Between Worlds, A Garden by JL George
3400 words, ~17 minutes reading time
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)
i.
I was the one who coaxed you into being, last son of our shining city. The doctors who would have birthed you were already gone, fled through the heavy iron portal of the world door, and I should have been right behind them. There was no saving the city now, only running from it. The heat of the flames had already broken the birthing-chamber’s great south-facing windows. Glass shards crunched and glittered beneath my desperate footsteps.
We were no relations. I had contributed no DNA and I’d never mentored a new generation before. I wouldn’t have been due to teach my first cohort for another three years. I owed you no more than any other stranger.
But your eyes—deep lustrous brown inside the amber of the growing-pod—were open, and your fingers clawed uselessly for purchase on the gelatinous surface. Your mute thrashing stopped me in my tracks.
My own awakening had been a peaceful thing. I remembered the slow creep of awareness; the beaming, waiting faces as I slid from the pod. The wonder I felt as all my knowledge of the world, theoretical until now, absorbed unconsciously through my years of growth, gained tangible form. Trapped, you would waste and die there eventually—if the pod did not rupture, if the fires did not reach the chamber first.
How cruel a beginning.
I didn’t know the procedures; I was no medical man. I cast around for the nearest sharp thing, sturdy enough to break through the membrane, landing on a thin, bladed surgical implement whose real purpose I could only guess at. The wild, wordless hope in your drowning eyes kept me hacking at the pod after I might otherwise have given up. At last, it punctured, spattering me with amniotic fluid, thick and body-warm.
That single perforation was all it took. The pod gave you up easily into my arms, naked and fully-formed and sticky all over with thick, golden liquid. You heaved for air. The light and my panic made your body an abstract thing—a collection of planes, like slabs of honey-coloured stone—but I understood the weight of it, under which I sagged; its warmth; its need.
I hooked my arm under your shoulder and hefted you to your feet. The exertion forced a grunt from my chest. Somehow, I hadn’t expected you to be so solid.
A rumble from our left—from the east side of the city, where the fires raged. Your first, shaky words were, “What’s happening?”
“No time. I’m sorry.” I helped you upright, colt-legged, wincing as you trod on broken glass. As my hand found the great iron handle of the world door, I heard a sound behind us that was bigger than anything, too big to describe—the sound of everything I knew cracking apart.
ii.
The world door deposited us on cracked, brown earth. Around us, a hundred more doors, perhaps a thousand. I had no idea which the rest of our people had fled through.
This in-between space was a neglected one, a place we passed through instead of inhabiting, taking notice only of whether it left dust or mud on our shoes. I was as guilty of that as any. All these centuries and I’d barely spared a glance at the low, scrubby trees, the long windblown grass, the sluggishly flowing stream. My gaze was always fixed upward and outward on the doors that hung in the air, iron and bronze and wood and stone, some trailing ladders, others hovering bare inches above the ground, all of them leading to new worlds.
Still leaning on my shoulder, you began to shiver. Your heel left a bloody print on the ground.
I looked back at the door that had brought us from our world and laid my hand on the knob, cracking it an inch, hoping against hope.
Hot vapour curled through the gap. A draconic gust of wind. I slammed the door again, fast.
We could have kept going through any of these doors, but without the city’s records, I had no way to remember what lay behind each one. Yes, I’d visited dozens of worlds, but the ways to them didn’t always stay the same.
I remembered heading out with my classmates as a young man, the route carefully mapped out for us by our teachers. One of my cohorts made for a door that wasn’t on the map, convinced that it led to the sparkling, frozen world she’d visited on her last trip and bursting with impatience to show it to us. “It’s stunning,” she announced as she wrenched open the door. The caustic slick of black liquid that escaped when she opened it just an inch took her arm off.
I shuddered at the memory and laid my coat around your shoulders. We made for the treeline.
It had never occurred to me to venture this way before, but as we drew closer, my eyes made out regular, solid shapes among the trees. A cluster of low, stone buildings—a cottage with outhouses, perhaps, or a farm. Unwilling hope leapt in my chest. Perhaps there would be someone there who could help us.
“Come on,” I urged, and despite your bleeding foot, you sped up. But as we drew closer, I saw empty windows, overgrown brambles climbing the walls. The front door hung open and the wind had blown drifts of russet leaves into the porch. I sighed. “Nobody’s lived here for a while.”
“At least it’s shelter,” you said, your voice a touch steadier now, and ducked out from under my arm to trudge inside. Leaves rustled around your ankles. You found a creaky wooden chair and slumped into it; I was grateful it didn’t splinter under your weight.
A slip of paper stuck out from beneath the door. Water-stained and fragile with age, it felt like moth-wings beneath my fingertips. I expected it to flake apart as I pulled it free, but it held together, not that that helped. The note was in an alphabet I didn’t understand, blocky letters as opaque as shuttered windows.
You tugged my jacket tighter around yourself. “What do we do now?”
There was a fireplace. I supposed we should use it. I dredged the depths of my memory for the survival classes I’d taken in my youth and promptly discarded, never having felt the urge some did to prove myself against hostile worlds. We needed wood, as dry as possible, and tinder and a spark. And after that, we’d have to start looking for food…
The thought of it all was so exhausting I almost lay down and quit right then.
But there you were, brand-new and raw as a fresh-healed wound, looking at me with your wide trusting eyes.
I got to work.
iii.
I was neither your teacher nor, most of the time, your lover. I certainly had no claim on knowing where you went at night. Still, I tossed in our makeshift bed when I was alone, only settling when I heard your quiet footsteps enter the cottage and felt the midnight chill swirl through the door alongside you. Even then, a knot of unease remained tight in my belly.
I’d made a home of this place, with a door that locked and a wood-fired stove for cooking and cobbled-together furniture. You helped, of course—it wasn’t in your nature to sit idle—but volunteered for the tasks that would give you excuses to explore the forest as you collected firewood, or to walk along the river searching for new fishing spots and gathering edible weeds. You were growing restless, ranging further and further into this abandoned world. Soon, I knew, your gaze would turn to the world doors, and I would not try to stop you leaving.
It was only natural. Our people had always been wanderers. In darker moments, I wondered if that compulsion was what had led us to build our home on so overheated and precarious a world. Was there some fissure in our collective unconscious, some deep, destabilising fear of being anchored?
On the verge of sleep, I heard the quiet rattle of something being deposited on the kitchen table. In the morning, I found tiny, yellow seeds.
“They’re from those berries,” you told me. “The purple ones you liked. I thought they might grow – in that spot near the wall?”
You clasped my hand, thumb stroking my palm. The offering felt like an apology. I planted the seeds, and in the spring, they put forth slender green tendrils.
By that time, you were gone.
iv.
You asked me to go with you.
I thought about it. I’d done it before: drifted from world to world, chasing adventure, never settling. But I’d had somewhere to go home to, then. Our city had seemed an eternal beacon, a lodestar. The thought of us both drifting, rudderless, made me uneasy. You needed a home; I would be one.
At least, that was what I told myself. Maybe I was just tired.
I packed food for you: berries from the garden, leaves from the woods, dried meat from the rabbits we snared. I thought again of that girl from my cohort, screaming as the flesh of her arm bubbled to nothing, and made you promise to be careful; to open every door a crack before you looked through it and to look well before you stepped inside; to keep your maps updated. To come back to me.
In your absence, I kept busy. Built more furniture. Went through the spare rooms of the cottage, cleaning up and mending what I could. Brought more cuttings from the wood into the garden and planted them alongside your berries, which grew until they crept along the wall like a lover’s arm stretching across the back of a couch.
The first time you returned, you were glowing like a paper lantern, overflowing with stories.
You told me about the people you’d met, the ones you’d travelled with and shared beds with, and on one memorable occasion, almost drowned with in a thundering waterfall. You brought delicacies, brightly-coloured, sticky sweets the like of which I hadn’t tasted since the shining city. The fizz of dissolving sugar was electric on my tongue.
Best of all, you brought more seedlings. A herb with rounded violet leaves that gave off a tart citrus scent when I crushed them between my fingers, and another whose edges cut like paper but which, when brewed into a tea, would cure headaches and chase away fatigue. Fruit trees, too. This one, you said, produced tiny, bitter, green drupes that had made you grimace when you tried to eat them raw. The people who grew them had laughed at you and shown you how to stew them with sweet sap for hours. The segmented yellow fruits of another were like sunshine on the tongue.
I feared they wouldn’t grow, though I didn’t tell you that. Since you left, I’d tried transplanting other native plants to the garden, and while some took root immediately, others withered. Perhaps the soil was wrong.
I needn’t have worried. Though my own efforts still met with limited success, every cutting you brought me grew sturdy and strong.
v.
The garden was a riot of green, of fruits and blooms and scents, and at the same time, it was my quiet domain. There was a slow peace in the pruning of dead leaves, the turning-over of soil, the fetching of water from the stream in the hot months. At first, after the bustle of the great city and the traffic between worlds, all this stillness had seemed unnatural to me. I’d heard of people who went mad living alone.
I was surprised by how quickly I got used to it. The drowsy buzz of insects in summer and the fragrance of new leaves became all the companionship I needed. Even my thoughts, which had once hopped from branch to branch like startled birds, grew rhizomatic, putting out slow tendrils, reaching deep.
Your interruptions were never unwelcome. Each time you came back to me (I hesitated to call it home and didn’t ask if you called it that when you were out in the worlds) you brought cuttings, seeds, flowers. All of them thrived. You brought stories, too. You were always buzzing with the joy of discovery.
And then, you weren’t.
I was in the garden when you arrived, absorbed in weeding, and I didn’t hear your knock at the door. You staggered around the back of the cottage, holding your hands cupped before you, as I wiped the damp warm soil from mine on the thighs of my trousers.
I raised one arm in greeting, a smile breaking across my face, before I caught sight of your tight mouth, the terrible distance in your eyes.
You spoke while I brewed tea of the world you’d visited in the midst of disaster. Spores misting the air, thick as storm rain. The sickness that followed spared nobody. Your voice shook when you talked about the children, their bodies split like seed pods.
You’d been helpless to do anything. You could make no sense of why you had survived.
The whole time you talked, you kept your hands clasped tightly together and your great dark eyes fixed on the tabletop. I recognized it was shame you felt, but I didn’t know how to lift the burden of it from you. If I could, I’d have killed it and put it in a deep grave, food for worms and flowers.
At the end of your story, you opened your hands. You held a clump of soil between them, and in it, a flower like a crimson bell.
“It was the only thing I could save,” you told me, your voice small. “It seemed important.”
No spores clung to the little plant. A tiny white hint of root, like a buried bone, peeked through the soil.
I extracted it from your grip as gently as I could. “Get some rest. I’ll take care of this.”
You insisted there was no way you would sleep, but eventually you did, heavy and deathly still in the bright afternoon. I planted the little flower in a shady spot near the back wall—a pure guess, since I’d never seen its kind before—and watered it and hoped.
For the first time since you’d left, you stayed with me longer than a handful of days. I didn’t mind. Another body in the bed, another pair of hands in the garden. We kept each other warm at night. I savoured each moment, sure you would leave soon. During the day, remembering our arrival here, and how busy hands stopped my mind from flying off its axis, I gave you jobs to do. You followed my instructions without complaint, fetching water and pruning dead leaves. After a few days, you began to look like your old self.
By the time the crimson flower began to put forth new buds, you were ready to leave. “You can stay longer,” I said. Your answering smile was opaque, and I didn’t ask again.
vi.
You didn’t stay away as long as I expected. Your next visit surprised me as I plucked the tart green fruit from one of the young trees you’d brought me after your first excursion into the worlds. It seemed forever ago now; I’d taken root so deeply in this place I could almost imagine I’d been born here. In the days after our arrival, I used to wake from nightmares of fire and screaming half-afraid that this world was the dream, that it would crumble to ashes before my eyes. I would light a candle and walk round the cottage in the middle of the night, touching things to make sure they were real, and feared each time I stepped outside the garden that our home would vanish while my back was turned.
It had been a long time since I felt that way. Sometimes I even brought my blankets outside and slept beneath the stars, remembering the freedom I’d felt as a young traveller between worlds.
“Can I help?” you asked me, nodding at the tree. I shrugged, and let you peel and chop the fruit and stew it with honey. You seemed content to take over the task, so I sat in the garden, watching the sun set in a blaze of orange. In the distance, the world doors hung in the air, scattered like stars against the bluing twilight.
Behind me, the doorway framed you in warm light. The tension was gone from your shoulders, and your expression was placid and still, a lake in summer. You looked as if you belonged here.
At night, you wrapped your arms around me and clung like a vine. You slept better with something to embrace, but I didn’t think I was the anchor you were looking for. Roots needed more than one person to wrap around. They needed to dig deep.
Between your embrace and the bedcovers, the heat was suffocating. I climbed out of bed, pausing as you stirred and settled, and went to the window. The doors shone, beacons in the dark, and I looked at them for a long time. For the first time since we left the shining city, I wondered.
A restlessness had taken hold of me, and even after you left, it remained. I went on long night walks and, whichever direction I started in, found myself veering inevitably toward the doors.
The next time you visited, a scant few weeks later, you weren’t alone.
The girl with you was gaunt and wan. There was fear in the way she carried herself, in the tight line of every limb and her bunched-up shoulders, and the way she startled at loud noises and soft words alike.
“I said she could stay a while,” you told me, not quite asking permission. “We can make up one of the other rooms.”
You didn’t bring seeds with you this time. I set the table for three and watched you prepare the soup, moving through the kitchen with a familiarity that grew more practised every day.
The girl came downstairs while you cooked. She’d changed into some of your old clothes, soft trousers that puddled around her ankles where they were too long and a woollen sweater that would keep out the evening chill. When she hovered awkwardly beside the table, you nodded to the pile of grey-green leaves on the counter. “You can chop those up for me, if you want.”
She nodded and got to work, her hunched posture relaxing with the activity. After a moment, she held a pinch of the herb to her nose to inhale its scent. “I used to help my dad in the kitchen.”
You looked at her sideways. Your expression was gentle, understanding—a new look on your familiar face. “Did you make this with him?”
She glanced into the bubbling pot and shook her head decisively. “No. This is nothing like what we ate at home.”
“Ah, I see. He was a good cook.” You smiled, waved away a billow of steam, and turned to me. “Open the door?”
I did as you asked and after a moment, seeing that you didn’t need me, I slipped through it into the cool evening air and stood in the garden, facing out. Your mingled laughter reached me on the night breeze. When I glanced back at the cottage, I saw the yellow glow from within, strong and steady, and felt a dormant flame inside my chest flicker to new life. Behind me, a promise of home—and in the blue distance, the beckoning doors.
vii.
Remember to water the garden. Remember that the creeper along the back wall needs training—use wood from the slender trees near the stream, not branches from the crabbed bushes beside the house. Remember those little red flowers need shade, and remember…
Oh, never mind. You don’t need me to tell you. The doors shine bright ahead of me, and my pack is heavy on my back, but I walk toward them so lightly I’m almost running, new-made again in my excitement.
What I’m trying to say is, remember me. I’ll need an anchor, just as you did; a home to come back to one day.
When I do, I’ll bring you seeds.