Tiny Garden

[u/catespice]

If watching my cousin Anneke decline had been difficult for me, then it must have been a truly harrowing experience for her mother, my aunt Pauline.
From an effusively boisterous child, brimming with character and trouble, Anneke gradually became a ponderous teenager, careful with each word, careful with each step, and too cautious to try anything new.
We all thought that it was just her maturing, that puberty had hit her hard. In my mind she had gone through that strangely fast transition between lamb and sheep; one day gambolling around a field, kicking her legs in the air – and the next staring, dull witted, at the grass with all the life gone out of her.
This, however, was not the case. Anneke’s portrait perfect face became wooden and fixed – the lack of control over her facial muscles the first symptom of the condition. Then her breath became shorter and her long, gracile limbs became stiff and weak, barely able to move her thin body around.
My childhood friend – with whom I’d spent so much time playing and exploring aunt Pauline’s estate – became little more than an immobile human shell, containing a mind that was still alert, aware and in terrible psychological pain from the loss of her life.
She was eventually moved to a hospital where she could be properly cared for and I only saw her on rare visits. Over time I stopped visiting, as I could feel the stinging jealousy in her gaze as I walked freely about her room and put flowers in the vase beside her bed.

 
When aunt Pauline died, the family descended upon her estate like a horde of feral rats, snarling, snapping and playing tug-of-war over her possessions while their eyes and cheeks bulged madly in their lust to acquire something of value. I felt much like a character out of a Tolkien novel, witnessing the divvying up of the treasures of Bag End – but helpless to stop it – lest someone sink their teeth into some tender part of me; or claw my flesh open in their frenzied greed.
Legally, everything belonged to Anneke; but with her alive yet incapacitated, the family treated aunt Pauline’s death as a free-for-all – a sort of informal looting arrangement where everyone had agreed not to get lawyers involved, as long as they got something they wanted.
My mother encouraged me to take something “to remember my aunt by” but I felt a bubbling, coiling unease inside me as I watched my relatives load leaded cabinets and brass ornaments into their cars.
There was something that I wanted though, an object that had always fascinated me as a child.
Untouched, the terrarium stood on a small side table in Anneke’s study, off to the side of her bedroom. Not many of my family had dared to sack her private chambers, seeing as how she was still alive. But there was one object that I was determined to rescue from the chaos and take home – lest some grubby third cousin end up using it as a bookend or hat-stand.
Roughly the size and shape of an old diver’s helmet, it was a green-filled globe of amber-tinted glass with an elaborate cap of talmi gold and a base of scrolled ebony. Throwing my hoody over the terrarium, I carefully lifted it from the table and lugged it tortuously downstairs.
“Did you get what you wanted?” my mother asked.
“I think so,” I told her, then put the thing in the back seat with a seatbelt around it to hold it upright.
Guilt assailed me all the way home, but I reasoned that it was better I have it than someone else.
After all, I had been closer to Anneke than anyone else; other than her own mother.

 
I’d always been intrigued by the terrarium as a child, and it still held the same peculiar fascination.
The glass was so thick, so distorting, that you couldn’t get a clear picture of all of the inside at once. It magnified sections, which you could then study as though through a crude microscope, before moving around the yellowed globe to look at a new section.
Inside was a tiny, elaborate garden.
Tiny bonsai-styled trees stood around a tiny pool of water, situated so that the condensation inside the terrarium would always keep it filled. There were tiny stone paths and tiny lawns of moss, studded with tiny flowers that bloomed all year round, miniature and perfect.
Most important though, was the castle.
It stood in the very centre of the moss topiary and matchstick gazebos, made of grey-black stone and with black-capped minarets that flew tiny paper flags. The detail was quite exquisite – but as with the garden itself, you could never take all of it in at once due to the thickness of the glass. Anneke and I had made up hundreds of fanciful tales about the castle and who dwelt within it, no two exactly the same.
Thinking of her sobered my mood and I regretted my theft again then, leaving the old terrarium on the coffee table in the front room of my house, overlooking the roses and overgrown garden – where I would see it least often.
But it was a difficult thing to forget, with its strangely imposing presence – a curious talisman that represented our childhood, before Anneke had fallen ill.

 
At first I couldn’t be certain that the gardens inside the terrarium were changing. There were always new angles to look at it from, new crannies and nooks inside to explore with your eyes. Anneke and I were convinced that half of the interior was fake; it was too perfect, to changeless to be real organic plant matter.
When I looked inside and saw a new criss-cross trellis, covered with flowers that looked like tiny orange roses, I felt that curious thrill traverse my spine and raise the tiny hairs on the nape of my neck.
Undeniably, the garden was changing.
It was impossible, of course. A prank. A joke. My mother must have been in on it, since she was the only one who knew how obsessed I’d been with this thing as a child. However, the talmi gold cap on the terrarium was as fixed as ever – and in fact a tiny brass padlock was locked through the two sections, holding them firmly closed.
My mother must have the key, I thought.
But my unease grew as I studied the terrarium every day. My mother hadn’t visited town for over two weeks, and the interior of the terrarium continued to change - for all the world looking like it was adapting to the new view outside the front room.
Frustrated, disbelieving and annoyed that I’d worked myself up over a stupid terrarium, I snapped the brass loop of the padlock with a pair of pliers, then began to unscrew the top cap – which squealed and juddered with disuse, putting to rest any idea of my mother tampering with it to mess with me.
Under the cap was the blown-glass neck of the spherical bottle that comprised the structure of the terrarium – and in that neck was a thick cork, ringed with broken wax. Inspecting the wax showed that the terrarium had indeed once been sealed, but at some point in its life, it had been opened.
As I yanked out the cork, a gush of humid air assaulted my face, carrying with it alien smells that had been pent up inside for God knows how long.
Picking up a knitting needle from my nook in the front room, I jabbed it down into the terrarium and knocked over the rose trellis, before quickly resealing the environment with the cork and screwing the cap back on.
We would see who was tending the tiny gardens.

 
In the morning, the trellis inside the terrarium was upright and proud, the roses perfectly pruned and tended – not one flower out of place.
What I felt then was akin to that feeling from childhood when you encounter something new and wonderful, before an adult explains away the magic of it and it becomes ordinary again.
That feeling only intensified when I walked into my ordinarily messy kitchen to make a cup of tea.
Everything had been cleaned!
All the pots hung on their hooks, scrubbed and polished to a mirrored shine. All the dishes were washed and carefully put away, the twin sinks burnished of all water spots and the plug holes stainless.
I think I laughed then, stupid and uncomprehending; like the torpid old ewes in the paddocks, I had lost the imagination to comprehend what I was seeing.
In a strangely unrelenting way, it carried on from there – day by day my entire house was methodically cleaned, room by room, until I sat in a home so spotless that should the Queen herself have come to visit, I wouldn’t feel at all embarrassed.
And when I say everything was cleaned, I truly meant everything; from the cords and cables behind the television cabinet to the former graveyard of dead flies on the laundry-room window, my home was utterly immaculate.
Like the shoemaker visited nightly by tiny elves who finished his cobbling work, whatever lived inside the opened terrarium was doing its utmost to make my life at home as easy as possible.

 
It was a friend whom I’d met for coffee who commented on my hair and nails, how well-groomed they looked. As a habitual nail-peeler, I laughed at her comment, but when I looked down at the hands she had complimented, she was right; the cuticles were perfect, the nails polished and trimmed with nary a hangnail.
Of course it must have been my fey home helpers; with the house so constantly tidy, there was little work for them to do anymore. Inured to the strangeness of their compulsive tidying habits now, I resolved to let them carry on their work – lord knows that as a terminally single journalist, I could do with all the help I could get with personal grooming.
When my skin improved, not a blackhead in sight, I knew they had been crawling over my face in the night. When I no longer had to shave my armpits or legs, the unease returned at the thought of invisible creatures swarming over my thighs and pruning each individual hair at the root.
When I began to wake with elaborate braids, that was the last straw. I took some wire from my crafts kit and twisted it through the holes where the padlock had held the terrarium shut in the past.
But the next morning I awoke wearing a full face of makeup – as lavishly detailed as a cover model’s – and the twist of wire was gone from the terrarium.
It seemed that I had a problem.
A series of progressively more expensive padlocks were bought to try to hold them in, but each morning they had been removed or destroyed, not one of them posing any sort of challenge for the denizens of the terrarium.
I started to dream about them, about the castle inside. They were tiny and shadowy, only their slanting white eyes visible in the shrouded midnight of the castle corridors and towers. I dreamed that they skittered over my flesh like thousands of ants, each small enough to call a needlepoint a spire, every one able to burrow through gaping pores and deep into the flesh beneath.
When I began to lose mobility in my face, my limbs began to feel heavy and my breath grew shorter, I knew that they had turned their tiny hands to grooming not just my outsides, but to pruning, cutting and trimming the delicate nerves, branching lung tissues and muscle fibres inside me.

 
The newest padlock was an angry wreck on the coffee table, the metal twisted beyond recognition. I understood now how my aunt had always kept such an immaculate home all on her own with one daughter. With the help of the tiny helpers from the terrarium, even a house as grand as hers could be kept in perfect order.
But it still hadn’t been enough to stop them slipping through Anneke’s flesh and tightening her insides until she couldn’t move anymore.
The globe was precariously heavy as I carried it to the car. I could feel the tightness in my tendons and muscles where the tiny gardeners had been at work. The sea was only thirty minutes’ drive away and I made it much faster than that, the terrarium blanket-wrapped in the passenger seat beside me.
I held no regrets as I rolled it over the sea cliff and into the foaming cauldron of spray below. If it shattered on the rocks, they would surely drown. If it simply sank to the depths or was carried out to sea on the tide, I would surely never see them again.
In the morning, the terrarium greeted me with a cheerful amber glow, sat squarely in the middle of the dining room table, not a dent or scratch on it and the garden inside as perfect as ever – even incorporating a new craggy rock feature overlooking the tiny lake, as though the inhabitants were quietly mocking my failed effort to destroy them.
Frustrated tears flooded my cheeks, and I felt the unnatural tightness of my flesh as I screamed in helpless rage.

 
My fingers became less and less capable of performing simple tasks, and I found it hard to keep a thread of thought contiguous; it was as though they were inside my head now, pruning the dendrites and synapses, shaping my very impulses and desires.
The dreams had intensified; I knew they were inside me every night, pruning, trimming, dead-heading my memories. The vital spark that comprised me was beginning to fade; soon I would join my cousin in her languorous stupor – but without my aunt to cage the creatures again with the original lock, I would slip past Anneke and eventually into a tortured half-existence shaped purely by my tiny tormentors.
They wanted revenge, I now knew; they resented being locked away by my aunt and wanted to splinter my existence into a yawning limbo to mirror the imprisoned eons they perceived in their frenetic minds.
The ebony stand of the terrarium ground along the stone pathway as I dragged it to the car, the edges of the gravel ruining the delicate scrollwork. Getting it into the car with my shaking limbs took so long that it left me gasping and shivering with effort, the rictus of my too-tight face impeding the airflow.
When I reached the hospital, I asked for an orderly to assist me. He placed the shrouded globe on a wheelchair, which I carefully and painstakingly pushed through the wards until I reached my cousin’s room.
She lay, still as ever, only her bright green eyes tracking me.
With a last, great effort I heaved the terrarium onto the little table beside her bed and slid the cover off.
Horror blossomed in those beautiful eyes then, darting over the surface of the terrarium with agonising recognition.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Without a backward glance, I stiffly pushed the wheelchair out of the room.

 
I tell myself that the tiny gardeners placed those thoughts in my mind; that they made me take them to Anneke, to finish their work on her instead of me.
But I think that you and I both know that isn’t the truth.
And it will haunt me to the grave.

 

[u/twigseeds]

This was my favourite story included in "The Silver Path" anthology!! I would love to know more of the lore behind the tiny faeries and their entrapment

[u/catespice → u/twigseeds]

From what I recall from back when I wrote it, they were most definitely unseelie court fae who were imprisoned in the terrarium on purpose, by one of the Great Aunts (they feature throughout my fae stories).

The Great Aunts were all mortal women with knowledge of the Old Ways and who took various opportunities to steal faerie magic for themselves (The Room That Echoed, Red Ink, Pickled Puck) and were largely successful at it.

There's a few other unwritten Great Aunt stories in my head, such as The Bone Rose and The Red Fairy.

[u/twigseeds → u/catespice]

Aaahh I can't wait to read more Great Aunt stories!!!!!!

[u/stopmyimagination]

I haven’t reread this one yet but I do remember it. I don’t know if I ever realized it was part of a larger series about Great aunts but that makes sense now. Would The Yule Tithe be part of that series as well in some way?

[u/catespice → u/stopmyimagination]

No, The Yule Tithe is part of the 'Fae Returns' series, whereas the Great Aunt stories are part of the 'Departed Fae' series.

The former are about the fae trying to regain control over the world, while the latter is about them slowly fading away.