Purpose

It was not an educated guess. Edward (Bun Bun) Taylor’s formal schooling had promptly ceased after a miraculous, possibly fudged, graduation from the State-required Eighth Grade. Not for any practical reasons. Edward just didn’t ‘get’ school, is how he put it. In fact, if eight years had not been required, Edward would have removed himself sooner, which, in truth, would not have upset the teaching staff at Middleton Elementary in the least. They didn’t ‘get’ Edward either.     

     

     But Edward didn’t need a higher education to determine, from a single glance, that his mother was dead in the passenger seat of his father’s ’05 Caprice Classic. 

     

     She'd fallen asleep, as she always did, ten minutes into the trip home, doped up and exhausted after her weekly visit to the doctor. On every other occasion, the seatbelt had engaged when she lolled forward, limp with sleep, restraining her in a mostly upright position, where she would simply nod in silence as Edward navigated the Caprice homeward.   

     

     Perhaps her weight had deteriorated beyond that which the seatbelt’s catching mechanism could recognize. She was so tiny, light and frail that Edward himself had begun to see her as one of those mosquito-like creatures he called Gallinappers, a winged manifestation of dust, dried air and cobweb.    

     Whatever the case, the seatbelt hadn’t caught. Edward’s mother had listed steadily leftward, toward him, until the belt reached its full extension, where she had come to a stop, suspended just above the Caprice's center console.  

          

     She had rolled in her downward journey, and when Edward glanced at her, his mother was looking up at him, like some kid, goofing, her mouth agape.  

      Edward (Bun Bun) Taylor looked away from his mother's upturned face, back to the road. Traffic was light. He sensed his mother swaying gently in the harness beside him, her eyes opened and rolled back white behind her Solar-Guard sunglasses. He listened to the steady click of his father’s Caprice Classic, its rings long burned from lack of oil, lowered the visor to shield his eyes from the sun and drove his mother home. 

Allergic

It was the trees. 

     In April of 2023, Neil Patterson made the discovery. But by then, the Earth had been nearly cleared of humans, the soil rich with their decomposition. 

     Neil had had a hunch. In full respiratory gear, he studied pollen taken from Deciduous and Conifer alike. Maple, Oak, Beech, Pine—all of the samples registered quantities of an allelopathic chemical once found only in leaf sap, a mild herbicide rained down as a means for clearing the soil immediately around the tree of competition for nutrients and water.
    In the pollen, however, Neil tested the chemical at nearly one hundred times the potency of what it had been in the sap. A single blossom, he found, had the capacity to inflict irreparable damage on human lung tissue. Springtime became a massacre.
     The aged fell first, the infirmed and young children.
  They thought it was a virus. Ran tests. Declared emergencies. Countries were quarantined. The dead couldn't be buried fast enough. Five years and Neil began to wonder if he had the Earth to himself. 

   
     From the quiet of his back porch, he watched now their gentle movements in the breeze, the sway of shadow over the unkempt grass. It was nearing fall. He was safe, for the moment, and smiled, remembering how helpless he had once thought they were, remembering the ambitious young tree-huggers he had known. He wondered if any of them had survived. If, now that the predator was removed, the chemical would weaken and return to the leaf sap—if the gift of clean oxygen the trees had once given freely, would become safe again to breath.
     Spring.
     Six months.
     He could only wait.  

                

The Garden Found

It was only upon request that Richard Tinder would actually divulge information on the needs specific to the flora that consumed his slip of gardened yard—sunlight, soil requirements, pruning tips and what have you. 

     Those out for a stroll, who found Richard at work there and made the mistake of asking for a brief tour, would quickly find that his wealth of horticultural knowledge, his green thumb and keen eye for balance and foresight in planting were all incidental when compared to his great love of the acquisition unrecompensed. 

     Richard would positively beam as he explained how every single item in his garden had been scavenged in one manner or another. The cuttings, the stone, the bird feeders, the bench seats, all of it acquired through some means of his cunning, the details of which, would unfold as tourists brushed past beds rich in Gladiola and Snapdragon, Aster and Peony. 

     'Keep your eyes open,' Richard would advise as they neared the exit gate. 

     'Your garden is out there,' he'd say, pointing with plucked weed to some untold wealth beyond the immediate rooftops. 'Waiting to be had.'