Harriet’s Garden is a slice-of-life adventure by N. Rae. Five-year-old Harriet couldn’t be more excited to visit her grandmother’s cabin on a small island for the summer. While her older brother, Max, and her mother, Eleanor, accompany Harriet to her grandmother’s house, she will spend the rest of the summer alone with Grandma while Max and her mother return home. With no wi-fi or video games, Harriet must find new ways to spend her time. Luckily for her, Grandma is adept at finding exciting activities for Harriet to engage in, including painting, strolling down to the beach, doing puzzles, reading and visiting the library, hugging trees, and more. Additionally, Harriet listens to Grandma’s stories and falls in love with the surrounding environment as she learns to dream and makes friends with a few playful pixies.
Harriet’s Garden is a beautiful story about a young girl learning to use her imagination to dream and build her own worlds. N. Rae’s heartwarming tale tugs at your heartstrings while showing how a child perceives the world around them and the unique bond between a grandmother and her granddaughter. This is a tale for readers of all ages. While young readers will love to follow Harriet’s adventures, older readers will find it easy to relate to Grandma Tommie. Rae does a masterful job of putting a child’s psyche onto the pages, realistically depicting how they react to new surroundings and soak up the lessons they learn. The characters feel like real people, and I found Grandma and Harriet’s relationship dynamic adorable. I will heartily recommend this book to children and adults alike.
Harriet’s Garden is available on Amazon as Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
This is a story about a granddaughter staying with her grandmother for two weeks at the end of summer. The grandmother lives on an island in the Puget Sound. They spend time baking, painting, walking the beach, and telling each other their dreams. It begins like this:
Blue sky. Blue water. Green islands. A long stretch of a two-lane highway cutting through. A round yellow sun above the horizon in the western sky. It was a quiet summer evening. Cars driving away from the sun. Cars driving toward it. In one of the cars driving toward the sun, there was a little girl named Harriet sitting in the backseat of a red SUV. The hum of the car on the road was like a tune to her. She hummed along as she gazed out the backseat window, daydreaming, watching it all go by. As one aspect of the world blurred, another came into sharp focus. There was the pretty blue sea. A small white pickup truck. A yellow road sign. Birds flying. The sky was such a particular perfect blue it seemed unreal. There were only a few fluffy clouds in the constant cerulean. Those clouds were perfectly white and so fat and pretty that Harriet wanted to reach out of the car window and pluck one from the sky. So she did. She closed her eyes and imagined just that. She used that cloud as a pillow, resting her head on it while dreaming.
Harriet’s mom was driving, and her teenage brother, Max, was in the front passenger seat. They were listening to the music that was on his phone. Momma said, “What’s that song that goes scoo scoo scoo? Play that one.”
“I don’t know.”
“I like that one.”
Max googled song, scoo scoo scoo. He played the suggested song. There were only two scoos.
“That’s not it.”
“Yeah,” Max shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Scoo scoo scoo. Maybe I dreamed it.”
“Maybe you dreamed it.”
*******
Harriet’s Garden is available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and KindleUnlimited.
There were six kittens inside me. I birthed four and we swaddled them in little baby blankets, nestled them side by side in the fruit basket. Mother said to rest on the sofa. I watched the other two kittens squirming inside me. I could feel them romping inside, sometimes pressing on my bladder. I asked Jane to sketch the shapes of them in her book. Their little cat bodies moving just under my skin. Their spines, each delicate notch, rising and falling. Their paws flexing out, then disappearing. Fast. Their bodies moving from one side of my abdomen to the other. As if they were playfully chasing each other inside my darkness.
Ribbons for my hat. Blue. Like the sky when the rough wind is up, pushing and pressing, all the leaves of the trees and things go flying. Look, there’s father going past. Hello, Father. Orange ribbons too. Like the egg yolk from a well-fed chicken. You can make a baby chick out of that. I crack the egg and there is nothing but air and a sweet friendly scent that makes me sad.
I wonder how I ever knew anything. There were doors and then more doors. I stepped from one to the next. Opening and stepping through. It was all doors. All the same door, repeating.
I make a concoction. There are only two ingredients. I mix the crushed flowers, soft, silky pink with the mint. The fluid leaks out and I pour that into a small porcelain bowl. Emma, it is time to drink this. She steps back. Mother says, Emma, This is for your own good. We laugh.
A baby crawling across the street. I consider helping it. A living thing no bigger than my thumb. Tiny and naked. Vulnerable and filthy. I could pick it up and carry it out of the road. But if I touch it, it will be mine. I keep walking.
I have the sensation of someone watching me. I turn but there is no one there. I feel guilty. A deep unease. I turn off the light and get into bed. I close my eyes and imagine Miss Bates. Dear Miss Bates. Her eyes are closed too. She is also in bed, snoring. She dreams and I dream. In the morning we wake. Her mother still sleeps. Miss Bates gets out of bed, scampers into the kitchen, pulls a book and a pen and ink out from a cupboard. I watch over her shoulder as she writes down all the images she saw while she slept. The things that were said. She is embarrassed and confused. But there is something to be known here. She puts the book, pen, and ink away. She starts the fire for the kettle. The day begins.
A neighbor man wants me to help him fix a drawer. He makes a gesture. He is catching in his large hands an object I cannot see. He has a flame between his palms but no candle to go with it. I feel a little sick in my belly. Like something tiny is flying in the emptiness. We are laughing.
I hold a book. It is much too small. A book for a doll or young child. We walk on the ruined part of the hill. So much wet thick earth and the strands of trampled vivid green grass coming through. Father is slipping, but mother is safe far ahead. Someone speaks. A voice! From all around me. It says, That is a book about the true nature of everything. This tiny book in my hands with words too tiny to read? In it is written that Satan is us. That knowledge comes from the book itself, as if the letters crawl from the page and through my skin, into my blood. I shove the book into the earth. Father laughs, says, Hetty, Satan cannot be all around you and inside you and not also be you
I have five cards. We are at a table. Mr. Woodhouse sits across the room, over by the fire, out of the chill. He has only one eye in the center of his face. I look back to my cards. I have only three. Mother. Where is mother? I get up. With each step, the room shifts. I am off the carpet and walking down the side of the walls as if this is natural. The colors are too vibrant. The furniture moans. Mother, are you down this dark corner? Mother, are you in the room with the tiny fire burning? The hallway is long and tilts and yawns. I feel it shudder and stretch as if it’s a living thing. I don’t want to be here. My legs tremble.
We are in a carriage. Mother next to me. It is dark night, yet I can see everything as if it were daylight. All is vivid and absolutely pure. The moon is behind the clouds. The crisp air. I see my breath. Miniature puffs of bright white yarn, floating from my mouth. There’s a bump in the road. We go up into the air. I look down as I fall. There is no carriage beneath me, no seat, but the horses are still prancing in front as if they are pulling us forward. I find myself sitting so politely on the air. I look up and there’s mother coming down from the night sky, her skirts all fluffed up. So gentle. Falling down, so softly. We are on the fresh backs of horses, galloping, our thighs clutching tightly their warm bodies. I yell, “Mother, we are riding!” She doesn’t hear me. Her hair has come undone. Long strands, white as the moon, flowing behind her. It is beautiful, but improper.
Mother says, “Dear, please, may I have more tea.” I notice her mouth is not moving. We are in the sitting room. Outside it is raining. I see the mud and muck and puddles even though I am nowhere near a window. I turn and am standing in the kitchen. Mother says, “What are we going to do about the horses eating all the silk purses?” Emma says, “How delightful. So pretty,” as she pets the horse I am holding. It is quite small. It fits in my arms and nibbles and pulls at my shoulder, searching for sweet grasses in the fabric of my dress.
My mother kept a box of all my baby teeth I gifted to the Tooth Fairy when I was little, so I used one of those. I had a copper penny from 1952 and a vial of my blood drawn fresh that morning. He looked over each item, sniffed it, then put it in a pocket of his black cloak.
The dark river was smooth. The sensation of going down it was like only the river that was moving and we were locked in place. I had imagined it would smell awful but it was fresh like spring and made me long for the world of the living. I sobbed the entire ride.
The next thing I remember is being in a cave. It was dark cold stone. I felt feverish. My blood was too hot and my skin was too cold. My mother had asked me to ask her mother where something was. My mother wouldn’t tell me what. She said her mother would know what she was asking about.
I had no desire to ask for my grandmother when I was in there amongst the dead. Instead, I whistled and called out for our cats. Sunshine. Fat Cat. Smarty Pants. Vicious. Each one came running. A small table and four chairs appeared. My cats sat down like people. I noticed they were wearing leather dress shoes and jackets with ties. Windsor knots. Vicious placed a deck of cards on the table.
“What game do you want to play?”
I sat down on the floor between Fat Cat and Smarty Pants.
“Little Metal Man,” I said. I had no idea what game that might be or why I had said that.
Vicious shuffled the deck. “That’s a difficult game.”
“Whose life are you betting,” asked Smarty Pants.
“My own?” I hadn’t expected to say that either.
“That’s the only way one should play it,” said Sunshine. “Kudos!” He lifted his back leg, put his paw in his mouth and cleaned his toes. He made a strange gnawing sound. I smiled. He was still a cat even though he could talk and play cards and sit in chair.
“You think that’s funny?”
I thought to lie. But I shrugged. “Yeah.” I copied the noise.
Sunshine lifted his head. “That is not what I sound like at all.”
“If I were about to give my life for a card game, I doubt I’d find such things amusing,” said Smarty Pants. “But seeing as I am already dead, I’ll concede that such sounds are droll.” He lifted his left front paw and gnawed on it making that same goofy noise, then threw his head back and laughed. His white whiskers flitted about and I reached out to pet him because he was so strange and adorable and he scratched my hand. I apologized. “Try and touch me again and I’ll cut your throat. Wide open.”
The four cats looked at each other and giggled.
“Pay attention now,” said Vicious. She rapped the deck of cards on the table three times. We all sat up straight. She shuffled the deck, split it once, and dealt to all but me.
“I thought I was playing.”
“You are what we are playing for.”
I watched them play but could not understand the rules. The deck they were playing with was unfamiliar. The game went on for some time. It wasn’t any sort of poker. It was maybe a little like whist.
Sunshine won. Just as I opened my mouth to ask what happened now, I vanished and reappeared inside of Sunshine. I was the living human me inside my dead orange tabby. I looked out at all my fellow cats. I looked at my orange tabby paws. I felt my particular cat tongue sandpapery inside my cat mouth with my sharp teeth that could break little animal necks and rip flesh. Sunshine stood up. He said, “So long. I suppose I’ll be back soon enough.”
We tromped out of the cave, me inside Sunshine, on all our four paws, prancing. I felt spectacular. Limber and fast. I could see all sorts of things I never saw before. I was on high alert. By the time we reached the river, I was walking on two legs and looked like myself again but I was Sunshine. I got in the boat and I put my hand in the soft water. It was almost too cold. The fresh scent of life was strong. The scent of living things. When the boat came to shore I stepped out. The ferryman said nothing. I wanted to ask him if he knew that I was no longer me. That there was a dead cat from my childhood moving me about. But I couldn’t make myself talk.
I was left to my own thoughts as we walked home. I was a prisoner inside my own body. I had no way of communicating. I had no access to what Sunshine was thinking but I could sense him. I could feel his awe. I sat back inside myself and watched.
The first thing we did on my return home was sit at the kitchen table and ask my mother to make us a pastrami sandwich. We watched her as she took out the bread and the meat and the mayonnaise and the mustard. We watched her as she sliced tomatoes, salted and peppered them. She washed a piece of lettuce and dried it. We took note of our body there in the kitchen, sitting in a chair at the table. We laid our hands, my human hands, flat on the baby blue wood. There was the scab on my right hand from when Sunshine had swatted me. I licked it, my wound. I watched my left hand turn. We studied closely my palm. The lines of it. How strange. We looked up and our mother was standing there holding the plate with our sandwich.
“You on something?”
She set the plate before me, ripped off a paper towel and gave that to me too.
I used my hands to pick up the sandwich. I put it in my mouth, carefully. I took a bite. Wow. I chewed slowly. I closed my eyes. Wow.
“So? Tell me. What did my mother say?” She tapped the table with her long pink fingernails. O! That was an exciting sound. My eyes popped open and I watched her fingernails dance and I wanted her to scratch my head. Scratch my back.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. It’s nice to be here again. In the land of the living.”
“My mom? Did she tell you what she did with the thing?”
“I didn’t see her.”
“Who did you see? What was it like?”
“It was like a cold dark cave.”
“I told you it wouldn’t be any fun.”
“No, it’s not what I would call fun.”
“They say a trip to the dead changes you.”
The cat smiled. “That it does, Mother. That it does.”
(Story expanded from vss365 prompt ambiguous but without the word ambiguous.)
My husband was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. I asked him if there was a hummingbird at the feeder in the garden just outside the window.
“Do you see one?”
“Yes. It’s here at my feet.”
A little bird sitting quietly.
I was worried he would step on it. I walked over and picked it up to take it outside. It was very still in my cupped hand. It jumped in my mouth before I could open the door. It jumped in my mouth even though my mouth was not open.
The mountain is green. I wait for snow. One of my giant mothers is here with me. When we stand side-by-side my head is at her ankle bone. This mother is translucent with a blue outline. She says, Come with me. She is kind but I don’t want to go. I follow her up the mountain. We stop at the top. She has food. I have a bucket. I make a steam room to enjoy. But it is only for me. I am very happy. She is disappointed. She made dinner but I won’t eat. I am in awe. And full of guilt.
