Episode 3: Harvest
Cate finds out why her garden is so fertile
What follows is Part 3 of a short series of Choose Your Own Adventure fiction—where each chapter ends with a Reader Poll (open for 3 days after sending) to determine what happens next. Play along! None of this is planned out…I’ll discover along with you.
Start with Part 1 here.
Part 3:
“That huckster realtor tell you what happened to the previous owners?” their new neighbor asked. “Why it went to county auction?”
The Clarences shook their heads.
“No one knows…just up and vanished,” the neighbor said. “Two summers ago I went over there one day, some mail hit my box by mistake. Found the front door ajar, back door wide open. Everything covered with dust and musty…like no one had lived there for years, insteada the couple months since I saw them, before my big RV trip that spring.”
Cate and Michael’s eyes widened.
Their neighbor nodded. “Yard all gone to weeds, big ol’ overgrown brush pile where your pretty little garden is now, crawling with chipmunks."
“What’d you do?”
“Called the city,” the neighbor snorted. “Those little bastards were eating my flowers—county finally let me clean it up and mow the weeds for them.”
“And the owners?”
The neighbor shrugged. “Guy and his wife and three kids, just gone without a trace. Cops searched the house, saw no evidence of foul play; suitcases all there, dressers and closets all full. County eventually filed a Missing Persons and sent it to auction.”
Summer deepened toward autumn, and the garden produced astonishing abundance; peas, beans, corn, squash…plus unending salad greens, tomatoes, and whatever else Cate could fit in the small plot she’d turned. Far more than they could eat, no matter how fast Michael cooked…even more than they could give away to friends bit by bit.
The Clarences filled baskets and boxes and paper bags with produce, and left them down the driveway. Cate posted pictures on the neighborhood page, offering First Come, First Served—just leave an empty container in exchange.
But the more they gave away, the more vegetables seemed to grow. Let us rise, give us light, set us free!
Cate had to scale back her hours at work, for more time harvesting and tending the lush unruly garden—and they started collecting donations via Venmo QR.
“Pay what makes you feel good,” she told people, indicating the laminate card.
At the height of the season she was bringing in more cash than she would’ve made at work. Running her own little CSA farm, from a patch of garden that could hide under a flatbed truck.
The days shortened and the breeze brought tidings of cold winds ahead. Eventually the garden produced only tough bitter remnants…and Cate decided it was time to mulch everything down for the season.
She was digging up a last forgotten carrot, grown huge and round that Michael would gleefully run through his new mandoline—when her trowel struck something hard underneath.
Treasure! whispered her inner child. Let us rise…
But at the base of the carrot’s hole, she uncovered just a pale tree root. Cate looked up and around. Unsure which of the not-very-close trees might send such a root this far. So she troweled the hole wider, seeking the root’s track—and gasped.
No way…
She fetched her shovel and kept digging…fast but steady—not stopping to acknowledge what she was doing, until her whole garden was inverted; a crater ringed with high dirt piles. Like a paleontology dig—revealing five tangled skeletons, three small and two fullgrown. Human. Mostly decomposed.
And Cate suddenly realized why her garden never needed new nutrients…