The allotment came with a tin shed, six neglected beds, and a dibber whose handle had been worn to the shape of somebody else’s palm. She spent the first Sunday planting beans. On Monday, the neighboring bed contained thirty-six fresh holes arranged in a grid so exact that she measured them before filling them in. By evening, they had returned.
The same thing happened wherever she left bare soil. Onions went into one bed and unexplained holes appeared in another. She sowed leeks and found a third bed prepared overnight, each shaft smooth-sided and strangely deep. Eventually she knelt beside one after dusk and watched a blunt wooden point rise slowly from below, pause at the surface, and withdraw. Something underneath the allotment was using another dibber.
The shed offered an explanation of sorts. Pinned above the bench was an old seed packet bearing a photograph of a woman in a headscarf. The instructions recommended firm ground, one hand’s depth, regular watering, and patience through the third season. The date stamped on the flap was the year she was born.
She took the packet to the allotment secretary, who examined it without surprise. The neighboring plots, he explained, had never actually changed owners. Gardeners simply reached maturity.
That evening she dug beneath the bean row.
Six inches down, she found hair.
Not roots. Hair.
Deeper still lay the curve of a forehead attached to a sleeping face she recognized from photographs of herself at twenty. Beneath the onions rested another version, older. Under the leeks, a small hand flexed in the soil.
The allotment did not grow vegetables. Vegetables merely marked the beds.
Each gardener had been raised elsewhere until old enough to return and tend the next crop of themselves. Every choice made above ground altered what developed below: patience, bitterness, loneliness, generosity. The earth took cuttings from a life and propagated variations.
Her boots had already sunk to the ankles.
The soil tightened gently around them while something beneath the path worked its dibber upward.
She understood why the handle fit her hand so well. It had been worn smooth by all the versions who came before her, preparing holes for the woman who would eventually replace them.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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