What to Do When Your Garden is Girls

Art by Lauren Farkas

Double-check that the sprout coming up to the left of the backyard fence does, in fact, have a face, is, in fact growing flesh; consult your gardening books, your plant dictionary, your wildlife of Virginia field guide to see if this is normal; wonder what, anyway, is normal;  

And, upon finding nothing in the books, and then on the Internet (though you’re always afraid to confront the Internet, which always makes everything seem so drastic and definite and large), wonder if you should call someone—Who?  Who would know about a thing like this, about a tiny person sprouting out of the all-purpose soil behind your kitchen window?—but don’t, because sometimes calling for help isn’t really helpful at all, like when you told your third-grade teacher Miss Patty a boy named Dylan cut off your ponytail and she said it just means he likes you and you sobbed at home over the blunt ends of your hair; water the plant and jump back a little when it blinks up at you, coughs at you, splutters water from its peach-pink lips;  

And continue to water it (her?) every day for six days, gently, careful to only douse the roots; be surprised but not upset when more plants with faces push out from the ground, their leaves opening up like unclenched fists; think about the way you’ve seen boys and then men clench their fists, about the many things hands can be;  

Tell the girls they belong here; tell them they’re doing their best; tell them this world will one day be for them, too; tell them they’re valuable; feel a beam of heat in your chest when this makes them grow taller, makes their leaves sprout into fingers and toes, makes their hairlike petals thicken and their mouths open into smiles like half-moons and their voices rise; 

And when the neighbors start to complain, the girls are too loud, we don’t like the girls, dig them up tenderly (ask first) and fill your largest, nicest pots with them; put them in your car and take them far, far away, to a plot of land with sun and opportunities; tell them (and yourself) that sometimes running away is saving yourself; there are always new things to do and new ways to do them; make sure the girls know this, make sure you know this, begin to work, begin to wait.  

Kyra Kondis is an MFA candidate in fiction at George Mason University, where she is also the assistant editor-in-chief of So to Speak Journal. Some more of her work can be found in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Pithead Chapel, the Best Microfiction 2020 anthology, and on her website at kyrakondis.com.