When she was little, they used to plant marigolds together. Her mother wasn’t soft. She didn’t do bedtime stories or kiss scraped knees. Their little house was quiet: full of clattering pans, unspoken tension, and words that needed to be said but stopped just short of the tongue.
There were rare occasions of peace. One of them: the first time her mother gardened with her; she spoke one of those rare, kind sentences.
“We grow things, so the world knows we still believe in it.”
It was idealistic, something she had never seen her mother be before. She had only ever seen her mother be stubborn. It startled her. Drew her in. Made her believe too, even. Thus, it became a tradition. Every spring, like a ritual, her mother would haul down a battered seed crate and press a pair of gloves into her hands, no words said. And out they’d go, into the backyard where the soil was still dark and forgiving.
They knelt side by side, digging rows with their hands, sweat streaking their faces. It was sacred. It was the only time they were easy around each other—when their mouths were shut and their fingers were working, folding seeds into the ground like secrets. Dirt under her nails was the only trait she was willing to inherit from her mother. (She pointedly ignored the twist of her mother’s smile or the small mole under her left eye when she looked in the mirror.) These few weeks of gardening were the most familial thing they were capable of.
But at age twelve, she noticed the berries came up slower. At fifteen, half of them died before she could taste them, and her mother’s fingers trembled when she tried to hold the hose. The sun was scalding. Still, every year, her mother planted. Even when the rain didn’t come.
Even when the earth was dry and cracked. Her mother’s attempts to mimic normalcy enraged her. She refused the gloves the next spring, disgusted.
Then she left for college. Didn’t come home one summer. The next, she stayed only two days. The first to bury her mother. The second to bury the old seed crate beside her. She thought it was fitting. But she kept the gloves. She kept the gloves.
And she didn’t sell the house, despite it all. She convinced herself it was an investment worth keeping. So, after graduation, she moved back to her small town with her little house.
It wasn’t theirs anymore. The garden was dust. The tools were still hanging in the shed like bones. The house was as silent as it had been when her mother was alive. After all, they had never really spoken.
That fall, she remembered the gloves hanging from their rusted hook. Something in her demanded she wear them. Recklessly, she bought and planted whatever shitty seeds the cashier said would grow in November.
When they didn’t, she cried. Maybe, she thought, maybe she killed them. Maybe she killed her mother. Maybe if she’d been more grateful, maybe if she’d been a better daughter, then everything around her wouldn’t be dead. So, what if it was irrational or absurd? It didn’t make it any less true.
A few months later, the news said the ground had officially been reclassified as sterile. Nothing would grow now. Close to nothing had been able to grow for a while before that, they announced. At hearing that, she felt hollow. Eventually, she stopped staring at the TV and got up off the couch. She found the gloves again. She folded them gently. She didn’t cry this time.
There was no one left to cry to, and nothing left to cry for. She buried them in the garden. And she moved on.
She kept the house. She found love. Not the star-crossed kind she used to write stories about, but the mundane, everyday kind. It seems miraculous to be mundane when the world was falling apart, to her at least. Regardless, it was love, and that was enough. She never had children, but she never thought about her childhood either—not the garden or the crate or the gloves—not any of it. The house wasn’t full of oppressive silence anymore, just a calm quiet, with little moments of happiness in between.
But sometimes, when the wind cuts through the quiet just right, she thinks she hears something scratching at the parched earth beneath her feet. Not her mother. Something old and forgotten.
It asks her:
“Do you still believe in it? The world?”
Giya Agarwal is a student at Interlake High School. Her poetry has previously been published or recognized by the New York Times, the Eyre, Polyphony Lit, Hollins University, and the Pulitzer Center.