There’s a Garden

by Christina Ellison

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set. It’s difficult to find, but it’s there. You don’t mean to find it, you just happened to jump from the fourth swing from the left at just the right angle with just the right amount of speed, and instead of landing on the mulch as you should’ve, the shavings fell away.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and a slide to bring you there. The farther down you slide the less you can see, the chute’s connecting ridges and bolts rubbing against your back where your T-shirt has risen.

You recall the slide of your old neighborhood’s playground, a finicky thing that felt like a sheet of ice in the winter and was utterly untouchable in the summer. Four years ago, at the breakfast table one sunny July day, your brother announced he was going to go down the infamous slide. You warned him against it, but his mind was set in stone, and his twelve-year-old self didn’t have to listen to his ten-year-old sister. He left the house at noon and reentered at noon-fifteen, limbs adorned with blisters. You looked to your mom for assistance, but she yelled pointed words instead, arrows that bullseyed your brother with enough force to hit you, too. That was when you began to notice his pattern, why he was so adamant to be out of the house.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set, though you don’t see it at first. When the slide ends, you steady your breathing, sitting on the lip, feet dangling. Your breathing never really returns to normal, but you hop onto solid ground anyway, the impact reverberating off the walls.

Somewhere, a light source shines through, providing a dim illumination. A scent hangs heavy in the air. It’s familiar, but not overly so, something you’ve smelled maybe once or twice before. You take a deep breath in, an inhale so sharp the bones in your nose hurt a little. A memory slots into place: Carlsbad, New Mexico; a winding trail leading you farther into the cool earth; bat guano. It was a blue-moon excursion, an on-the-way sight since you, your brother, and your mom were driving up to Angel Fire anyway for the funeral of a father you never knew. You and your brother giggled at the amorphous blob of the Caveman, peered into the depths of Longfellow’s Bathtub. Your mom had pulled you two along, each hand a pinching vise, berating you for almost being left behind several times, that she didn’t spend money to have you lost in the cavern’s stomach. You weren’t sure why she cared. She didn’t seem to ever want you two in her line of sight, either. You tilt your head back now, squinting, and see stalactite daggers hanging from a hidden ceiling.

There’s a cavern beneath the front park’s swing set.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set, but you’re intrigued by the light. It’s yellow-white and shining from a corner of the cavern—as much of a corner a cavern can have—and as you near it, you find it emanates no warmth. You’re tempted to stare at it. When you were five, your mom told you to not stare at the sun for too long or you’d go blind. But this isn’t the sun, is it, and there’s no one around to yell at you if you look. You could probably stare into its shine for as long as you want and still come away with your sight intact. You break contact after three seconds.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and it’s filled with outlandish plants. The garden is separated into three sections sat side by side. The first displays flowers striped in alternating yellow and blue bands like exotic candy canes, their stems twisted and curved in curlicues. Then you see the tips of the stems sport the circle-star shape of a potato flower, the petals maroon and pink, and you realize these aren’t flowers at all, but a bed of potatoes waiting to be harvested. You recall your mom forcing you outside in the death-humidity of midday and pushing you into the dirt of the backyard. If you won’t leave the house like your brother, you can at least be useful instead of wasting oxygen, she said, and, You’re not coming in until they’re all planted. You did as she told, because this was your old house and you were younger and your brother knew where the playground with the blistering slide was without asking and he didn’t take you along. He said you would slow him down. You didn’t know what he was running from, yet. When you all moved to a new neighborhood, you made sure you found where to escape. And this is where it brought you.

The second section of the garden holds what you can only classify as celery-to-the-left. Four or five wire plant cages are placed in what you assume is a strategic pattern but comes across as being placed wherever they could fit. You thought it odd that someone would use cages to grow celery, but you see how the skinny, limp-leafed stems littered with darker spots of green rise about two feet off the ground and drape across the rungs of the cages, too tired to support themselves, and you understand the need. They remind you of your brother’s arms, drooping over the back of the living room couch, spotted with dark spots, too. He only let them show at home, where no one would ask him about why the spots were there. You mom wasn’t one to strike, but she would hold, would tighten her fingers around a forearm, a constrictor with a mouse in its grasp. Constrict the mouse often enough and it will train itself in suffocation without being held at all.

When you approach one of the not-quite-celery, you see the leaves are as large as your hand, though they feel like mint leaves instead. You sniff one of the leaves, hoping to smell something to remind you of home, to remind you of the mint lemonade you and your brother would sell on the street corner at your old house, hiding the dollars and change in a pencil box under your bed. All you smell is guano fertilizer.

Fronds shoot from the ground in the last section like tall grass. You wonder why someone would want clumps of grass in their garden until you see a bulge at the base of one of the clumps, orange like a carrot. You’re surprised to see that this plant is overtly normal, so you take your chances and grab hold of one of the clumps and pull with all your might. The root plant never exits completely, but when you examine what exactly it is you semi-pulled out, you conclude that it is indeed a carrot—a carrot with leaves more akin to palm branches than the greens you’re used to, but a carrot nonetheless. You’re glad to know that if you’re stuck here for an indeterminable amount of time, at least there’s food for you to eat. You wonder if anyone has realized how long you’ve been gone. The thought almost makes you laugh.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and a house for its caretaker. Its build is like something out of the Sword in the Stone movie you and your brother would rewatch on mornings when your mom didn’t have enough energy to comment on your existence, a rectangular structure made of stepping-stone-sized rocks with a thatched roof and a chimney. You try to imagine what sort of person would live in a cavern under a swing set, why they would have a garden of strange plants. You hear the hinges of the door whine and you look for a place to hide, but the plants offer no protection and you can’t find the slide, so you stand stock-still and close your eyes, accepting your fate.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and it’s maintained by a woman. You know this because you hear her call for you. You open one eye and dare to look at the cottage. Standing at the entrance is a middle-aged woman beckoning with one arm to come here, come closer, come in. You walk toward her—what else are you supposed to do? The only ways out are back up the slide or climbing out through the hole the light is shining through, and you still can’t find the slide, nor something that would allow you to reach the opening in the ceiling. She’s seen you, anyhow. There’s no point in pretending.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and it’s maintained by a gardener. You suppose that goes without saying, but it surprises you nonetheless, that anyone down here could survive at all. Her honey bun hair is wound tight below the brim of a sunhat you’re not sure she needs, and over a white T-shirt she wears an orange pair of overalls that deepen to a midnight blue at the foot. You look closer and notice the overall cuffs are embroidered with midnight-blue thread, a pattern reminiscent of the potato flowers outside that winds around dirt stains from work in her garden. She kind of reminds you of your mom, if your mom expressed more interest in hair care and smiled with kindness, smiled at all. She looks like she sounds—like a mother. Not a real-life mother, more like June Cleaver and Olivia Walton and others that pop up on old-timey TV reruns.

Her work boots make muted thunks against the cobbles. She sits you down at her wooden table with a glass of water before stoking the fire, a cauldron suspended above like a witch’s brew. The inside of her house resembles a giant garden shed, rakes and hoes and shovels hanging on the walls, toolbox by the door. You passed a wheelbarrow on the way in. Pruners and trowels and gloves litter the table in front of you, as if she couldn’t decide which kinds she liked the most, so she bought them all.

She says it’s been years since the previous child visited her garden, how she so rarely gets visitors, how she’s glad she has company now. She asks how you found the slide, and you say it was an accident. She pets your head, says it’s okay, that accidents happen. She asks what you think of the cavern, and you say it’s large and echoey and you ask back why she’s down here alone. She says she likes being alone—which you can empathize with—so long as there’s people like you to come visit her. You nod and the cauldron starts to boil. Flashes of Snow White’s stepmother, of Ursula and Madam Mim, fly through your head and your eyes glue to the cauldron, wary of its concoction. A tiny voice in your mind reminds you that you should never talk to strangers. The voice sounds like your brother and nothing like the soft words of the gardener.

She notices you staring at her pot and laughs, a cackle sharp and warm as the fire. She ladles some of the concoction into a bowl and shows you what’s inside: celery, potatoes, carrots, and chunks of meat all floating around in a brown broth that makes your mouth water. Stew. She’s making stew. The gardener asks if you want any. Your brother’s voice is a vague, blurred sound, but it causes you to remember your manners. You thank her, but deny, sipping your water to prove your point. She smiles, and her teeth gleam brighter than you think they should. A vocal yawn emerges from your throat, and you mumble an apology. The gardener continues to smile, the kindness on her lips like snow on a rooftop, cold and slipping away. She’s still smiling as your eyelids droop, your consciousness dwindling. You wonder what was in the water. You wonder where she got the meat. You wonder what happened to the other children.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and it’s dark when you open your eyes. You’re lying on your back and something is preventing your limbs from moving. You reach your fingers out to the sides and feel crumbly soil, breathe in and taste rancid dirt that sticks to your tongue.

A sob erupts from your throat. All you did was wake up this morning. All you did was leave the house to escape your mom’s constricting hands, her gaze that burns your back when you try to ignore it, her mumbles and complaints and shouts. All you did was want an hour of peace. But now you’re here and you’re going to die if you don’t pull yourself together.

You jerk your arms toward your body once, twice, three times until whatever is holding you breaks. You twist the binding between your fingers. Roots. You snake your arms up to your face and start digging at the soil above.

For weeks now, your brother has been obsessed with unconventional ways to die. This meant he would tell all his facts to you on the bus and while you were brushing your teeth and any other time he could find. One morning he came to the breakfast table and told you how to survive being buried alive. Though at first his facts were interesting, at that point you literally couldn’t have cared less. But you were already there, so you let him talk on and on until he noticed his Cheerios were drowning and directed his attention elsewhere.

Never did you imagine that you’d be buried alive at the ripe old age of fourteen, but you thank your lucky stars for your rambling brother and start pushing the dirt to your feet. When your legs are covered, you push the dirt to your sides. Sit up as soon as possible, your brother’s voice says, so you do so when you can. You wonder how deep you’re buried, how much lower below the swing set you can go.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set, and as you break its surface, you take in huge gulps of air, cold light beaming as a reminder of the world above. You crawl out from the batshit soil and catch your breath beside a monochromatic sapling. To your right lies the three plots you saw before, the carrot in its half-in, half-out position.

Your stomach roils, but you stand. You approach the carrot, grab its fronds. You have to see for yourself. You pull and pull, and just when the carrot is fully out, you see small fingers holding onto the end, a final hope shriveled and gone. They’re grungy and mealy and—you, that was almost you. Keep moving, says your brother’s voice, and you go before you can be added to his list of unconventional deaths. You send a silent apology to the flowers and grass and vegetables, to the children in the dirt. Then you run.

Colliding with the cavernside is a sudden surprise, but you resituate yourself and hurry along the perimeter as quietly as you can manage, left hand dragging along the cold rock, remembering how your brother found a way out of a corn maze you got lost in last year.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set, and you forget to muffle your shout of pain as your gut meets the lip of the slide. You just begin the incline when you hear the whine of the gardener’s door and your heart buzzes like an alarm clock. You hear her boots boom on the cavern floor and your movements become frantic, your tread-worn shoes digging into the slope of the slide, your hands scrambling. She curses you for making her go hungry, shouts a string of nonsense words up the tunnel, but you have experience tuning out angry women. What you don’t expect is a piercing in your leg, a liquid warmth running down, but then you’re out of her reach, her shouts fading.

Labored breaths fall from your mouth as you rise. Your limbs ache and you want to give up, but you see a glint of pure blue and pull yourself upward, a second unburial.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set and you’d rather eat your dog than see that place again. You lay on the grass, far from the mulch, letting time tick by, watching the true yellow-white sun travel across the sky, but never looking directly at it. The whole time your chest is heaving, sobs ugly and unnoticed in the empty park.

Someone calls your name, but you don’t stop. Your brother’s face enters your vision, half-seen through tears. He looks concerned, lifts your torso and cradles you in sleeve-covered arms. He asks what happened, why is your leg bleeding, who did this, did she do this; whispers, You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, into your hair.

There’s a garden beneath the front park’s swing set. If you land on a certain area of the mulch, the ground opens up and swallows you, sending you down a slide to a nightmare land with distorted plants and a mother-like gardener with overalls the same orange-to-night as the sunset you see through the windshield of your brother’s dented sedan. You’re both driving back to a home you despise, but you escaped hell once. You can do it again.