✷
There’s a threat of rain as Willa turns north.
It looms like a dark promise, unfurling over the tops of the oak trees, swallowing blue sky as it creeps.
Willa pedals faster. Her left knee aches from crouching for too long in the garden, but she coaxes it into motion, rubbing at the side with firmly-pressed fingers.
The sky rumbles, and she can’t tell if it’s the clouds or a passing plane, the deep sort of gurgling grumble that could be a giant’s snore.
But there’s no mistaking the smell on the air, the bated breath of an incoming storm to silence the summer soundtrack of cicadas and chirping birds.
Tabitha Blue’s house is her last stop today, a request that came as she was just finishing weeding her tomatoes. There was a neat pile of uprooted green at her side and slick sweat on the back of her neck when Sina Mershent knocked on top of her wooden fence.
“On your rounds today,” he called out to her, “could you stop by Tabitha’s? Based on the look of her roses, she still isn’t back. Best to check on the house, I think.”
It was just like Sina to make such a request—he saw everything, knew everything, but kept nearly all of it to himself until he decided it was necessary to reveal it.
Willa once asked him what the strangest thing he ever saw in the village was. He’d only laughed and shook his head.
“No one would believe me if I told them,” he murmured.
Willa gave Sina a dirt-smeared thumbs up, then added Tabitha’s house to her mental list—after dropping off another batch of strawberry-rhubarb jam to the bakery, feeding Britta Yu’s birds, and watering Dani Poulter’s garden and collecting her mail.
There are many things that happen in the village during the summer: the population triples with tourists, the humidity makes a deep sleep nearly impossible, and Willa spends hours of each day bicycling from house to house, carrying out chores for anyone travelling.
It’s a job she started before her mom moved away to the coast, when she volunteered Willa to go around and collect mail for their neighbours on vacation.
“You’re always on that bike, anyway,” she said with mock sternness, a comically sharp raised eyebrow. “Make yourself useful.”
And once Willa started, she never stopped. The last time her mom called her, she laughed when Willa mentioned her rounds for the next day.
“Still doing that?”
“What else would I be doing?” Willa grumbled as she paced around the house seeking the best cell service. “The library doesn’t let anyone work more than three days a week.”
Her mom smiled at the screen. Her face was small and pixelated, but Willa could still see her crow’s feet. She missed her immensely.
“You’re so loyal to them,” her mom said softly. The roar of the ocean curled around her voice, covering her words in sea foam. “To that place.”
Willa smiled. In her own reflected face on the tiny screen, it looked wistful. “I like it here.”
It’s a simple truth. In spite of everywhere else she’d been in her life, she preferred home. It was how she was, just as she was a little on the tall side and had a short temper.
So, she cares for it—for the temporarily empty homes and neglected gardens, the hungry animals and dusty shelves. She notes the absences and the arrivals, occasionally picks up a shift at the bakery so she can shamelessly peddle her jams and meet the tourists passing through—those bright, bold people, smiling and shiny, perfect in a way that only ever spoke of being from somewhere full of chrome and concrete and food delivery apps. Willa laps up their stories and recommends the prettiest paths to hike, the best spot around the lake, the most scenic route to take for journeying to the next village, the next town.
Sometimes she feels like the willow tree at the edge of her property—so young compared to the oaks and the maples, but steadfast. Swaying gently in summer breezes, yet rooted deeply.
Her brakes creak as she stops in front of Tabitha’s gate. Sina was right about the roses. They look fatigued from the heat, slumped over one another, petals drooping.
Willa dismounts her bike and walks in through the gate, letting it slam shut behind her. Above, the sky rumbles again.
Tabitha’s house is a small stone cottage. It’s a little old, the roof in need of work and the paint peeling on the windows, but it’s surrounded by so many flowers that, no matter when you walk by it, there’s always something blooming. To the side of the house is a green shed secured by a simple lock. Willa memorized the combination to it long ago, and it takes seconds of habitually turning the dial before she realizes the lock is already open.
She frowns, removing it from the door and turning it over in her hand. When she clicks it in place, it locks easily.
“Did I forget you?” Willa mutters to herself. The last time she had visited Tabitha’s was four days ago—she was certain she had locked the shed up. Right?
She stares down at the lock. Puts in the combination to open it again.
“Weird,” she says.
She’s worried there will be a family of squirrels living in the shed when she opens it, or bags of soil torn apart by a particularly riotous coyote. But when she pulls aside the first door, there’s nothing amiss. The shed looks as it always does: the work bench is clear except for a pair of gloves and a hat; the gardening tools are neatly hanging off a peg board along the wall; the bags of soil and bush clippings are upright and undisturbed.
It’s exactly as Willa left it.
“Super weird,” she whispers.
She retrieves a basket from the shed and a pair of shears. Her shirt is damp with sweat, sticking to her back as she moves. When she tilts the rain barrel next to the shed forward, only a trickle of water comes out.
She exhales a harsh breath, blowing sweaty curls away from her face. “Fuck, we need that rain.”
Willa works methodically through the backyard, snipping some overgrown branches from Tabitha’s bushes. She uses the basket for harvesting—those deliciously red, overripe tomatoes splitting at their sides, thick zucchinis falling off of the vine.
Willa brandishes her shears, thinking that she’ll take everything with her to make a stew, something she can freeze then gift to Tabitha when she returns, whenever that might be, how is it she’s not even back yet—
Her fingers sink into something warm and wet that squelches, and she shrieks. She stumbles away from the plant, the shears hitting the grass with a faint thud.
The zucchini she had been touching gapes open in a maw of blackened, rotten flesh. Its insides look as though they’re caving in on themselves, swallowed by the green, puckered skin of the squash. A fly dunks itself into the opening, drawn by the base, earthen smell of decay.
Willa’s fingers are covered in drips of the slimy zucchini innards and she gags, wiping her hand rapidly against the grass. It comes away filthier, now coated in a film of dirt. An ant crawls up her wrist to her pointer finger.
“What the hell,” she wails, flicking the ant away. The smell of the rot is overwhelming. It slithers down her nose to her throat, her stomach. She gags again, rolling over onto the grass.
She scrabbles across Tabitha’s backyard until she finds the extra house key hidden underneath a stone sculpture of a smiling bee. The back door creaks as she pushes it open with her clean hand. It’s old enough that it sits unevenly in its frame, more effort to close than it’s worth, so she leaves it open behind her, skittering across Tabitha’s kitchen floor without bothering to remove her shoes. She thinks there may be some zucchini guts stuck to her right heel. Gross. She’ll need to clean Tabitha’s floors before leaving now, too.
The stench of decay clinging to Willa pushes her into a single-minded focus. She needs scalding water and bleach-grade soap that will all but strip the skin from her hand. Then, maybe then, she’ll stop feeling like she’s still wiggling her hand through it—through the ooze, the rot.
She wrenches the knob on Tabitha’s kitchen sink to the right and sticks her hand under it, scrambling for dish soap with her other.
Of course Tabitha is the type of person to keep naturally-sourced cleaning products in her home, tinctures concocted from botanicals in her own garden and those she collects on her trips. Willa curses under her breath, one muttered, low stream of profanity as she rattles around beneath Tabitha’s sink, still attempting to hold her hand beneath the hot water.
The best she finds is a thick-bristled boar brush that she scrapes across her hand with some lavender-scented soap. She digs the brush into her skin, scrubs until it’s raw and red, until there’s a bleeding scratch along one of her knuckles.
As she stares down into the sink, she tries to remember if the rest of the garden looked like that. The tomatoes looked okay, but she didn’t check them all. Is there a parasite of some kind that’s made a home in Tabitha’s garden? Willa has seen plenty of overripe and rotten vegetables, and none of them ever looked so violently disgusting. Is it an infestation?
“Am I going to have to call someone in?” Willa asks aloud. She’s a jack of domestic trades by nature—baking and gardening and canning preserves with meritorious efficiency—but she knows she couldn’t handle a DIY extermination. Where would she even begin with something like that? Gasoline and a match? Fucking apple cider vinegar?
Her gaze moves beyond her own hands, tangled in her increasingly-panicked thoughts, and she notices a bowl resting at the bottom of the sink, filled with water and congealed oatmeal. A spoon rests inside it, also dirty—rushed, like it was set there for someone to return to and clean later.
Willa knows she didn’t leave any dishes out the last time she was here.
Slowly, she turns off the water. The residual drips from the tap are too loud in the quiet house.
“Tabitha?” She calls out.
Nothing. Even the drips peter out to silence.
She wipes her hands on her shorts, grimacing at a last bit of zucchini flesh that gets smeared across the denim.
There’s a notebook and drawing paper spread across Tabitha’s kitchen table. Willa hadn’t noticed it when she first entered, or the small, purple-leafed plant that was sitting underneath an open, inverted jar. She leans across the table. The drawing is new, more shade and erased lines than anything else. Scrawled in the notebook are a few words:
smell — acrid
grew at swamp bank — best in humid/wet conditions
weed?
numbs skin when touched — poison?
Willa frowns at the plant imprisoned by the jar. She taps the top of it softly.
“Is that you?” she murmurs.
She rounds the corner to her left into the living room. It looks as it usually does—cozy, populated by mismatched furniture from a long-gone decade and hand-knitted blankets. There are oil paintings of botanicals on every wall, jars with dried roots on the shelves, potted oddities on the windowsills. But here too there are more signs of life—a half-finished cup of coffee, an unfolded letter sitting atop an envelope Willa remembers collecting from the post office.
She’s bending down to inspect the letter, thinking it will reveal some emergency Tabitha was called away for, because it would be so like her to receive a written plea rather than a phone call, and as her eyes skim over the first line, she hears something.
A soft gurgle. A responding rumble.
Willa snaps her head up. She squints out the front window but there’s no rain yet. The cloud cover has thickened while she’s been inside, darkened. Was it more thunder, the storm-blanket being pulled more tightly over her head?
There’s another gurgle, then something like a slurp.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Willa exhales. She marches towards Tabitha’s bedroom door with a hand over her heart. “Terrified me when you could have just told me that you’re sick in bed. I could have—”
She turns the knob, pushes the door open without any ceremony, and stops.
At first, she can’t comprehend what she’s seeing. It’s shapes and shadows only, a shift of movement on the floor that registers distantly in her mind, like a dream she’s struggling to recall.
Tabitha is on the floor, or what’s left of her. She’s been split open, skin and bone splayed apart like flower petals. Her organs are blackened, slick and soupy, and there’s a thin, pale hand dragging through them, picking up pieces of flesh and bringing them to a wide, toothless mouth. The lips that close around the fingers are as colourless as the rest of the skin, smooth and lined with thin, dark veins.
The creature is short and narrow. Its fingers curl like bone but its torso undulates like a single, spineless vine. It’s naked, crouched over Tabitha like a cathedral’s gargoyle, but there are no bones visible through the skin of its back.
Tabitha’s head is bent at an unnatural angle, so far back that her open eyes are staring emptily at the door—at Willa.
Another slurp.
Willa realizes the gurgle is coming from the creature, a happy sound it makes whenever it sucks up something else from Tabitha’s corpse.
Corpse.
That word—that’s what slingshots Willa back into her body, makes her open her mouth and choke out an aborted sound. Not a scream, barely a breath, but it alerts the creature to its audience. It tilts its head up. It has no eyes, no nose, but it moves as though it can see and smell her. The veins on its head flash a bright purple. It tilts its head again, then crawls forward, over Tabitha’s body, closer to the door.
“Oh my fuck. No—no!” Willa backs through the door and grips onto the first thing her hand touches. An umbrella.
She shrieks and opens it. Brandishes it like a sword at the creature.
“Get the fuck away from her!” She flaps the umbrella open and closed, too deathly horrified to even consider the insanity of her actions. “You—you thing! Get out! Get OUT!”
She swings the umbrella again. It connects with something—something hard but soft, something that gives under the metal and fabric, and Willa screams, flinging the entire umbrella out of her hands. It flies over Tabitha’s body and slides across the bedroom floor. Willa is prepared to run, rapidly calculating whether the front door or the back door will be better for escape, but she realizes, heart racing, hands shaking, that the creature is gone.
Panting, she collapses into the door frame, legs buckling at the knee.
She inhales deeply, and gags. The smell in the bedroom is ghoulish—decay and death that has seeped into the very walls. She looks down at Tabitha, and notices that there are leaves on her hands. Purple, like the one beneath the jar. They’re bursting from her skin, surrounded by veins dark as ink.
Willa thinks, she looks like the zucchini, and throws up.
She flees the bedroom, wiping one hand across her mouth, remembering the touch of the rotted vegetable on her skin, and pukes again, heaving onto the kitchen floor. She scrambles for the doorknob, fingers slipping on the cool metal, and flings herself onto the grass once it opens.
She rolls onto her side, coughing and gagging and sobbing, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her body convulses with the force of her coughs.
Help, she thinks. I have to get help. Someone.
She presses her hands into the ground—gorgeously solid, just brittle enough to the touch to feel real—and lifts herself up to a seat.
“Okay,” she murmurs, hugging her knees up to her chest. “Okay.”
Get help. Get someone. Try to forget what Tabitha looked like, carved open.
Willa whimpers, ducking her head into the safe cavern of her raised knees.
“Okay,” she repeats. “You have to go.”
She stands on shaking legs. Her bicycle is still parked near the shed—unassuming, familiar—a vehicle to transport her as far away from this house as fast as possible.
When Willa steps toward it, she sees the leaves.
Purple. Circling the base of the squash plants, bleeding into the tomatoes.
Willa barely noticed them when she arrived. Dismissed them as some odd little pollinator-attractor Tabitha had picked up somewhere.
That thought gives her a horrid, lurching feeling. Something like being pushed into open water by an unseen hand.
Could she call the creature she just saw a pollinator? Or does it work the opposite way, where those leaves spread in its wake, marking its path, its meals.
She makes it to the road, clumsily mounting her bicycle, gripping the handlebars with clammy, sweaty hands. Overhead, the sky cracks open, and fat drops of rain begin to fall.
Willa remembers it—the notebook, neatly written in Tabitha’s elegant handwriting.
best in humid/wet conditions
Willa pushes off from the ground. She pedals away so fast the rain drops hit her like tiny stones, blurring her vision and chilling her skin.
Her desperate speed, her racing mind, her eyes blinking away rain—all of it keeps her from noticing how those same purple leaves have migrated away from Tabitha’s property, lining the road like dandelions.
Just like any other weed.
✷──────────✷──────────✷
Natasha Grodzinski is a writer based in Toronto, Canada. In 2019, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an MSc in Creative Writing. Her work has been previously published in Three Drops From a Cauldron, From Arthur’s Seat, Luna Station Quarterly, and Dream Glow Magazine. You can usually find her wandering any nearby woods, or on Twitter @TashGrodzinski.
