1,014 words

The Spike Garden
Or: a pointed person and the people impaled

My mother had five sisters so I had five aunts, and the house had six gardens. Each sister had a garden of their own. There was the Rose Garden, the Green Garden, the Water Garden, the Spring Garden, the Fruit Garden, and my mother’s, the Spike Garden.
I never played there.
Now that all six gardens are mine, I wonder what should happen to them. I could decide, I could let nature take its course, I could keep the gardens as they are.
To let nature take its course would be to smudge them together into a wilderness. And what about the gardeners? How should they live with no gardens. A gardener needs a garden like I need … what do I need?
To keep the gardens as they are would be to build a flowery prison. Or should I say a rosey, green, watery, springy and spikey prison. What a prison that would be. What criminal deserves a prison of so many adjectives? What crime? A single prisoner, in a singular prison. A prison purpose-built to protect the outside humanity from one thing and one thing only. A prison purpose-built to punish one act, a set of acts, or should that be a sequence of acts? Acts that are individually criminal, and collectively more criminal. What should a series of such acts be called? A play? And yet, crime doesn’t play. Crime works.
But I am no prison-builder, no commissioner of punishment. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. That made sense when criminals were stoned to death. For more civilised times, a modernisation of the motto is needed. I have one: Let him who is without sin lay the prison foundation stone. What our lord never told us was the qualification for the second stone.
If I cannot build, and I cannot leave, then I must decide. To decide means to destroy. Decision is reduction. What is deduction?
I cannot decide on a garden to destroy. I can only decide to destroy all of them. But then one must be first, unless all are destroyed in an instant. That would not be possible if they were to be dug over. The digging would take time and one would be finished before the others. Then there would be a first destruction without a decision. Intolerable, which means impossible.
One gardener could be set to destroy each garden. Only if all six gardeners were copies, grown from the same seed or cast in the same mould or perhaps twins by six. I have encountered twins one or twice, though none were gardeners. I have read about twins by three; triple-lets they were called. But I have no information about their chosen profession or professions. I could track them down, approach them, offer them employment, wait for them to be trained, but I would still be three gardeners shy of the precise destruction required. I could search the world and never find twins by six; double-triple-lets I imagine they would be known as.
It could be my life’s work. Even if they exist and I found them they might reject my offer. If they did not reject it could be worse. What if one had been injured and worked slower than the rest? What if another became ill during the work? What if a third were to break his shovel? The fourth becomes melancholy in the eradication I demand and slackens. The fifth steals flowers from his garden.
He takes them home concealed in the pocket of a gardening garment that I cannot name. He stashes them in a compartment of some crypto-hortico-criminal equip that again, I cannot even name. Is it called a pocket and an overall? Is called a tray and a propagator? I do not know, I am no gardener. I cannot question what he brings or takes if I cannot even name what he carries. Picture the scene:
I tell him to turn out his pockets and he laughs. I have no pockets, sir he says. I tell him to open the trays of his propagator. It has no trays, sir he says. His brothers the other gardeners stand in a sector equal to exactly one third of a circle. They position themselves like the petals on a spare daisy. At once, they all shout laughter. Derided, I must let him past me as though he had crept and I was a sentry gasping in his garrotte. The seeds or seedlings or flowers or fruits are paraded out and he replants them. He nurtures them through season after season, year after year, generation after generation. The garden is not destroyed but moved, perhaps even made more, its seed sown. Now flowers spill over acres. Of course he must die at my hands, perhaps stoned.
The sixth gardener is free from damage, healthy, has a full set of tools in working order, is happy enough to uproot his assigned garden and would never stoop to theft. But he is loyal to his brother, a brother in work, in the soil and in blood. He must avenge and so he pursues me. He is implacable. With a taste for poetry in his justice, he uses a variety of gardening implements in his revenge. He asks me to identify each before striking me with it and shouting the correct name, which in all cases I have got wrong. Until it comes to the onion hoe, with which he would have struck the coup de grace. My mother made sure I could identify that particular tool. He is stunned by my correctitude. In that moment, I snatch the onion hoe and set it in him. He dies but has injured me so that I bleed to death. In the ebbing of my life’s tide I see the ebbing of my life’s work. Two brothers dead, two gardeners short, two gardens not destroyed; three if the fifth gardeners stolen beds are counted.
So no, I will not scour the earth for double-triple-lets.