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City Grown From Seed

by Diana Dima

 

Long before you came along, I was myself just a seed in Raffa’s pocket, something she fumbled with as she stepped onto the plane, her other hand clutching her mother’s. Small as I was, I sensed her fear. I tried to hum reassuringly. Above the ocean, I helped her fall asleep.

She planted me soon after landing, behind the park by a graffitied wall hidden from view by maple trees. She seemed half ashamed, yet she came every day to water me and sit beside me. We can’t grow without stories, and she made sure I never went hungry. At first, they were stories from home, full of her aunt’s golden yeast pastries and hand-knitted dolls. Later they were made-up tales of dragons that came to whisk her away from the cramped walk-up apartment, or fairies that did her mother’s work while she slept, or spells that made you speak every language in the world. I loved all the stories, even those that made Raffa sad. Little by little, I bloomed: a single clock tower (there is a tower at the heart of every living city), no bigger than a blade of grass, with little dirt roads radiating from it; then tiny red-roofed houses and a neoclassical theatre and kiosks on every corner and markets and packs of stray dogs.

At first, Raffa had to bring a magnifying glass to look at me; then I grew large enough that she could count my windows with the naked eye. She worried about rain and raccoons. She brought a big glass bowl from home and set it over me like a dome. “I’m going to be in so much trouble,” she said, and I found it funny how she switched to English mid-sentence, as though she couldn’t remember the words.

When school started, she stopped coming so often. She only dropped by on Sunday mornings and crouched beside me, checking for new buildings. I didn’t fit under the bowl anymore; the clock tower came up to her chest. Her stories changed. She told me about the boys she didn’t like and about Mae, who she maybe liked too much and who lived in a big house in the suburbs with a garden and a barbecue and a garage.

One day I saw Raffa from a distance, walking hand in hand with a girl. She’d grown tall, but I was taller. She looked at me sideways and turned away, pulling the girl with her. It stung a little. I didn’t mean to grow the abandoned five-storey garage by the river; it sprung up like a pimple after they left.

I had no room to sprawl, so I grew inwards, roads knotting and twisting, buildings folding in unexpected places. I waited for Raffa to walk through my gates. I hung baskets of flowers on the lamp-posts and put up banners and a festival stage; I filled the streets with smells of honey-soaked pastry, of summer days and river picnics. Every house brimmed with Raffa’s memories.

It took a long time for her to come back, and she wasn’t alone. She stopped at a distance, whispering in the girl’s ear. Even though I wasn’t pleased she’d brought someone else, I made myself as welcoming as I could, gates thrown open, road laid out like a carpet for them. They walked in holding hands, chuckling together. I made the sunlight bounce off windows and rooftops, so that Raffa marvelled looking up, and I could tell she remembered everything.

“It’s strange,” the girl said. “This is your hometown?”

Raffa mumbled, “Sort of,” and I was so happy she’d come, I let it slide.

I carried them deeper inside, and Raffa marvelled at how large I’d grown. “We could actually live here,” she said uncertainly, walking past the white-columned theatre where she’d spent Saturday nights with her aunt. In the market, she tried a peach and gave one to the girl. “It’s just like I remember.”

“It’s a little creepy,” the girl said.

I brought them to the clock tower, the plaza around it bathed in golden light, and they sat on the crescent steps. The girl had found some chalk and was playing with it.

“Let’s write our initials on this wall,” she said.

Raffa asked, “Really?” and I didn’t think she’d let her do it, but she did. She watched her friend draw the M and R across the bricks, and the sun went down suddenly. That was my fault; it’s hard to shine a summer sun when I’m angry. The girl looked a little scared.

“Let’s go back,” she said, putting her arm through Raffa’s.

I didn’t stop them getting out but didn’t help them, either, so they wandered for a while until they found the gates. Raffa looked back for a moment before the girl pulled her away.

After that, I didn’t see Raffa for a long time, longer than ever before. I almost forgot her; at least part of me tried, opening cracks in facades and digging potholes into roads, breaking windows so all the memories would drift out of houses. I grew wild. I grew chipped paint, sagging walls, glowing signs with letters missing, slippery things scurrying down dark alleys, ivy creeping up the theatre’s columns. Bony dogs howled in the night. There was a fire, and it left piles of rubble on street corners and black smears across the clock tower.

When Raffa came back, I didn’t see her arrive. You mustn’t judge; I’d closed my eyes to the outside world by then and looked only inwards (perhaps hoping if I grew deep enough, I might emerge home again, on the other side of the world). The gate was overgrown with brambles, and Raffa squeezed through it with her clothes torn and arms scratched. I didn’t know what to do. One of my roads had started unrolling at her feet, eager to welcome her, but I pulled it back. It had been so long, I barely knew her.

She made her way through narrow alleys, over fallen lamp-posts, around piles of bricks. I thought she’d give up, go back. But she kept going, even when I put the sun down and lengthened the night; even when I sent dogs to trail her in low-growling packs; even when I filled the streets with rotting smells. She kept walking until she found the clock tower and collapsed on its time-eaten steps and the pigeons gathered around her.

In a low voice, with her head in her hands, she told me a new story. The words fell like bitter rain after drought. Halfway through, I tried not to listen anymore, but couldn’t — I wasn’t built that way. So I learned all about Mae, about the bruises Raffa hid under long-sleeved jumpers; about Raffa’s mother, and how she’d died in the small apartment, thousands of miles away from home.

“I came to see if I could bury her here,” Raffa said. “But this isn’t home either.”

If she’d have looked up just then, she’d have seen a crack zig-zag across the clockface on the tower, splitting it in two.

When she started walking again, I didn’t let go. Roads spiralled tight under her feet and rowhouses duplicated turn after turn, until she grew dizzy, stumbling back into the shadow of the clock tower. She slumped down on the steps and cried.

She said, between sobs, “I can’t find my way in here, just like I can’t find it out there.”

Something thawed in that hard, charred heart of mine, then. I grew ashamed. Did part of me still want to keep her, spinning her around so she’d never find the way out? Perhaps, but I’d been lonely for a long time. Let us not speak of it any longer.

I unrolled the road at Raffa’s feet and opened the gates for her. She thought it a trick, at first, but eventually, she rose and walked away swaying, unsteady on her feet. She mumbled, “Thank you.”

I didn’t think I’d see her again. To be honest, I didn’t think I deserved it. But a year hadn’t yet passed when she came back with a woman, someone new. They stopped at a distance, and Raffa showed her the city she’d grown from seed. Though I opened the gates, they didn’t come in. They looked at me for a long time, and the woman squeezed Raffa’s shoulders, and Raffa leaned her head against the woman’s.

“I’ll be back soon,” Raffa said to me before leaving.

Waiting wasn’t so hard after that. For the first time, I let some of the spring come in from outside, sweeping fresh air through the winding alleys. I repainted houses, weeded gardens, cleared out rubble, chased away rats.

Raffa kept her promise. She came back and wandered the streets and told me about Lucia, how she made Raffa’s chest feel lighter, with more room to breathe. The next time they came together. They walked hand in hand to the tower, stared up at the cracked clockface.

“It’s beautiful,” Lucia said. She looked at Raffa looking up. “We could live here a while if you want.”

I shivered down to my roots. Before Raffa answered, “I’d like that,” I had found the house, her childhood house, yellow, single-storeyed, a lime tree by the door. I opened the windows, let the sun warm the walls. On the back of a chair, I hung a half-finished blanket Raffa’s aunt had been knitting the day before the move.

When Raffa and Lucia came to stay for the first time, a summer storm had been brewing outside. The downpour caught them at the gates, and they ran inside holding hands. The rain didn’t stop; it smelled so fresh and made them laugh so hard, I couldn’t help letting it in. I lit streetlight after streetlight like a trail of breadcrumbs to the yellow house, and the women walked inside, into the warm dry dimness, and breathed in relief. I breathed in relief, and the rain swept my streets hard and deep, and it was as if at last I had a place in this world.

I didn’t listen at their door. Suffice it to say that the house had a content air in the morning, curled up on its street corner like a well-fed cat, and the street stretched playfully at the women’s feet when they walked out.

While Raffa chattered and counted all the buildings she remembered, Lucia fingered something in her coat pocket. At the clock tower, she pulled Raffa down onto the steps and showed her something in her palm: a seed, the seed of you. (Can you believe you were ever that small?)

Lucia whispered something and Raffa jumped up. “Of course! You can plant it right here. There’s a garden right around the corner.”

Lucia hesitated. “My city is different, and I didn’t live there long enough to grow to like it. It’s big and dusty and grey and fast, it’s noisy and overflowing, it’s —”

“It’s just what we need,” Raffa said.

She pulled Lucia by the hand into the small garden behind the clock tower, and they planted you there, between roses, in a patch of ground warmed by the morning sun. They watered you and marked the place with stones.

“We’ll need to get a glass bowl,” Raffa said.

They sat on the ground together — this part you remember — and Lucia started telling stories. She spoke about long-ago wars and long ship crossings and family grown strange, and I listened too. I listened and watched a tower sprout from seed, grey concrete pointing at the sky.

Raffa and Lucia watched over you. The outside sun seeped into my stones and from there into yours, and your new heart beat in time with mine. Your roots tangled with mine under the world. I felt you grow inside me, and myself expand around you, city around city, seed inside seed.

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Harvest House

by Sara Omer

 

The houses grow up, big and strong. They stand tall, orange as egg yolks with warty skin, swelling to fullness under ruffled leaves. On the first sunny day, we pick our home. Da uses a jagged-tooth blade half the length of my arm to saw out a door, then carve a window. The spongy pulp of the walls barely gives, until the point of the blade thunks through. It sinks into fibrous guts, tangling in them.

We scoop out the innards with our hands, fingers knotting in strands. I pile it all outside in great heaps as tall as my little brother Lumpkin. Grandma keeps eyes on the sky in case birds come, always alert for black feathers. She says death flutters on wraith wings.

“It’s too small,” Ma says, stepping into the belly of our new house. She tucks her frizzy red hair behind her ear and wrings her freckled hands.

Last fall, our home was tall enough for three stories: a thin, white structure. This year it’s squat and sunset orange, capped with a great curling peduncle. The smell of raw, sweet rot clings to the scraped-down walls and ceiling. A few stringy bits like loose threads trail on the floor.

Da and I carve out more space for larger rooms. We work all day until our fingers shrivel and our sweat smells like house-flesh too. Da installs the same red door we used last year. Next fall, I’d like it if we picked a house the minty color of lichen or the verdant shade of moss. A springtime home to weather autumn in. Ma strings up lace doilies discolored with sun stains. Her curtains let in dappled shadows around noontime, perfect spiderwebbing lattice on yellow walls.

“Petty, lend me a hand, could you, wild-violet?” Da says, wiping house guts from his dark beard.

Outside, Lump uses a bent spoon as a shovel, practicing digging holes to plant seeds.

“We’ll have to bury them deeper than that.” Grandma pushes her spectacles higher on her liver-spotted nose. “Now that’s too deep. Look out, Lumpkin Picker, you’ll fall in!”

When we drag the black stove inside, Grandma cooks down pulp into purée. Bread and crisp, pie and pudding, soup and turnovers. We roast up some of the huge seeds and slice them, sprinkle ‘em over sticky buns. Ma fills baby food containers with the leftovers, canning them out front in a big tub. Da carries the large glass jars. They’re so heavy his back nearly gives out. Lumpkin and I help out by ferrying boiling water. We work on heating the canning bath until the lids pop down, sealing shut.

Lump and I gather sticks, and I help Da cut them into balusters for an upstairs railing. We heave up thin branches for support beams, and Da lays down bark floors.

Around the field, the houses fill up, windows and doorways appearing on homes as the air cools and the days shrink. Each day, night comes faster, smearing the sky cold black, but we have warm food to heat our bellies. We’ve got wood chips to feed into the mouth of the stove. The fire keeps us from freezing until the sun peeks out again tomorrow.

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“My, he’s really sprouting up,” our neighbor says, smiling kindly at Lumpkin.

We volunteered to clear out the leaves in front of her home, impaling crunchy fall foliage on clothespin spears. In exchange, the older lady put out a feast of harvest treats on a tea-saucer platter. She baked house muffins and mixed the seeds into caramels that stick between my teeth. Cinnamon and sugar and nutmeg, when such exotic spices can be scavenged, turn savory house-flesh into tantalizingly sweet fare.

“You think so?” Ma asks, stirring honey into her tea. Lumpkin’s small for his age. I was the one who shot up like a weed — Petunia Picker, her dandelion daughter.

“Oh yes. He’ll be a big, strong boy.”

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“Less windows out means fewer eyes in,” Ma always says, but one day my brother cuts a small square in his bedroom wall. Late into the night, the yellow insides of his room are illuminated by a tea light he uses as a chamberstick to examine his postage-stamp collection.

A whoosh, crack, squish, squish.

I hear gnashing that makes my insides turn snow cold. A red paw half again as big as my brother shoots in, drawn to the jack o’lantern light. The creature’s fish-hook claws rake lines in the bruising wall. A snout of sharp teeth sinks into our house’s skin, carving a corner of our home into ribbons. Lumpkin’s candle flickers out, wax spilling, pooling and hardening like a scab on the floor.

Ma shrieks, but Da and I keep calm and trundle her, Grandma, and Lump down the creaky stick stairs to the baby-food jars. We take cover behind them until the fox wanders off.

Da inventories Lump as he wriggles in my grasp. Luckily, there’s not a scritch on him.

When morning squeezes through the cracks in the wall, I survey the damage. I swipe animal spit and dew off Lump’s stamps and bundle up his one-patch quilt to move into my room.

Lumpkin loves his collections: postage stamps, big glass marbles he and the other kids can barely roll up the hill, buttons large enough to sled on. Come on, Lump, you just need one, Da says, but our traveling wagon is always piled with haberdashery. Each notion has four circles to loop thread through, but Lump’s buttons will never be finishings on a giant’s fine coat. He has more fun with them anyway.

I run a finger over a stamp’s white scalloped edges, enjoying the tacky feeling of the sticky backs. I admire the pretty illustrations of flowers, faces, and faraway places. It’s easy to see why Lump likes peeling these off their shiny backing sheets and cutting them from envelopes and postcards.

I see the value in the smooth buttons and whorling colors suspended in catseye marbles, but I stick to collecting things I forage near the house. My treasures include insect legs and beetle wings, four-leaf clovers, tufts of hair. I’d like a pet one day, only cats and dogs are too dangerous for people our size. A house mouse would chew through the walls, squeaking all night. I think an inchworm would make a fine companion, until it squirmed away.

“At least you’re all right,” I tell Lump, ruffling his auburn hair and handing him his stamps. “You can’t fault the fox. It didn’t choose to be big and hungry.”

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At the Harvest Festival, Lumpkin runs up the hill, lugging a red rubber ball to play knucklebones with his friends. Six-pronged metal jacks are big enough for the little kids to cower behind and look strong enough to rip the undercarriage of a paper airplane. They play the game a little different from how giants do.

I lend an arm to Grandma, helping her hobble over to deposit a crock at one end of the banquet table. Stumps form a long line of chairs all the families sit on to dig into the potluck. Steam rises off mismatched plates. They’re ceramic shards repurposed as dinner platters.

Everyone thinks this is the best part of fall, lighting sparkler stubs in dry grass and stamping out fires, dancing to string fiddles and the rusted harmonica — it gets dragged back to its hiding knoll when winter comes. Takes three players with strong lungs to get a jaunty tune going.

While Ma and Da giggle into their cups of blackberry wine, I hunch at the edge of the party, tugging at my tatty sack skirt, thinking I’d rather be at home.

“Dance with us, Petty!” Lump shouts, leaping up and dragging me by the elbow.

The children don’t dance as much as they just link hands and run in a circle. When I fall down, dizzy, laughing something delirious, the stars wiggle like lightning flies up in the sky.

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A millipede climbs through the broken wall one night when Lumpkin is sleeping in my room. We’re pretending it’s a special occasion, a holiday, like when we all share a chamber in the abandoned rabbit burrows during Winter Solstice. Lump shakes me awake, pointing. My eyes land on the twitching antennae, segmented body, and ghost-pale legs.

“Petty, Petty, look,” he whispers.

“Shh,” I tell him. “It’s all right.” The millipede curls into a ball when I walk over. “You don’t want to hurt them, or they’ll stink up the whole house.”

Its defense glands reek something awful and taste terrible, gets the big animals spittin’ and slavering. The bug pulls from its defensive curl. Its black eyes swivel, taking me in, landing on Lump, thinking he might be delicious, thinking better of it when I raise a wood splinter threateningly.

Not my brother. Its legs drum the wall with a whispery clicking noise. It melts into the shadows, disappearing through Lumpkin’s room, back outside.

I clutch my little brother extra tight that night, so nothing can take him away until he’s big and strong.

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A flock of crows descends on our neighbor’s house, cackling while they pick the walls to pulp.

“It’s just an early start to winter for us,” the nice old lady says. Her wiry silver hair is disheveled instead of neatly coiffed now, but she still smiles, probably relieved everyone’s alive.

“That’s the trouble with living like this,” Da says when their wagon disappears up the hill.

Ma corrects him. “There’s beautiful resilience in being little.”

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Despite the early-winter chill, the walls sag, beginning to wrinkle up. Another rain, another warm day, and the roof will cover over in fuzzy decay that blackens as it molders. Every week more birds make circles around the patch, chortling at their good fortune. The cloying smell of rotting fruit drives them ravenous.

We pack up the wagon, using a spool of thread to tie down Lumpkin’s buttons, Grandma’s thimble pans, and the jars full of preserves. Da pries our red door out of the soft wall and loads it up while Ma takes down the lacy curtains. Our frost-season home will last us longer, just so long as no new warren’s taken up residence in its subterranean halls. Really, I don’t think I’d mind snuggling into a rabbit’s warm, musky fur to weather a chilly winter.

All through the snow, I’ll dream of springtime with the meadow mice, of summer on our lily-pad boat home, of autumn at our harvest house.

Our family was the first to arrive, relishing our pick of the patch, and we’re the last to leave. We watch from up on the hill as the birds descend in a frenzy onto the squat orange house that’s collapsing in on itself. The empty doorway smiles toothlessly, lips wrinkled. There’s crow’s feet lines by gaping window eyes. Before we left, we sowed the ground with set-aside seeds, so next autumn, the field will be full of new houses.

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “City Grown From Seed” by Diana Dima, and although it was her first time at Escape Artists, she’s had 5 other stories out just this year at markets as excellent as khōréō, The Deadlands and GigaNotoSaurus, so pop on over to http://dianadima.com for links to read them.

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…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Harvest House” by Sara Omer, and again, it was her first time at Escape Artists, but there’s more available online! Head to http://sara-omer.blogspot.com to get links to a few tales at other junctions on the information superhighway, like The Dark and Archive of the Odd.

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Thank you, both, for your stories. There are pretty obvious parallels in City Grown from Seed to the diaspora experience that I am as unqualified to comment on as it is possible to be; but the lack of qualification there is, perhaps, a stronger grounding for discussing and thinking of the other aspect of that story, and of the heart of Harvest House: home.

Because I have lived basically my whole life—bar my student years—in a 20 mile triangle in Lincolnshire. I am a yellowbelly through and through, back through generations. I was in my childhood home from 4 years old through to 24; my grandparents were in the same homes my entire life, till their deaths; my two youngest have lived their whole lives in this one home. When I say I put down roots, I mean that Nidhogg may as well be coiled up under my foundations.

I am well aware of how fortunate I am to have had this stability. I have not been forced to move around by a parent in the armed forces, or by divorce, or by rent increases. Or, even worse, by climate or political disaster in my home country. And I think it has played a huge part in where I’ve made it in life—particularly knowing what I know now about my neurotype, if I’d had the shifting sands under my feet of a new house every 2 years, I don’t think I’d have coped. We tried to move house from here a few years back—just before the pandemic kicked off, so you can imagine how well that worked out for us—but having seen how even a new pet in the house disrupts things for months with the kids, I think we’ve had to finally concede that we’ll be here, forever, because they need that constancy in their life.

When you look at Maslow’s five-layer Heirarchy of Needs, “home” is threaded through the lower four layers—the shelter and food of Physiological Needs, the stability of Safety and Security, the cocoon that enables Love and Belonging, the sense of pride needed for Self-Esteem. Home is the part of our world that enables, eventually, Self-Actualisation: being the best version of ourselves, the version we want to be.

I hope you have found, or find, your home; and I hope, my gods how I hope, that the world can stop gleefully tearing home away from Palestinians, or denying it to people seeking asylum, or squirrelling away the available market in the name of investment portfolios, so that everyone can have the foundation they need to be the best version of themselves—and then, perhaps, the world can be the best version of itself.