The Unintended Garden

By Daniel Holland

Slapping wet dirt from her reddened fingers, she stood again, propping a shaky palm on her lower back as the riptide of aches and pains skittered across it. “Why am I doing this?” she asked aloud to no one and pressed her sun-faded bandana to her forehead, catching a runaway dribble of sweat. Her young neighbour passed with a bouncy poodle, the white curls about its collar swirling a little in the new breeze. “Looks like a whole new world,” the girl mused, beaming up at Jamie from the sidewalk below. Resetting her feet on the slope, Jamie contemplated her work—this hillside that she’d been standing and sitting and kneeling and digging on for two days now. Once a mound of dried, brownish ivy that acted more like a wired fence than a welcome mat for her Santa Monica apartment complex, now it was… what exactly?

A sea of jade, cactus and aloe of every size and shape--that’s what it was. Some plants had long intricate names that she couldn’t even pronounce, and most she had never even worked into the earth before. But here they sprouted: these bursting greens, flaring reds and bright yellows tumbling from both sides of the slab entryway like some project she’d been dreaming up for years. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” she whispered, gazing down at her smudged palms.

When she looked up again, the girl with the dog was gone and another neighbour was smiling in her place. This one in a sky-blue jogging outfit, her feet still rhythmically tapping the concrete. “I don’t even recognize this place. You did this all by yourself?” the lady said, before spinning back to her daily jog. Watching the woman depart, Jamie’s smile dropped a notch. All by myself?

But she wasn’t. Karl, her “good guy,” would be here in a matter of hours now. Karl who had a great job could be a good listener, and who enjoyed a weekly, decadent five-star meal at a fine restaurant of her choice. Maybe he was just a little stiff-collared, but all men in finance were. His eyebrows, though, were a bit of a problem. They seemed… unnaturally still, two caterpillars frozen in a snowstorm still. Eyebrows should move, but his didn’t. It shouldn’t bother her, but it did. Went against some idea of warmth that her native Arizona must have planted in her years back. She peered down at the jagged gardening scratches lining her sunburnt forearms and told herself to go inside and finish packing for Karl’s big trip. No, that wasn’t right; it was her trip, too.

She gaped wondrously at the garden. Where did you come from Jelly Bean Sendums, Penwater plants… and what were those ghost shrub things called again? She’d been out here in the dirt for two sundowns now instead of packing and completing the errands that every long trip required. But it would be their third big journey together, and by now she already knew his basic approach to travel. He liked to get up early, solidify the itinerary over a big breakfast, then knock out the day by late afternoon, so they could sit and dissect the “adventures” over drinks at the bar in the early evening. Why was knowing that a problem, too?

Her cell lit up from the wooden garden table she’d set outside her front door. How many calls was that? Karl would be starting to worry by now. She should text him with a funny emoji, take a quick shower, then throw her things into a suitcase, and everything would be… well… fine. Just fine. But the scrapes on her forearms felt good, and the ache in her back didn’t really hurt-hurt; it was a feels-good hurt--all of it--the kneeling and digging and scraping out here in ways that were so unsettlingly refreshing.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she whispered again to herself, picking up a splashy red Adolphy Firestorm she’d bought just today as she kneeled down close, once more, to the earth.

Daniel Holland is a teacher, writer and film-maker.