As told by
Headmaster Palltu
I’ll never forget the day the garden died.
I began each day with a stroll through the foliage, taking note of new buds, propping up toppled stalks and brushing insects from the leaves they were devouring. I knew the garden like I knew the lines of my own face.
That morning, the soil felt odd and somehow sticky. Some of the plants were covered in a film of what looked like yellow pollen. I brushed it off–and spent all day trying to wash that yellow stain from my fingers.
Sometime after lunch, I got up from my desk to look out the window. There was a little girl, a wisp of a thing, dressed all in black. She made her way through the garden, touching each plant as she went.
I didn’t think much of it. The students loved the garden; digging in the soil with their hands, throwing earthworms at each other and smelling the fragrant herbs. By the time it occurred to me that something seemed odd about the little girl, or that she should in fact be in class, she was gone.
As the day ended, I thought to stop by the garden one last time. I could see it from the door of the school: gray-yellow smoke rising from black, withered stalks.
I ran towards it, thinking some troublemaker had set it on fire. But it wasn’t fire. It was something else. The plants had blackened and folded in on themselves and were sinking into the tar-like soil. Littered about were the bodies of birds and insects, poisoned by the black waste.
The acrid smell burned my nostrils so I took a step back. From my new vantage point, I spotted a slender, pale, childlike face, just barely peeking through the soil. When I cried out, her eyes briefly met mine, a small smile crossed her lips and she went under.
Was she a student? My records indicated no. Even more troubling was the fact that when I brought help later that night, everything had returned to normal. The garden was lifeless but the soil was just soil. And when we searched for the little girl’s body, we found nothing.
Nothing ever grew in the garden again.
