Episode 4: Harrow
S1 Finale – Cate decides about the bones
What follows is the conclusion to a short series of Choose Your Own Adventure fiction—ending with a Reader Poll (which will remain open) to decide what happens next…
Start with Part 1 here.
Cate dug, 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…
She knew what she should do. What Michael and any lawyer would urge her to do. But the thought of her garden swathed in yellow police tape…all those jackboots and fabric-footie bio-suits trampling everything, spilling cigarette ash and powdered-creamer coffee into her beautiful fertile soil…blue-gloved hands excavating the musty (and nutrient-rich) remains into stiff plastic bags bound for some cold sterile forensic lab table…
Cate closed her eyes and murmured some words of gratitude and apology; plus solemn assurances that it’s much more soul-healthy to spend eternity as a mystery pushing up luscious vegetables for a loving community…rather than a ghoulish discovery splashed across newspaper pages and grim headlines, a foul inkblot forever spilled over the final passage of their legacy.
Then Cate sank her shovel into the mound she’d just dug out…and tipped the dirt back into its place in the garden. Thump by crumbling thump she filled in the gruesome archaeological discovery…and then raked the broken soil into furrows to sleep through the winter under its own corduroy comforter. Over top she sprinkled a variety bag of winter wildflower seeds; which if nothing else, would add some color through the gray, and compost come spring planting.
Let us rise, give us light, set us free!
When Michael came home from work, he found Cate outside in the yard sprawled on a chaise longe, facing the freshly harrowed dirt of her garden patch.
“Cate?”
No response. Though her back was to him, in a thick sweater and beanie, Michael could see she had no earbuds in—and his heart started pounding. He trotted down the deck steps and strode toward her across the grass.
“Cate, you okay?”
Michael hurried to round the chase longe, where he could see her face—could see Cate lying there with a mug of cooled tea cradled in freshly painted fingertips, gazing deep into the fallow earth in front of her. Attuned to a chorus only she could hear.
“Mm?” she said looking up at him finally. “Sorry what’d you say, hon?”
Michael sighed. “Nothing, nevermind…I like what you’ve done with the place.”
Cate sat up and surveyed her winterized garden bed. “Can’t believe the season’s over, how fast it went by.”
“Didn’t seem so fast when we were in it,” Michael shrugged.
“True,” nodded Cate. “Time did slow down and stretch out, in there among the plants and produce.”
“Thanks to your green-thumb magic.”
Cate said nothing. Let us rise, give us light, set us free!
“What’s the biggest thing you learned,” Michael asked, “gardening this year?”
Cate pondered that for a while. Thinking of all the knowledge gained and experiments run, the successes and failures. Then of course, what she’d just found underneath…