The Garden

The Garden

By Kyoko Telfer

There is a void at the end of the garden. Both gardens, to be exact. The front garden, with its barely restrained flower beds and climbing rose trellises, and the back garden, fruit trees heavy with their burden, both come to an abrupt end just outside their wooden fencing. The wood is weather-worn and in need of a new coat of paint, a task that keeps getting postponed to another day. The front garden isn’t gated but the back garden is, a door with a latch that stands around hip height. It can swing open, out into the darkness, and when it swings shut it brings with it eddying gusts of Someplace Else.  

You have not always lived in the house with the garden, but it has been your home for so long that that fact may as well not matter. The house is too large for an occupant of one, dust collecting too quickly in rooms that barely get used. It has been a good home to you though, and so you appreciate its strange corners and its peculiarities. The garbage always gets collected from where you put it out by the front fence on Thursdays and your kitchen always gets filled with the groceries requested on the handwritten list pinned to the refrigerator on Mondays. Water runs clear no matter which tap you turn open and light is only a flick of a switch away. Shiny brass pans hang from the kitchen ceiling and your cupboards are always stocked with spices. There are books to read — all the great classics — overflowing from bookshelves despite your best efforts to keep them organized. The window seat in the second-floor study is the perfect place to curl up, balancing a book on your lap and a steaming cup on the windowsill.  When the itch to leave the house rears its sleepy head, there are the gardens to play in and tend to. It is a quiet life.  

Light from somewhere, and it might be the sun though you never actually see the fiery thing itself, reaches down warm fingers to dance across your skin and draw the open faces of the flowers to it. It is usually bright in this place, in this garden, but there is rain sometimes too. The rain barrel at the side of the house catches errant streams of it on the days it is too stormy to venture into the garden. The apple tree in the back garden with its carved wooden bench balanced between the bulging roots provides the 

best shade to sit under. It is so very easy to while away a few hours there, time unwinding like a runaway spool of thread.  

There is a silence in the garden that is almost ringing in its resoluteness. Your breath is the only wind that disturbs its foliage, your footsteps the only ones that crush grass underfoot. To be in the garden is to know that you are the only living creature in it. Solitude in its purest form. It frightens you sometimes,  drives you inside behind closed doors where at least the fire in the stove can be lit and the crackling of the logs keeps you company for a few scant hours. But the moment always passes and the lure of the garden draws you out again.  

You cannot point to the exact hour or day at which the void at the end of the garden transforms from simply a fact to something of an oddity. The days run together, into each other, until each is barely distinguishable from the other that there is hardly a point to asking the question in the first place. It remains, though, that no longer can you find it in yourself to ignore the mystery. Simply, the void which was once obtrusive now seems to clamour for attention. Perhaps your attention was caught the first time you had thought to see if the back gate could still close if you opened it wide enough to stretch out into the void. Perhaps it was one of the whispering echoes that occasionally seep through, ragged scraps of the unseen. The void will not go unnoticed.  

Small tasks become unbearably difficult. Cleaning the windows is a bitter lesson in how not to ignore the ever-present nothingness. Dinners get burnt and laundry starts to molder in the machine as instead your attention catches and holds on the garden gate. The seemingly endless nothingness grinds against your senses, making the hollow ringing loneliness of your life impossible to sublimate anymore. It is difficult, yes, but you soldier on with your routines regardless, as simply living produces so many little tasks that must get done. Ignoring what lurks beyond the fence becomes a routine of its own. To cook without getting distracted you must constantly hop on your left foot. Dusting bookshelves requires you to count spines in threes lest your eyes wander. Hanging your laundry on the lines takes a spoonful of rhubarb cordial from the cellar and a maple key under your tongue. It is not quite a quiet life. 

The dish soap you had written down on your grocery list does not materialize the Monday after you first touch the void. One evening the idea had occurred to you that you had never truly observed the void in the shadow of night. Renewing your grip on the flashlight handle you had gone out into the dark to the bottom of the garden and simply stared. Mesmerized by the way it simply devoured the beam of light, you had reached out to steady yourself on the solid framework of the fence and… missed. Unnerved by the experience of your hand simply not being there but escaping relatively unscathed, you had promptly left off your exploring. The next day the paper titled “Monday’s Grocery List” appeared on the dining table as it always did. Double-checking the list, you had indeed written down the words “dish soap”. Yet the soap did not appear. It is a small inconvenience and you make do without it.  

On what must be Wednesday evening, the reminder to take out your garbage shows up pinned to the fridge door as usual. The garbage does not get taken away the next morning or the next evening. It never gets taken away at all. Instead the half-hidden sounds of Someplace Else grow stronger. Like a half-healed scab, the almost perceptible words taunt you. Time seems to crystallize; no more languorous days running into each other. The isolation of each hour, each second is felt in passing. The lights grow dimmer than they were before, requiring you to flip switches more than once to coax away darkness.  They stop working completely by what is probably Sunday, though you can’t be sure as the paper for the groceries never arrived. Food, of course, never arrives. You make do with the fruit of the garden and the preserved jars in the cellar, but it will not be enough forever. Three days later the water stops running clear before it stops running at all. Leftover water collected in the rain barrel tides you over but it will not be enough forever.  

Voices whisper in the wind that blows across the garden, rattling the branches of the apple tree.  They coax and call, teasing promises of tenuous kinship. Surely this had happened before, in this house that once did not belong to you. Desperate to find some answer, you turn to the books lining the halls of the house. Hungry hands page through them, these great classics of literature, to find with horror the texts descending into madness and then disappearing from the pages altogether. Sharp gasping inhales winch your chest tight, sight blurry. There is no future for you here. There might never have been. 

There is a void at the end of the garden. Both gardens to be exact. It beckons you with laughing voices and winds that twine through your clothes. There is no safety left here, in this perfect loneliness.  The only chance for you is the gaping wound of the void and whatever may lie on the other side. You have not always lived in the house with the garden and you never will again.