The seed catalog arrived unsolicited, wedged into the mailbox between bills and coupon flyers, no return address, no company name printed anywhere on its glossy cover, just a single line of script promising a harvest beyond anything conventional soil could produce.
Most people would have tossed it straight into the recycling bin, and most people, in fact, did exactly that, but every town seems to have at least one gardener desperate enough for something to finally take, and this town had hers, a woman who’d lost three seasons in a row to blight and drought and a rabbit infestation that ate through every fence she built.
The seeds inside were labeled in that same unfamiliar script, names that sounded almost like vegetables and almost like something else, and the instructions asked for things no seed packet had ever asked for before.
Plant at the hour between dusk and true dark.
Water only with something that had once been warm.
Speak to the rows nightly, and mean what you say to them.
She followed the instructions with the specific devotion of someone who had run out of other options, and within two weeks the rows were thick with growth unlike anything she’d planted before, dark green and glossy, heavy with fruit that smelled faintly of copper.
The harvest, when it came, fed her better than any season had in years, and she told the neighbors who asked that she’d finally found the right fertilizer, laughing it off the way you laugh off good luck you don’t fully trust.
What she didn’t mention, because she’d only half admitted it to herself, was the sense that the garden was listening back now, that the rows seemed to lean toward her before she’d finished speaking, that the vegetables on her table had started to taste like things she remembered rather than things she’d grown.
She kept planting anyway, every season after, because the harvest never failed again, and because by then she’d stopped being entirely sure the choice was still hers to make.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Leave a Reply