Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  Before we left the village we saw a little girl, drawing designs with chalk in the cracking pavement near the bonfire. She seemed different than all the others, playing with an ardent freedom I’d sensed in no one else. She didn’t seem tight and narrow, closed against strangeness, against hope. Like Sonia, she too brimmed with secret knowledge but it was innocent; she hadn’t been hurt by it and their was no concomitant cruelty in it yet. I left Sonia’s side to go and speak with her, but without warning, one of the hooded old men seized her and threw her into the bonfire. I ran forward to pull the child from the flames but it was already too late. She’d burnt quickly, and silently, making no cries, not struggling, and not smelling of burnt flesh either. I cried but hid my tears in the hood that I too now wore. The men stared, and began to encircle us, their brooms and rakes, cluttered with red and yellow leaves, raised menacingly. Sonia drew me towards her, throwing half her cloak around my shoulders to show I had her protection. It wasn’t enough, however, and it was only when my wife made that trick with her eyes and threatened to breathe them all in, only to exhale them forever changed, that they let us pass, whispering and rustling like leaves as we left them behind. I half imagined they said they wanted to come with us after all, see the outside. We walked very slowly out of the square, and onto the one road that led out, to safety. Bears, wild pigs, what could frighten me now?

  We began the slow trek down the mountain to a town I no longer believed existed. The pig pens had burned away the memory of my white house, of that sea wind blowing through. So much for my wife being the restorer of memory, but perhaps it was only certain forgotten moments she could bring back, and not the forgettings she’d occasioned herself. We are all fallible.

  We camped together above a waterfall that night, just as you and I had, listening while Slipstream and the donkey ate. Sonia had brought along the remaining bottle of last year’s fruit wine, a sweet mango. We finished it after our fish, as our little fire burned down.

  “We have to make sure it’s out before we sleep,” she said. “Too dry this time of year, before the rains come.”

  “Sonia, who was the child?”

  “Spirit child, witch child. They hate them almost as much as they hate outsiders.”

  “But she was so good. I could feel it in her, good in a way they know nothing about.”

  “Good in a way they’re afraid of, because it threatens everything they believe in, their whole way of life.”

  “She was like you, a bit. Only not so hard.”

  “Hard is what life among them has done to me. I never wanted to be this way.” Sonia reached out and laid her hand on my knee, and as always, I didn’t know whether to recoil or embrace her. She had that effect on me. “I’m the only witch they’ve ever allowed to grow to adulthood.”

  “Why?”

  “They thought they needed one witch to protect them from the eyes of outsiders.”

  “You were a spirit child then too, like that one? What are they, spirit children? She didn’t smell like burning flesh.”

  “We only harden as we age. If I was to burn now I’m afraid I’d smell just like bacon,” she said ironically. Then added,“If I answer all your questions now you’ll never come back next year, and I need you to. It’s the only way to stop the burnings.”

  “We don’t have witches,” I said.

  “I know, but you are one now, and you’re returning. I’m sorry, husband. I hadn’t intended for you to see a thing like that; it’s why I kept you hidden.”

  sss

  When I woke in the morning Sonia was gone, as she’d said she’d go. I went home down the hills without my wife, wondering what lay ahead of me, and whether, by having married her, I’d given up my right to you forever. But my night’s dream came to me as I walked the leafy trail, saw at last the sea, the town. A seemingly prophetic dream that filled me with exhilaration and dread. You’d be back, Alia, and I’d marry you as I’d hoped, keeping my other marriage secret. I’d never go back to the mountains to my first bride, never begin the trading that she and I had hoped for so fervently. But you and I would have a child, and it would be a spirit child, the first one ever born by the sea. Sonia’s legacy after all, having changed me so irrevocably. Which would be better? To give you up, Alia, my one true love, or to father a child that might be destroyed by a fear, by a hate that had never existed in our town before, that its birth might elicit? Sonia had awakened me to my own witchery, both terrifying and promising. The full saddlebags had been a cover. It was my new fearsome eyes, the child I’d father, that were my real trading goods. But what would I have to bring back to her mountain village to end the cycle, allow people to see the gift and not just the difference, the gentleness as well as the fearsome power?

  I prayed to my grandfather, but he didn’t hear. He too had tried to open a trade route between the mountains and the sea, had been catapulted for his arrogance into the future time when such things might be possible, destined to end his years in the loneliness of those who can travel forwards, but not back to their home time.

  And you, Alia?

  You live in the middle, in a secret forest village in the foothills. You retain a measure of Sonia’s wisdom, and teach it where you can, as you taught me. Still, your eyes are human. You haven’t lost the innocence of the sea people, and are thus protected from the fear and ignorance of those who need the protection of witches but fear and hate their power. You wait, wondering whether I’ll ever find the path home to you.

  Bus Owls

  THERE WAS ONE YEAR that southern Ontario was subjected to an influx of Great Grey Owls. They came from the north and for a few months or a year adorned all our fences and posts, watching us, seeing what we would do. Some people watched, photographing and writing about this massive silent invasion, but in the main, it was we who were being watched for once and not the other way around.

  Or so Stella thought on her way home from Toronto, taking the Greyhound. In Oshawa the bus always stopped to let people off or on. Stella liked it when her schedule coincided with the express bus, which stopped only at Scarborough Town Centre. But if not, there she was in the ’Shwa again, adding half an hour to her trip home. On the good side, in ’Shwa she could get off the bus and have a breath of fresh air and a smoke. Stella still smoked in those days, the ones she is remembering, the ones she is describing here. It was before everything changed. Now, post change, it is no longer possible to smoke cigarettes, no matter how much she misses them.

  Sometimes missing them is akin to heartbreak. Sometimes missing them is like losing her best friend in all the world. Sometimes missing them is like having to grow up forever and never look back. Not even once, for a single backward look would inevitably coincide with the first cigarette. It is like she swore. It is like she made a vow, she isn’t sure to whom. It is like she made this vow when she wasn’t looking, for had she been looking, she would never have made it. The sacrifice, the murder even of her smoking self is so large, so violent. It is like she made the decision to quit in her sleep.

  She remembers how she told herself the new story, this ground-breaking story about art and tears and luck and being young again, and saying goodbye and never looking back, not even once, for you know what happened to Lot’s wife. Because of her decision, the stars perform new constellations. Because of her follow through, a new season approaches. Because of her forthrightness, her dog begins to talk. Because she cared, the children all get new ice skates for Christmas, and actually turn off their computers long enough to put them on and go outside to the pond on the point to skate beneath these strange new stars that appear, even, to dance a little above their heads.

  In a way she has had to leave two lovers. She and her man were co-dependent, but in a nice way. In the evening they would sit together, discussing books and movies, watching movies and reading, sipping beer and wine and tea and smoking really a lot of cigarettes. She cannot do this anymore. She stares
at him now across naked hallways. I do not love you any less. If anything I love you more. Love us more. Love the world more.

  Now her evenings are spent blogging on all the world’s activist sites. She can’t help it. She has so much to say. She always did have so much to say, but she used to say it to him, while she smoked a cigarette. Now she can’t do that anymore, so she says it to the world. The typing keeps her hands busy, hands which she would otherwise use for smoking. Typing hands cannot smoke, it is true. She has expanded her audience, now that she no longer smokes. She talks to the world, and not just to him.

  She can no longer write anything of any length. A beginning, middle, and end, stretched across ten entire double-spaced pages seem a minor impossibility. The thought of revising her new novel yet again elicits unexpectedly suicidal thoughts. She runs away. Whatever made her think finishing the novel was important? It is true the novel is her life’s work, a book she spent thirty years of her life drafting various versions of, a book that really would only require a few relatively short and easy months to fine tune, but no, she balks. She is like a horse throwing its rider. Absolutely fucking not, no way, not ever.

  She feels no regret. Yet the pragmatic part of her thinks: thirty years, the thing is good; it seems a pity to waste it. Perhaps she could apply for a grant to hire a nice young assistant to implement the necessary nips and tucks. A young assistant who never smoked, and to whom menopause is so far in the future that she has no issues with her attention span at all. Someone who can sit and write for hours each and every day with no thought of commensurate financial reward beyond a few skimpy arts council grants, if any, and some thought of possible publication. In her spare time the assistant could do the shopping and laundry and vacuuming and make dinner to boot.

  The assistant sounds like someone, in fact, quite a bit like Stella herself used to be. Maybe she has been insane all these years only she doesn’t know it. Let someone else do the work while she blogs about literacy, uranium, Indigenous land claims, nutrition and brain function, agribusiness, genetic engineering, wind farms, etcetera. The list is endless. She knows a little about everything, just the right length for a blog post, or a comment on someone else’s blog. She has opinions about very serious things and also about the Oshawa bus and plastic owls.

  You know those plastic owls? You can order them from the catalogues of nurseries that sell objects as well as plants. The big plastic owls are taken home and affixed to garden posts. They are supposed to keep critters away, the sorts of critters that might come at night and snack on all one’s nice fresh lettuces.

  Before the Change, the only good part of the milk run was you could get off in ’Shwa and smoke. It is just as well she quit, because the new driver, a short blonde woman, told her she doesn’t let any Peterborough passengers off the bus in Oshawa anymore, not to smoke or make phone calls or go to the bathroom or anything else. “I used to,” she said, “but then I had to go chasing after them when they didn’t come back in time.”

  Stella thought about it later. At the time she was busy resenting the woman for not letting her off to smoke. But later she thought why didn’t the driver just leave these rude people behind? The reason, of course, was that they’d complain and she might lose her job if enough people complained.

  Sometimes there was a new driver for the second half. Sometimes even a new bus. Once she stood there in an empty station, she remembers, with a driver. They both smoked. There was a post beneath the overhang, the part of the structure that sheltered waiting passengers in case of inclement weather. She is not sure what the post was for, normally. The driver silently pointed at the top of this post, where a large grey owl perched.

  “It is plastic,” she said. “It is to keep the little brown bats away at night, and the raccoons. They would frighten the waiting passengers. You can buy them in gardening catalogues.”

  The driver smiled. “Just wait and watch,” he said.

  She waited and watched.

  The owl turned its head and looked at her.

  Then the bus came, and Stella got on it. When she looked out the window both the man and the owl were gone.

  A Shower of Fireflies

  THEY’D GO DAYS WITHOUT BATHING, wear the clothes they’d slept in. She wrote in the margins of the passing years, trimmed the wicks of the kerosene lamps. Was amazed in August by the Perseids, by congregations of moths. She remembers how, when they first arrived, her little son asked where the water fountain was. He couldn’t differentiate between this drumlin overgrown with mullein, thistle, and milkweed and the city park he’d left behind. Almost two decades later, he’s still living at home. He’s handsome and funny and helps out a lot; she wants to give him the world, but she knows she’d miss him.

  One summer she found a box of mason jars in the damp dirt basement, so old the glass was wavy and tinged with green. The boy and his cousin caught fireflies and put them in the jars to use as flashlights on their late-night walks. In the morning, the candle ends on the old scarred picnic table would be full of moth wings. Moth bodies. Poems to mature later. She stayed home and nursed, listening for boys’ voices coming home over the hill.

  The new baby grew round and sturdy, could identify plants at three. She helped in the garden as soon as she could walk, but protested when her mother squashed broccoli butterfly larvae between thumb and forefinger. By midafternoon, the kitchen was lined with mason jars of the green worms. When Margo visited, she said, “Do you know the jars in your kitchen are full of butterflies?” So busy trying to find time to write and keeping the fire going, she hadn’t noticed them hatching. Twenty years later the girl is gone. Margo said, “It’s the wild one you remember more.”

  The fireflies lived in those glass jars, year upon year, winking in the bedrooms at night. The butterflies still line her kitchen. Sometimes she thinks they’re not in jars at all, but in her throat, made, too, of green glass. Sometimes it swallows you up, all that green, and when it finally spits you out two decades later, you look around and say, this place has changed, and so have I. You have to know how to hold on to things, and you have to know how to let them go. Tonight they’ll sit on the back step, she and her son. It’s August again, just like it was when they first came. They’ll open the jars and let them go. The fireflies will fly up to meet the shooting stars, soon become indistinguishable.

  The butterflies will find her daughter and settle on her arms, sink into her skin. Become the tattoo that reminds her who she is.

  She wonders what her own tattoo will be. Is glad she waited this long to get her own; maybe she’s finally old enough to choose just the right one.

  Daughter Catcher

  THE WITCH SIENA LIVED at the bottom of the gardens on Vine Street where there were woods, mostly cedar and willow for it was damp. Nature’s natural cycle seemed altered there, for the ground was in places knee deep in broken sticks, and littered with the arms of dead trees. It was March, and Siena piled sticks and some old half-rotten clothes into a big heap; the village teenagers might come one day to have a bonfire. No one else came down much, so that the few paths were often overgrown, too brambly to struggle through, and decorated with takeout containers, beer bottles both whole and dangerously broken, and Styrofoam, both in cup and slab and pellet form.

  The streets and driveways of the village were swept clean often, the lawns sprayed and weeded and raked and mowed, but no one cleaned up the ownerless woods, unless the witch did it. Siena didn’t actually hear what people said about her, but she could guess: they thought she was stupid enough to think if she cleaned up after them they might give her daughter back. Noelle wasn’t dead, Siena was sure of that. She’d have felt it if the girl was dead, just as she’d have felt it if her men had died. But her entire family was still alive, Siena knew it for a fact. She just didn’t have them near her anymore, the way they were supposed to be.

  Early spring runoff filled the lowland gully beyond the fallen trees
and piles of sticks. While she gathered bottles, disconcerted as ever by how many there were that once contained hard liquor of all sorts, Siena talked to herself. When had she begun? She knew it didn’t help her reputation much, that she’d spent too much time alone in the raggedy woods. She rarely entered the village proper anymore except to fill recycling bins before anyone else was up, as she was doing now. It was very early on Thursday morning, and Siena was fulfilling her weekly ritual of carrying sacks of pop cans and bottles up the disused lane from the woods to the street. Surreptitiously, she tipped the sacks into the big blue plastic boxes, otherwise woefully empty. Why, Siena often wondered, was it better to dump garbage off the bridge at night than to sort it into bins? Why was that so hard? But the villagers couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t.

  Siena knew that even before dawn on Sundays the townsfolk made an opposite trek to her own: they went out, also with sacks, but they went to the bridge and tossed in their old pillows, used condoms, empty pill bottles, pornography, vomit stained sleeping bags, single shoes and sometimes even used toilet paper. They treated the gully beneath the bridge as an impromptu landfill in the middle of town. Yellow, green, orange and clear garbage bags hurled on top of one another made such a nice sound: a kind of sliding squishing ker-thunk. The witch, they seemed to think, would deal with it. She always had.

  And the morning after their midnight purges, Siena thought bitterly, they could go to church and talk about how disgusting she was: now so solitary, and untrustworthy because of it, and because she wove things she found out of old string she gathered; she knitted spider webs out of the dirty old string, and hung them from the trees. They were frightening, like things spiders on LSD might have made, and there were more each year. Siena made them painstakingly; each intricate piece of webbing took at least a month to make. It was especially because of the spider webs, Siena thought, that they could face the day pretending they were clean nice decent people. But she couldn’t have stopped making them even if she’d tried. They were a compulsion, like her paranoid and vengeful thoughts. She was sure the villagers looked the other way when their boys bent to reach for stones, even though they knew not one would ever make its mark; Siena knew how to deflect stones even before they flew.