Abelia was sitting with her mother in the sunshine on a patchwork quilt in the front yard, pining for a playmate. Her mother was very strict with her and overprotective, saying that all the children in the neighborhood were too rough-and-tumble and Abelia would likely be hurt if she were to venture beyond the white fence of their little yard to play. So on the quilt every day, Abelia sat with her mother in the grass listening to the gleeful squeals of children her age as they jumped rope and ran like wildlings in the dust of the road in front of her house, wishing from down deep in her bones that she could do the same.
Stop nibbling at your fingertips, her mother snapped. Abelia had an exhausting habit of peeling off long slivers of fingernails with her teeth, grinding them between her molars, and then swallowing them down. Her mother liked to read long stories from thick books by long-dead authors to Abelia while they sat outdoors, so Abelia often grew bored in a quiet, polite sort of way.
It’ll stop up your works, that gnawing of yours. And so to appease her mother she began spitting the tiny crescents, sometimes in quite high arcs, into the grass beyond the blanket.
The following day rain folded itself to the ground in great, gray sheets and even the wildest of children did not step out of doors to play in the puddles. Abelia sighed in the living room next to her mother.
When the sun shone again, it was a Thursday and Abelia went skipping out with the quilt to make a place for herself to watch the children go by. As she lifted the blanket into the wind by its corners, a fleshy nubbin caught her eye in the grass. She knelt to get a closer look and gasped when she realized that there were four milky-white fingertips poking up from the soil. Behind her, the voice of her mother startled her out of her wondering and she hastily covered the ground and the fingertips with the quilt. But all while her mother read to her the lengthy poems by Wordsworth, Abelia could swear she felt wriggling through the blanket beneath her legs.
In bed that night, after her mother had kissed her quite wetly on the forehead and tucked in the blankets tightly around her body, Abelia thought it possible that the fingernails she spat out into the grass days ago had sprouted roots like seeds and began to grow their own bodies. The thought gave her an idea.
After she heard the quiet sound of her mother’s door closing, Abelia crept to the bathroom and found the hair scissors. With a snick of the shears, she severed an inch of her golden hair, placed the hairs in an old leather coin purse her mother used to carry, and stashed it under her pillow.
Just as she surmised, a few days after burying the hair, Abelia found a crop of golden locks rippling in the breeze near the fingertips (which were now visible up to their second knuckles). Placing herself strategically between her mother and the new growths, Abelia could hardly keep her hand off of the gossamer tuft. While her mother carried on reciting long, complicated stanzas, Abelia stroked the hair and tapped the end of each earth finger with one of her own.
Over the next few days, Abelia wandered the yard while her mother kept watch through the kitchen window. While her mother was turned away she tugged at her delicate row of eyelashes, then sprinkled them among the weeds near the rest of her sprouts. Nights, she kept awake, touching the different bits of her skin and hair and even the crust of scab on her heel, wondering if there was more of her she could tease loose and plant behind the house.
The next week, Abelia’s mother took her monthly visit with her sister in town and like she always did, left Abelia at home with strict instructions not to go outdoors. She’d likely be away for two hours and although Abelia was typically an obedient child, the desire to go out and peek at her little garden was too strong. She paced for ten minutes counting the time it would take her mother to arrive in town on the big brass clock in the dining room, then she got an idea.
Her mother’s room was hot from the sunshine coming in the window and the bed cover had been made up so smooth and tight, Abelia was afraid to touch it for fear of leaving behind an imprint. Instead, she slid the top drawer of her mother’s jewelry chest open and lifted up the velvet bottom where she knew her mother kept her most tiny baubles and treasures. Next to a single diamond earring was the milk tooth Abelia had lost last summer.
Her mother, while very ornery about things like manners and lessons, was a deeply sentimental woman who kept photographs in shoeboxes under the bed and postcards tucked into the mirror of her vanity. Abelia touched the diamond earring once with her pinky finger and then pocketed the milk tooth before replacing the velvet-lined drawer back into the chest and racing off into the yard to plant it.
Sooner or later it became difficult for Abelia to keep her little garden a secret from her mother and she began placing their reading quilt directly on top of it when they went outside. All while her mother read to her, she felt the slight movement of the fingers underneath her and once there was even a sound coming from the place where she had planted the tooth.
Do I need to remind you how rude it is to interrupt? Her mother closed a thumb in the book as she scolded Abelia for this perceived disruption. Feeling nearly as betrayed as her mother, Abelia put one of her hands down hard over the place beneath the blanket where the voice had come from and nodded ardently at her mother. The lesson commenced without another disturbance, but Abelia had to bite her tongue in order to stifle a squeal when she felt a sharp pinch in the center of her palm. That evening, she rubbed the place on her hand where it was tender and instead of getting out of bed to tiptoe in the yard after her mother turned out the lights, she simply closed her eyes and fell asleep.
With a change of season, the rains persisted for nearly two weeks. Even when there was a break in rainfall, the soil was sopping and smelt like rotting. Her mother was happy to hold their readings inside, and to be quite honest, Abelia was grateful for a break from tending to her strange little garden.
One night, as she lay awake in her bed making up stories about the friends she wanted to meet, there came a clicking sound on her window behind the curtain. And because she was so wrapped up in the childish tales she was in the middle of telling herself, she went straight to the window without thinking and pulled back the curtain.
What stood on the other side of the glass looking at Abelia could best be described as a hideous patchwork of flesh and flora. The body of this thing before her was a heavy lump of sod with yellow dandelion blooms scattered on it like freckles and the arms were two fleshy-looking stems bent like funny bones in the middle so that they both pointed in one jagged direction. On the ends of the stick-arms were human hands very much like Abelia’s own and she recognized the fingertips and chewed bits of finger nail on the end of each one. And on top of the lumpy, loamy torso standing out in the drizzle of rain was a head so unlike any head she had ever seen.
Although the shape of the thing resembled, in a slight way, that of a person’s head, the cheeks were too low and looked more like jowls and the bit of dirt meant to be the nose was far too high on the forehead to look anything like a real thing. But the eyelashes were downy and fair and sprung out around two brightly colored marbles Abelia imagined she had left about somewhere in the yard. One white one swirled with sky blue and the other one an inky black.
The two stared at one another for a very long while as Abelia collected her heartbeats back into a normal pace and decided on what to do. The clock in the dining room chimed eleven times and when it stopped, Abelia slid up the frame of her window and stepped back to let it in.
Once inside the dry darkness of Abelia’s room, the lumpy growth sat with a thud. The floorboards of the house shook and both heads turned to the door, listening for movement. After long enough, Abelia felt it was safe to breathe again and let out a long breath of relief that her mother had stayed asleep. When she looked back at it she could see that in a way, the thing was also relieved and the gritty center of its body settled lower into place with a sort of noise sounding like a breeze through branches. Abelia raised a hand up in a half-wave and to her surprise, it lifted one of the stick arms in the same manner. And although the hand at the end of the arm had only four fingers, they were familiar to Abelia and she giggled a little at the way they wiggled. The thing sitting on the rug of her bedroom giggled, wetly, back.
The two of them faced one another and sat for an hour that way, moving their heads from side to side, flapping their arms like wings, both in turn. Abelia scrunched up her nose and the thing scrunched up its own muddy clump. Abelia pointed her toes and the five thorny toes at the end of the thing’s leg came together in imitation. But at the chimes of the next hour, fear bloomed inside Abelia’s chest as she supposed what would happen if her mother were to walk in to see her playing with her new friend. She hurried the thing to the window and hefted it, with great trouble, over the sill into the damp night. With a wide smile on her face, Abelia watched it amble away, only faltering a little in her excitement when she spied a fat pink worm jutting from in between two roots dangling down the thing’s back.
The next morning her mother scolded her about the dry mud on the rug, but nothing could smother her delight as she listened to her lessons, feeling a nearly imperceptible rise and fall of the earth breathing beneath her.
The two became nighttime playmates in the following weeks, clumsily moving about the room in silent waltzes, playing no-rules checkers. Abelia adorned the strange patches of hair and clover covering the garden girl’s head with ribbon and rhinestone barrettes and even took a great risk by helping the mess of grass and grisly tendons into one of her best nightgowns, during what Abelia imagined was the closest she’d ever come to having a slumber party. But at the end of every graceless dance, the garden girl’s face drooped more and more with the sadness of letting go as she went through the window and back into the yard. At times, Abelia thought, even the grubs coming out of its ears looked sad.
Once, when the chimes of the clock signaled it was time for the night’s play to end, the garden girl twisted her funny bones into a tangle in front of her chest and refused to leave. It was not in Abelia’s imagination that the limbs and height of her friend had nearly doubled since the first tapping at the window, but she was tired and wanted very much to wash up the muddy mess she’d made and go to bed, so Abelia did what she saw the kids outside of her white fence do when they had a disagreement and she pushed her friend a little and stuck out her tongue. This made the garden girl’s roots burn and she bared her one human tooth among a jagged row of glass and stones in a snarl that intimidated Abelia into taking a big step backward.
The two stared at one another again and Abelia worried for the first time about what her friend was thinking.
GET OUT. Abelia whispered emphatically and a tingle of superiority sparked behind her eyes knowing the garden girl could do many things that she herself could do, but making words was not one of them. For every yellow bloom that turned into dandelion fluff, the garden girl had a patch of golden hair. And though every woody stem was covered a bit in fair, sandy skin and the wax coming out of her coiled snail ears was real, the noises coming from inside of the garden girl would never take shape the way Abelia’s did because the garden girl had no tongue.
That night, when she reluctantly left out the window, the garden girl’s marble eyes grew so wet that they seemed to float inside the holes of her face as she settled herself into the rest of the yard.
There was no rain after they fought, but Abelia insisted on taking her lesson inside to avoid any contact with the garden girl. And that night, when she heard the tapping of her own fingernails against the pane, she put her hands over her ears and waited for the sound to stop.
But the garden girl had grown. Like plants and humans do. She stood taller than Abelia now and had become fond of the privileges the house girl allowed her while she was on the inside. She made her tapping stiff and sharp with the pebbles of her knuckles and Abelia had to decide if she was more afraid of her mother or of the girl who had grown out of the scattered seeds of herself.
Abelia went to the window and heard the broad hum of a hundred bees coming from the other side of the glass. She realized then that she was now more afraid of the garden girl than anything her mother could possibly do. She opened the window and stepped back.
The girls stood in the bedroom, one of them buzzing and hot with envy, the other so cold and flimsy with fear she could be blown over by the beating of a bird’s wings. Trembling, Abelia blinked. So did her friend. When Abelia frowned, the girl in front of her did as well. And when she lifted her arm, clean and pale in the dark, the garden girl lifted her own knotted and crooked arm.
I hate you.
Abelia whispered it with the last grain of courage that remained. The garden girl could feel that it was fear making Abelia betray her and that knowing cultivated a powerful need to take. She reached out and grabbed Abelia’s jaw so hard that it made her own cheeks hurt just to watch it. When Abelia opened her mouth to scream, the garden girl snatched the tongue out of Abelia’s face and left with it through the window and into the night. As she walked out of the gate and onto the dirt road where the other wildlings played, she heard the gushing moan of her friend behind her. When she was far enough away that the only sound was the growing of the grass and the moonshine, she brought the pink, limp bit of flesh up to her mouth and planted it.