He settled the last of the old Amazon boxes in the bed of the pickup, an intractable, unstrung guitar neck poking out from the middle, with the faded moon looming eerie in the midday sky like the cover of some science fiction paperback. He threw a blue tarp over the mess, then took his time stitching a length of twine through the grommets, around the cleats, a clever hitch knot at the end, even opening the driver’s side door before finally, finally turning to me standing in the hot pea gravel, glass of ice tea melting in my hand, before saying, “Well, that’s it.”
It started with packages set at the doorstep — even unopened they bore an earthy, fecund smell — each containing a handful of bulbs nested in tissue paper that reminded me of mummified organs. When we bought the house in September we were the same shade of pale, but as the pandemic became entrenched, reified in empty shelves and stocked hospital beds, as the year turned over and the sun grew bold, he would darken, gathering and stacking fieldstone into parterres, delineating the future. One February morning, he went out wearing a ski jacket and my good leather gloves to prune a neglected hedgerow of wild roses. This house that would finally, finally discharge us from the city’s miasma of green light, the traffic of grey men, with all its chichi energy and ambition and noise, was a center hall colonial — I needn’t see more than the neoclassical staircase (carpeted runner aside) that neatly divided the place in two — and I hid in my office with floor-to-ceiling glass, half-veiled in the curtains, as he thinned and cut back the hedge until what remained was but an abatis of sticks punched in the ground. It seemed too much, but he assured me (my gloves now prickled and ruined) they’ll come back.
Sure enough, a full year into the dispensation of desultory mask mandates and temperature checks, when it finally set in things weren’t getting better, wouldn’t return to the way they were, the property erupted in a flight of color clever as a magician drawing a bouquet from his sleeve. The orchids were first, so improbable in design, so alien in appearance, and then a field of bluebells and purple wood sage and star of Bethlehem. Of a sudden, the woody stems of the rose hedge flared green, besotted with blossoms. He sowed coreopsis along the road, a mile of broken asphalt through the tumble of hills before reaching the highway. Coneflowers drew dragonflies in July, chrysanthemums came in August. Such were the days of that summer. Yet when the sun left off and the night slipped in like a cat drawn to the spot of warmth she left behind, he would reminisce on the interminable city restaurants with Ted of the fat shoulders talking tech stocks and TikTok amongst the clack of flatware and the braying of a thousand Pomeranians as the waiter served drink after drink after drink.
He threw a tarp over the spray of boxes, winched the twine around and around the cleats, saying he needed people. The sycamores had begun to shed leathery curls of bark that left the trunks and branches a mottle of grey, white, green. “Do you want something for the drive? A soda?” I stupidly asked, sounding like my mother, anxious and hopeful, as though he were just off to scribble through a semester of college, would be home by May when the yard was ready to make a fresh run at things. But he wasn’t. He was going somewhere much farther in time and space and memory, and he was already gone, passing between stars now, crossing galaxies, and the smear of light he sent back to me was a decade old, he was already that far gone. And then he got in his truck and left.
Around these parts, people seem back to their old lives as though the last two years of quarantine were a book they started, set on the nightstand, carried about in a bag to nag at them, until finally they just decided not finishing was no big loss, found a place on the bookshelf, and got on with the day, such as it was. By December everything he planted was dead, as expected. But that spring, as through some magic, some remembrance left deep in the soil of where they left off, unbeckoned, unasked for, the damn things came back. However I would lift no hand to tend this garden, to motion some proposition for order. And in time the lot would be overrun with weeds, fast growing and broad leaved, crowding out everything around, unruly, pushing their way through the dirt wheresoever they will until wild grasses grew waist high such that one might think the place abandoned, and the neighbors at the bottom of the hill, with their kid clattering a fallen tree limb from last night’s storm over the splintered asphalt off on some adventure, will assuredly file a complaint with public safety that it was all an eyesore and attracted vermin and lowered their property value, until finally, finally you couldn’t see the front porch, and I will stay here, shut away, witness to what happened and what’s left, because it is not yet over, I think.
Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay – A border of colourful mixed flowers.
literally stories 
Todd
Great sense of loss. Also the MC is fully aware of the situation and yet is determined to hold onto a sort of mental implosion caused by isolation. But there may be hope, being afraid all the time is awfully tiresome–it too can be set aside like an unfinished book.
Fine work.
Leila
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Todd
I was hugely impressed with the prose in this piece. The language tumbles forward in beautiful concrete detail, and the sadness of the situation comes through because nothing is actually said about it, or not much. The simple title says volumes. The ambiguous ending has a thought-provoking twist. I felt like this piece was as much prose poetry as short story (like a lot of Melville’s writing), which is high praise and not true of most stories. Really, really well done. Thanks for writing this!
Dale
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Lovely writing and this piece has a really strong sense of lost hope and melancholy. We are aware that many lives were changed forever by what happened and not only those of the bereaved. There are many many stories of the pandemic and only a very few stand out and I reckon this is one of them because it addresses more than the frustration and fear. A good read – thank you – Diane
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Story of the pandemic and the eventual return to “normalcy,” such as it is. It tells of how some were well-to-do enough to escape to the boonies until it became evident that normal wasn’t coming back in its entirety. The flowers he planted are a good metaphor. There were some delightful, digressive and dignified alliterations which I found welcoming. However, some of the sentences were ponderously long — six or seven lines in length — which were rather unwieldy, though they did little to distract from the flow of the story. This was a short, short story and as always, short is hard to do, but gratifying when done right — and this was!
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Duh! I just had a notion. Reading a previous comment, I noted the word “bereavement.” Is that word for the actual death of the male character, for his loss back to the urban environment, or something else. Was she lamenting the fact that he perished from the Covid? This hadn’t occurred to me before,, but added more poignance to the fading garden.
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This piece instantly grabbed me by the heart and drew me into the atmosphere and sublime melancholy. The writing is fabulous and almost otherworldly, the imagery as if shimmering in the middle distance. Loved it, great work!
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I absolutely loved this! Gorgeous wordcraft – loved the comparison of night with a cat! – and a poignant tone. Very nice.
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I love the rich, detailed, expert descriptions in this and to that end this piece is as much a celebration of language as it is a tale of decline / loss.
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Todd,
I lost the story in the words, which I think was the point. When almost everything we did was inside, it’s what’s there. And in this story, the words were everything. And so well done. I knew I was going to love it when the bulbs arrived “in tissue paper that reminded me of mummified organs.”
The long paragraphs and long sentences right to the end were a lot like the shutdown felt like — while vegetative life on earth went on with us or without us, “I think.”
So well written!
Gerry
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Lovely story. The garden was a perfect metaphor. Used very well. All the details worked to make this real, and the emotion real.
Well done.
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An effective portrayal of melancholy and disconnection. The descriptions of the garden’s transformation and the MC’s feelings of isolation and loss create a poignant atmosphere. A powerful and evocative story. (Excellent banner image.)
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Todd
After a few more readings of this piece, I’m even more impressed with the prose. The rhythms and word choices, the punctuation and sentence lengths, the realistic details, which stand for more than themselves, are all really, truly, very well-done. Also, the prose is both full, and restrained, at the same time, which enhances the reading experience. Congrads on a fine piece of writing! It has a James Joycean ring to it.
Dale
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Hi Todd,
I thought only Tom Sheehen could construct the long sentences so beautifully – You are right up there with him.
The writing was rich, technical and complex but it was superbly balanced with the simplicity of those last two lines.
Excellent!
Hugh
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Wow, intriguing style kind of reminds me of Southern Gothic, all in motion, nature keeps growing and changing, the narrator remains behind in his own time and place.
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