Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Delia in the Garden

Delia was on her knees in the dry, hard dirt next to the house. She hated the dirt; it stained her face and hands a dusty gray brown, and it clung to the undersides of her fingernails, making the ends of her fingers look like they all had been bruised and blackened. No matter how many times she dipped her hands in the stream behind their house, the grime would never come out. When supper time came, Grandmother Emily would grab her hands and study them front and back, and if they weren't clean enough to suit her, Gray-Em (for that's what Delia called the gray haired old woman) would dry-scrub her palms, fingers, and nails with an old hairbrush. That was never very pleasant.

But somebody had to work the garden, and somebody had to cook the supper, and someone - who couldn't do anything else useful - had to check the children for cleanliness. It was simply Delia's lot in life that she was the gardener. "Someday," Gray-Em had told her once, with a wicked cackle, "you'll be old and gray and useless like me, and then you can be the one scrub people's hands with hairbrushes."

Delia often thought about that, and wondered if having sagging skin and a sore back and weak knees would be worth not having to stay out in the hot, dirty, dry outdoors picking weeds from a garden that never produced anything. Some days she thought it would be. Other days, when she heard Gray-Em's knees cracking, and heard her moans of pain as she sat in the outjohn doing her business, she was convinced she never wanted to get old, and would rather get eaten by a bear when she was still young than to experience being broken down like old Gray-Em.

"Delia," her mother's coarse, gravelly voice called out from the house, "Pick us some beets for supper, and then wash up!"

Delia smiled, then let the smile change to a disdainful grimace. She was glad to be done gardening for the day, but she hated beets. She stomped her way over to the row of beets and pulled a handful up from their dusty home. They were small and pale, and had a bitter aftertaste that Delia couldn't stomach.

On her way to their small shack, Delia passed by the Ugly, as she always did. It was a funny looking metal thing that had rusted through from top to bottom. It had two long metal arms that reached out to the level of her head, and sat on two wheels and strange metal spindles that stuck out at peculiar angles like those paper pinwheels Gray-Em used to make before pappa told her she couldn't waste paper anymore.

Delia called it the Ugly, because it was ugly, and she usually stayed far away from it on her way from the garden to the house. Gray-Em called called it a rootoo, or something like that, and said that in the old days, before the Ravaging, it used to weed the gardens for them.

Mamma had told her never to believe the silly old stories that Gray-Em told when she got in one of her moods, but sometimes she wondered about that. Maybe people didn't have to weed gardens when Gray-Em was a little girl. Maybe, if she was nice to it, the rootoo would help her in the garden.

"I'm sorry I called you Ugly," she said. The rootoo didn't say anything. "I think you're pretty," she lied. Still there was no answer.

So she kicked the rusted piece of junk, and giggled with glee as a shard of rotten rusted metal dropped to the ground. "Ugly ugly rootoo," she called as she trudged on toward the house, beets in hand. By the time she got to the kitchen, the insult had become a sing-song chant in her mind, and she decided she would teach it to her little sister too.

Delia in the Kitchen

Gray-Em met her at the door with a grumpy glare. Delia had long ago learned not be bothered by Gray-Em's left eye which turned inward and twitched sideways every few seconds, but the glare could still make her insides turn to water.

"Did you just kick the roto-tiller?" Gray-Em demanded.

Rototiller, Delia thought. That's what she calls it. Then after a moment she thought: Rootoo sounds better.

"Yes, Gray-Em," she said, hanging her head.

"You mustn't do that, child," the batty old woman said. "It's one of the only things we have left that reminds us of who we used to be, before the Ravaging."

Delia hated it when Gray-Em got started talking about the plagues and the wars and the lootings and violence that had turned the earth into a dry wasteland when Gray-Em was just a little girl. The stories scared her, but if she refused to listen, Gray-Em got very angry, and that was even more frightening.

"I'm sorry Gray-Em," she said, with her head still drooping.

"Oh, let her be, Emily," Delia's mother said as she put a trayful of biscuits into the delapidated wood stove pappa had found, against all odds, to replace the gas oven that no longer worked. "It's just a broken down old machine."

"The child needs to understand where we came from, and show some respect for the ways of her ancestors."

"She doesn't live in that world, gram, and she never will. Let her be."

Gray-Em held out her hand. "Let me see those beets," she said, still scowling.

Dutifully, Delia held out the pale beets she held by their greens, and dropped them into Gray-Em's waiting hand. "Hrm. I remember when beets grew a lot bigger than this. Tasted better, too." Then, looking over Delia's shoulder, the old woman said, "Goodness, child! Is that a bear?"

Delia quickly turned to look behind her, and saw nothing but the dusty land, and the horrid gray haze of the sky in late afternoon as the sun began to set. But Delia was quicker than grandmother realized; as she started to turn back toward her grandmother, she saw something stranger than a bear out of the corner of her eye. The old woman was hastily slipping one of the beets into the large pocket of her tattered apron.

Delia opened her mouth to ask Gray-Em why she was stealing a beet, but the ugly glare had deepened in her grandmother's face, and that scared her into silence just long enough that her opportunity to speak was gone.

"Let me see your hands, child," Gray-Em said gruffly.

Delia put her hands behind her back. "I haven't washed them yet," she said.

Gray-Em said nothing.

"I'll go wash them now," Delia added, backing toward the door.

"I want to see those hands extra clean tonight," Gray-Em said with a bit of a cackle.

Delia fled the house then, determined to make her hands glisten, even if she had to scrape a layer of skin off to make it happen.

And she wondered why Gray-Em was stealing beets.

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