, and is full of dabblings and side projects, new cultivars, experiments with cuttings, separatings, pottings, transplantings, loss and life. A garden takes spare time, spare change, spare pots from the store, spare plants from a neighbor, spare shoes that can be ruined with mud and squatting on the ground. It’s the place of connection between human and humus, and if Eden ever was then gardeners practice what is truly the oldest profession. When Niata showed me around the boarding house for the first time she took me to the garden last, and I felt instinctively that it was her favorite place. I knew then that we would get along.

I came back the next day to sign the rental agreement and move a few necessities out of the hotel and into my bare room. The hardwood floor, blank walls, and two round windows felt like the inside of a ship’s cabin. That would change soon, now that I could have my things taken out of storage and sent to my new berth. As she handed me the keys Niata sized me up with one eye narrowed, like she was trying to fit me into an analogy problem like they have on college entrance exams: “Blank is to blank as Daniel Sommerset is to …”

I’ve never been good at standardized testing. I’m convinced that my mediocre GRE scores are what kept me out of grad school, but I’m equally convinced now that that would have been the wrong path for me anyway. I said as much to Niata, early on in my tenancy when she asked me whether I planned to stay with my current job. I told her no, it was interesting enough but just a job, part-time at that, and the night-owl hours required when your immediate co-workers were half the world away got to me sometimes. Now that I was settled in-city, I would try to pick up another part-time gig waiting tables a couple nights a week – I’d been doing it since I was fifteen and had some high-class establishments on my resume.

“Funny thing about ways through life,” Niata replied, giving that same one-eye-narrowed look to the butterfly bush that took up the entire back right quadrant of the garden, “is that to grow like they want, people got to have their dead ends pruned.” She was holding a pair of shrub snips in her hand.

I chuckled. “Life itself does the pruning?”

“Sometimes,” she answered, still focused on the bush. After a pause she stepped in and dealt with a few offending branches. “Usually, though, you have to do it yourself.”

3

The tiled foyer had no decorations other than a cranberry-print wallpaper, and no furnishings other than an old-fashioned writing desk that stood against one angled wall. The lamp on the desk was the foyer’s only light, casting a silvery-gold puddle on the desk’s time-polished wood and the tiles beneath, leaving the stair and the back hallway in deep shadow late at night. That desk was built in the colonial style, so full of shelves and nooks and cubbyholes we were still finding things in it two months after Niata’s death. It was definitely an antique, complete with secret drawers and hidden compartments. The things Niata kept in them were odd, interesting – like three lines of poetry charcoaled onto an oak leaf pressed inside wax paper, or a little clay pot full of clear marbles. In one of the hidden compartments I found a small handmade dreamcatcher woven with black feathers and blue beads. Inexplicably, my hands trembled and my stomach turned nauseous when I held it. I burned it in the kitchen woodstove, and the whole house suffered from nightmares and insomnia for a straight week.

Odd as these things were, while Niata was alive the desk gave no sign of being extraordinary. The main cubbyholes served as mailboxes for her tenants, and she kept the writing surface clear except on tea days. Niata was a connoisseur of tea, a true aficionado; at least twice a week she set a large pot steeping with a new blend or an old favorite, and for sixteen hours a mismatched assortment of saucered cups and saucer-less mugs would litter the desk. The blends she found were exotic, aromatic, and like good coffee if it wasn’t good enough to drink black, she felt it wasn’t good enough to drink. Sometimes she’d set a bowl of smoking potpourri or a scented candle on the sideboard to augment the flavor, and we lodgers would stand around sipping her latest procurement in solitary peace or mingling murmurs, depending on when we got home. Judging from the heaviness of some of the steams and smokes rising from that desk, I’m not entirely sure that everything Niata brewed was legal, but I wasn’t one to ask questions.

I got to know my fellow lodgers only slowly. The townhouse had no common “hang out” area inside – the kitchen downstairs was too small for more than one person at a time, and standing in the foyer felt like standing in the doorway – a place to pause, perhaps, but not to relax. There was the garden, of course, but mostly we went out there when we wanted to talk to Niata, and those were usually two- or sometimes three-person conversations. We kept to our rooms when we were home, talking on the stairs or in the downstairs hallway when our comings and goings happened to coincide. Because my work schedule was the opposite of normal, for me those coincidences occurred less frequently than for the others.

On the top floor lived Stanley Georgian; the room across from him was vacant. Stan was an upper-30s to low-40s greencard-holder from Germany who worked with small electronics, designing the kind of gadgets that show up later on the shelves at radio shack. Why he lived with us, I don’t know – I’m sure his salary could have procured him a bigger place. Stan had Nordic blood in his body and Nordic blond in his hair; he wore glasses and an old-fashion haircut that made him look like a Nazi. Nobody could figure out how to tell him that gently, so the haircut persisted for awhile.

One Friday night I was up waiting to leave for the airport, standing half-in, half-out of that puddle of light the foyer lamp made, slurping down the last of the day’s tea with Niata before she cleared the desk and retired for the night. Stan and some cool night air stepped arm-in-arm through the front door, ushering before them the smell of cigarette smoke and cheap beer from his collared shirt. He accepted the final half-mug of tea that Niata offered him gratefully, cupping it between probably cold hands and letting the steam waft into his downturned face. I made a mental note to grab a sweatshirt before I went out.

“You know, Stan, there might be better places to meet a girl than the bars,” Niata suggested after a moment. Her tone was half-gentle, half-wry.

He gave a snort that leaned more towards disgust than comedy. “One does not meet women at American bars. Zeir bodies, maybe.” He shrugged expansively.

“Where you been then?”

Niata’s directness surprised me – it wasn’t her usual way.

“Bowling alley,” Stan answered. “I join ze local league last week.”

“Huh!” was all Niata answered, but as he slipped away into the shadow of the staircase she followed it up with, “Stan, erwäg dich deine Haare aufreizender schneiden zu lassen.”

He paused. “Mehr sexy?”

“Ja.”

He disappeared upstairs, and I looked at Niata inquisitively.

“I told him he should try cutting his hair sexier.”

I laughed at that. “So, you don’t think he harbors a deep-seated passion for bowling?”

She gave me a look of mock-scorn as she piled the tea things onto a tray.

The right-hand room on the third floor was occupied by a couple, for sure married socially, maybe legally too, I never found out. Pete was from the Philippines, brought up Catholic and Spanish-speaking; Stephanie was U.S.-born Hispanic, first-generation American. She was gorgeous, and very attached to him; he was a little rough-spoken, and often discontent – not with her, I later learned, but with their situation. They both worked at the same big retailer a few blocks away. Every month, just before rent was due, they fought about money, just loud enough that any of us walking by the room would press an ear to the door to make sure shouting was all that was going on. They made us uncomfortable, those two, but I think they really loved each other, and deep down we must have sensed it.

Next to them lived Jenny Portham, a shy dark-haired girl whose features were very English and whose voice and manner were very American. Jenny worked in “entertainment” – that’s all anyone would tell me. Judging from the timidity she regularly displayed, I doubted her job was anything worthy of non-disclosure. She was rarely home except to sleep, which she did on a schedule normal to any nine-to-fiver.

My own floormate was a dark-skinned Italian man who had the echoes of that look of European sophistication that white American women found so irresistible during the heyday of international spy movies. Previous to reaching his middle age, I imagined he must have resisted female advances pretty strongly to be as successfully single as he was today. On the other hand, he went by the name Mario and loved to joke about similarities he had with Nintendo’s game character. He even grew a mustache. On Halloween he would don a pair of overalls, thrust a giant wrench through one belt-loop, and hand out candy at the front door. Between his thick accent and absurdist sense of humor, I was almost always taken aback when he said anything to me, but it wasn’t long before I looked forward to his jokes. He was a 911 operator by night and ran a one-man hairstyling business out of his room by day. Here his lingering allure must have come in handy – not that he did business very often, but many of his clientele were upper-middle-class women, as stereotypical as they come – overdressed, makeup haughty, fat by contemporary standards, alternately flirtatious and disinterested. Half the time they were accompanied by immaculately dressed children, and if so, it was likely the child who was destined for shearing. Mario left his room’s door open whenever he had customers; the rest of us tried to slip past on these occasions, to avoid the necessity of introduction.

The advantage of this to us was that he would cut and style our hair for free, and often noticed that it needed upkeep days before we might have. The only person whose hair he didn’t manage was Niata, who would get offended if someone touched her dreads. So when Stan asked him for “sexier” hair, Mario laughed and gladly snipped the blond strands until they were short and spiky. Stan complained at first that Niata’s advice had made him look like a student, but after a couple weeks we noticed he was sporting a little facial hair to match – apparently agreeing that the younger look was an improvement.

It didn’t work like magic. Stan still went bowling Friday nights, and no women were seen swooning in his presence. But at least he didn’t have the Nazi hair working against him.

Niata said it was like weeding – didn’t guarantee the plant would thrive, but at least it wouldn’t choke. She stepped back, hands on hips, to frown at the nandina she’d bought the day I moved in.

“What’s up?” I asked after a minute.

“See that–” she pointed.

“Hmm.”

A shoot of English ivy was wound around the nandina’s main stem.

“Must’ve come that way from the nursery,” Niata said. “I didn’t see it then. The roots are all intertwined.”

“Nandinas are pretty hardy,” I suggested, “what about digging it up and cutting out the ivy, roots and all?”

Niata shook her head. “I got this one on discount from the TLC section. It’ll be a month or more before I’m satisfied it’ll recover. Til then, I guess I’ll just keep the ivy’s leaves stripped and hope it gives up.”

I nodded – a plant advertised “Tender Loving Care” was nearly dead by the time it was sold. To an experienced gardener with a little time on her hands, a TLC represented thrift and challenge – potential that just needed time to mature.

And time seemed to do the trick – about three months after the haircut, Stan started bringing around a girl from his work, Jessika Parker – now soon to be Jessika Georgian. They’re talking about renting the empty room across from Stan as well, using one for their bedroom and converting the other into a sitting room / study. Their combined incomes could comfortably get them more space elsewhere, but I understand a little better now why they might want to stay. I wish Niata could have seen their wedding.

Later, much later, I thought – maybe that is like magic. I mean, who am I to know? I’ve been led, by stage performances and popular fantasy, to expect the instantaneous and showy. I’ve never seen the real thing, any more than the next guy… or maybe I’ve just never known what I was looking at. Maybe the quietness of it, the simplicity and the time involved, lulled me to conclude that it was all part of the commonplace.

4

Niata’s garden softened me, I think, eased the knot in my shoulders that came from doing too much hunched over at my computer by the blinking indicator light of a WI-FI adaptor while the city slept. It was a place of peace, Pax Niata, but since it was her place of peace we tried not to abuse its sanctuary. Still, whenever I was out there it loosened me up, lowered my inhibitions.

I remember this one time I brought a girl to the garden on a date. Lunch was about the only time our schedules aligned during the week, and I’d set up a table for two in the back corner – nice, but not fancy. It was my first October at Niata’s place, and she had two red maples, one in each corner, that were still mostly ablaze like candelabras. As I led Sharon towards my little setup a leaf more brown than red tumbled from the boughs and was swept square into my jaw.

“Thank you,” I said aloud, automatically, as I pulled the leaf away and let it whirl down to the gravel.

“For what?” Sharon asked, smiling.

“Hmm? No, it’s–” I was pointing at the maple.

“Did you just thank a tree for hitting you with a leaf?”

I decided I didn’t want to be teased about this. “Not for hitting me,” I said seriously. “For acknowledging our presence. By dropping that leaf, the maple was saying that it’s not too caught up in its own fall glory to be courteous.”

I studied her studying me for half a moment, trying to decide whether she liked this touch of whimsy in me.

“However,” I said, pulling her forward to the table, “that’s not nearly as important right now as food.”

She looked at the table, told me she liked it very much and it was very thoughtful and romantic, and kissed me full on the mouth. It took me a little by surprise, and in the half-instant before I kissed her back I saw, over her shoulder, that Niata was in the garden, finally excavating that nandina to weed the parasitic ivy root that threatened it. I decided her presence didn’t matter, and was locked in Sharon’s lips the next half-instant, one hand in her hair around the back of her neck and the other around her waist. We didn’t think about food, or anything else, until at least a few minutes later. The maple, meanwhile, avenged itself for my verbal dismissal by dropping a leaf onto my plate. I endured with good humor Sharon’s jibe about needing to polish my ‘Tree Whisperer’ skills.

Next day I sent Sharon an e-mail, trying to be responsible – that kiss in the garden had told me that we were maybe moving faster than anticipated. I wanted her to understand I didn’t yet know where I was headed in life, that I saw my current job as temporary and financial stability might be a couple years out for me yet. I’d learned the hard way, with someone back in college, that this was the kind of thing a girl liked to know before she started pinning hopes on you. Sharon wrote back saying we should get coffee that weekend to talk about it.

As it happened, our first kiss was fated also to be our last. Sharon told me, nicely enough, that she was looking for a more “serious” relationship and perhaps it would be better if we parted ways, at least for now. She was distant and chatty during that conversation, and as I trudged glumly home later I battled against telling myself bitterly that when a girl said “serious” relationship she really meant “moneyed” relationship. It made sense to want stability, I told myself, and besides, by the time the average girl had reached her late twenties like Sharon and I, she’d probably been in one too many relationships with guys who couldn’t get their act together and didn’t want to risk sticking around to see whether I would fall into that category. Drifters make bad emotional investments, I said to me, and you sir are a drifter. Or at least a wanna-be drifter. I shoved my hands in my pockets and wondered whether I’d eventually settle for a misfitted career because I was lonely. But then again, wouldn’t I just end up with a secret pocket of leftover loneliness from not pursuing my real calling, and wouldn’t that be a kind of time bomb for the relationship that accrued from the merely-tolerable career?

Instead of going home, I turned impulsively and got on a bus headed to the other side of downtown. I wasn’t due on shift for another three hours, but I went in to work anyway and sat down with the senior manager. Ten minutes later we left his office and went over to the baby grand piano in the corner, and I started playing. When I finished, it was to scattered applause from the restaurant’s few early-Saturday lunchtime patrons. When I left, I was holding a simple contract we’d just drafted – I’d get in on tip sharing by playing piano on nights when he didn’t have any performers lined up, or when performers dropped last-minute. He was disappointed at first when I said I couldn’t sing, but said he’d have my waiting schedule redone and mentioned that maybe, if the piano gig worked out, in the future they’d find a vocalist for me to accompany. I hadn’t noticed before, but as I made my way home to change into the white shirt, black slacks uniform for the afternoon’s shift my movements felt oddly free, as if I had gotten used to walking with something wrapped around my ankles and it was no longer there. I had finally taken a first step towards what, for a long time, I’d just idly dreamed about.

5

It was in early March, eleven months after I moved in, that Niata’s garden betrayed her. She tripped over a loose brick in the path and fell onto the butterfly bush, whose brittle but freshly-pruned branches broke under the impetus of her fall and then impaled her. Two branches slipped between her ribs and broke off inside, causing organ damage and internal bleeding. Mario saw her fall and dialed 911 immediately, but despite the hospital’s quick response she died in the ICU that evening.

In accordance with the last wishes outlined in her will, her body was cremated. There were no relatives to alert. There was no funeral. It was a Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning, all of us tenants stood squashed in half of a very small law office downtown. The other half was occupied by a very small lawyer and an oversized desk. We had, to our total surprise, all been named as Niata’s beneficiaries.

It seemed that, four months before she died, Niata had finished paying off her townhouse. Somehow, she had set it up as a trust, and I was the beneficiary on condition that I moved into the downstairs apartments, took over management of the property, and signed new rental agreements with each of the other tenants. In a state of mild shock, we examined the prewritten agreements. None offered the same rate as any of the others; instead, each had been revised with a deeply personal knowledge of each tenant’s financial means and pay schedule. Most of the rates had been significantly reduced; without a mortgage to pay, significantly less money was needed to maintain the house. Peter and Stephanie’s rent had been reduced to a mere $40/month. Stan’s had actually gone up by ten percent.

The lawyer told us we were required to decide before leaving the office. After a few minutes’ thought, everyone signed on and then went home quietly. I stepped outside to phone a friend of mine, a 3^rd-year law student, who told me rather hurriedly that the arrangement sounded legit to him and hung up. I went back in and spent several hours dealing with my side of the paperwork, hoping the others – all of whom had been renting from Niata longer than I – didn’t resent me for her choice, which I understood no more than they.

* * *

In the first two weeks that followed her death, I left Niata’s garden to the spring weeds. Bulbs thrust themselves through the leaf mulch she had made of the maple hand-me-downs the previous fall, blooming in a riot of reds, yellows, and purples. The bushes and trees grew in any shape they pleased. I was still settling in, changing the name on the utilities and getting myself recognized as the property manager at Niata’s House – yes, we named it, and put a carved wooden sign out front – while closing out my night job and starting piano gigs at a fancy hotel downtown in addition to the restaurant. I was also negotiating with Jenny Portham on becoming a studio pianist, on call when a recording required piano tracks. It turned out that the ‘entertainment’ she worked in was a music studio.

One late afternoon I was standing out on the back step just outside the kitchen, staring out at the garden to keep from watching the pot that would boil soon enough. Through the open window above I was hearing Peter and Stephanie arguing, right on schedule – poor as they were, the drastically reduced rent merely allowed them the luxury of purchasing one more of several necessities they had, until then, lucked by without. My eyes swept the neglected beds, bright green with clovers and ground ivy and dandelion, while behind me the pot hissed like a cat. I really need to get to this garden soon, I told myself, it was her favorite place. The broken butterfly bush loomed like a set of shattered chimes fallen from a giant’s window in the back left corner, silently brown and starting to be overgrown; evidently it had not survived the winter.

I sipped the last from my wineglass and caught a glimpse of the garden through its crystal-like facets, the formal lines and hedgerows for a moment distorted; and I lowered the glass slowly, stunned by a sudden, odd idea. Putting the glass down on the kitchen counter, I ran down the hall to my room and grabbed a piece of paper from the printer and a pencil, then returned to the back door to sketch a rough outline of the garden’s shapes. It had occurred to me – and the sketch confirmed it – that Niata’s garden was laid out in a quadrant pattern after the floor plan of her house. The ground floor was the back left, where the now-dead butterfly bush lived; the back right quadrant was segmented exactly like the second floor, the fore right mirrored the third floor, the fore left was Stan’s floor. In the plot that represented his room, an immaculately pruned dwarf yew rooted; in the plot across from it, the vacant room, nothing was planted.

An escalating argument was spewing from the open window overhead – Stephanie’s voice was somewhere between a sob and a scream while Peter snarled and shouted. All the little things that Niata had said to me about gardening began to parade in my head, the analogies she’d drawn about life using her hobby as an illustration. I turned off the stove, my pot having by now boiled almost dry, walked down the crushed gravel path, and began to weed the plot that corresponded to Peter and Stephanie’s room; in it had been planted a lily of the valley and a cluster of exotic-looking elephant hosta. Soon there were more weeds in an uprooted pile on the path beside me than in the plot, and as I worked, the sounds of the argument above gradually lessened.

I looked at Niata's garden now with fresh but inexplicable insight. Tomorrow, I knew, I would need to begin by digging up the remains of the butterfly bush and transplanting my nandina to the back right corner.