Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (best story books to read .TXT) 📗

wanted it. And the only way to make something truly yours is to make it yourself. It would have been nice if he’d offered, but this way the flowers would grow where I buried them. These memories would be staying put.

But weeding was tough work. Pulling up twisted nettles and dandelions was easy, but the soil was littered with thousands of sickly buds as if attacked with spray paint. And Art was right about the mask. Soon, my throat was so raw that every breath rasped, but still I wouldn’t stop. I needed to see it through. Art suggested just using a big shovel and mixing it all in but then the roots would have still been there, deep in the mix, and would sprout again in search of light. I couldn’t have that, so I spent an hour or so each evening after work with a tiny trowel, digging out each offender by the stalk and placing it in a glass bowl. Even Art couldn’t deny that the patch of soil I was working on looked pretty flawless. Every so often he’d touch my shoulder, and remind me in a soft voice to head inside and sterilise my hands. The gardening gloves weren’t helping all that much anymore, and my hands were burning beneath the latex.

After layering on balms and new gloves I persevered, but by the time I reached three-quarters of the way around, the yellow spray was already starting to reappear at the beginning again, the tiny stalks already bending under their weighty heads. So I went back to the beginning, tearing out the new-borns before heading back to the three-quarter point. I was putting out little fires everywhere. Every time I turned around, another flame had sparked, and so I couldn’t catch my breath, but kept digging, until eventually I threw down the trowel and rested my spinning head on my knees.

All the time this was going on, the prickly shrub was growing, looming over the house, the berries luminous white, like fat little moons. Frustrated with the endless tending on all fours I went at the bush with shears, hacking it as far back as it would go, right to the bare black bark. While I swept up the branches Art came out of the house to see what I’d done. It was the first time I’d seen Art show real distaste. He clicked his teeth and twisted his face as if he’d tasted something rotten.

“It was too big, Art. You’ll have to help me dig it out.”

But he didn’t help me; instead he bluntly reminded me of the four crates still on the kitchen floor. Abandoned and suffocated by their tiny pots, they’d already started to wilt and dry. By that point I was short-tempered, I know I was, and I told Art to “Bring them out then if you’re so worried. Bring them out.” He did it without a word, dumping the crates onto the lawn and stalking back inside, slamming the kitchen door behind him. I wondered if he was still in the kitchen, quietly seething at what I’d done or whether he’d gone back up to his study to sulk. I couldn’t see any movement through his study window, so maybe he’d headed up to check on Nut, whispering to her about how I don’t have it in me to nurture anything.

Having sat on the kitchen floor for over a week, the plants in the crates were showing many signs of neglect. Some had turned a sorry shade of yellow, and others looked like they’d been executed, their blossoming heads decapitated from skinny bodies. I dug a hole in the border at random and picked up the first plant I could reach. I thrust it in the hole and squeezed the earth around it without even checking that the stalk was level.

I continued in this way with all four crates, planting a wild and unconducted chorus of orange, rose, violet, and inky blue amongst the speckled soil. Finally, I took a canister of fertiliser and dowsed the earth all along the border before standing back to survey my handiwork. Somehow, even though I’d planted around thirty-five little plants, they all seemed so small and indistinct in the grand scale of things. Sometimes it’s better to not get perspective, to not be faced with the cold, hard truth.

And then, something moving. Stirring beneath the red petals of some unnamed plant. I teased away the leaves and stalled, unable to move a muscle.

“Art!” And then louder, “Arthur!”

He must have only been in the kitchen, because in seconds he was by my side, peering down with me into the border. Stretched out beneath the fall of scarlet lay a green, shining frog. I’d never seen such a thing. Its limbs shone like plastic twine, a wide bowl of lump-encrusted back-skin split along a deep spinal ridge. Its eyes were black and glassy, and stared eerily to both the left and the right.

I could practically hear its skin sizzling.

We stood there motionless for some time, all three of us too afraid to move. I didn’t need to look for a seam, a flaw. The frog was indescribably actual, as if it was somehow more than itself. Vibrating too quick for our eyes to see.

After some minutes Art leant over and whispered in my ear that he’d go and get a bowl. He ran off at a pace, returning with a shallow saucer of cold tap water. But by the time he set down the dish, the frog had gone.

9

I woke up so many mornings that summer convinced that the frog had come into the house and was now squatting next to my face on the pillow. I’d be in a dream, and then the plug would be pulled and the world would swirl around me until I hit the bed with a jolt. Face deep in sheets. For weeks I met the day confused and dizzy, sure that there was something