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Joshua Malbin307 12
th
St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 11215
1GardeningThe Mexicans were best. She didn't know about the Chinese because she’d never had one, butshe knew Mexicans had that feel for the soil and growing things, could see it in the way dirt livedin the creases of their hands. White people were useless for gardening. They thought they were toogood for what she paid, and always thought they knew better than she did.She was not liked among the regulars in the Home Depot parking lot, she knew that. Workerswho’d been in the country a while wanted more money than she could afford to pay. They grewaccustomed to the better life here, started wanting better things, and she supposed she couldn'tblame them. Unfortunately, the longer they spent in the U.S., it seemed, the more their tie to theearth loosened. So when there was a new face among the laborers, as today, she went straight to it.It was a sad face except in the moments when its owner raised his eyes to hers.She took him home and set him to work weeding the flowers, mulching the vegetable beds,planting a sapling. And she watched him from the window the way she always did, because dayworkers never came to find you when they were done with their tasks. They just sat down wherethey were, and if she didn't go to them they might sit there all day. Again, she couldn't blame themfor it, but it bore watching.The man worked slowly. He put the weeds into neat piles instead of throwing them every
 
Joshua Malbin307 12
th
St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 11215
2which way. He hunted around her flowers for every last offending shoot. Several times shethought of opening the window and telling him not to be so careful, to speed it up. But then whenhe was done with the flowerbed and she checked the clock, she discovered that in fact he’d takenvery little time at all. He took less to mulch the vegetable garden, and less still to plant the sapling.Even when digging the hole for the sapling he seemed barely to exert himself, and every so oftenhe glanced through the kitchen window at her, smiling.By two he was done with the work she'd planned for the whole afternoon. So she gave himother things: rototilling, edging, planting, trimming. Her whole week’s yardwork.Each task seemed to last forever in his arms, but by the kitchen clock each was over in minutes.Then she saw that her garden was growing even as the Mexican worked. Slowly at first, butsoon it was obvious that the tomatoes were fruiting, the poinsettias spreading their petals. Theweeds grew too, and the Mexican went back to the flowerbed to pull them again, down one row of flowers and up another. The grass was growing, its long blades rippling along the edge of the path.In the bed where she'd planted begonia bulbs only yesterday, little shoots poked from the dirt.From the patch of ivy around the base of her birdbath a fresh tendril had coiled its way up andaround the pedestal.After another few minutes she couldn't stand to be separated from it by the kitchen windowanymore, and went outside to watch him more closely. The grass had already risen nearly to thetops of the planters. Tiny weeds filled all the cracks in the path and the bricks of the patio weremarred by a spreading blotch of moss. It was darker than usual, and when she looked up to see whyshe saw that the oak tree and the maple were both in full midsummer foliage, their boughs bending
 
Joshua Malbin307 12
th
St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 11215
3ominously together, threatening to interlace or fall. Her birdbath was drowning in ivy; a vine'sroots gripped the toes of the little cupid in the bath's center. The Mexican’s pile of weeds wasnearly waist high.It was starting to be terrible. Her trees’ roots and the little weeds were crumbling her path.Hundreds of snails dotted her patio’s inch-thick moss, and an army of millipedes and pillbugsscurried among them. All her flowers were dying, and their dried petals drifted over the snails andthe millipedes and the pillbugs, and piled up against the root-humps in the path. She smelled thedark, boggy smell of rotting plants, and it took her a moment to locate it: it was coming from themountainous weedpile.The hedges had doubled in height and wound their stems around each other, growing so thick so fast that the sparrows nesting there were trapped inside. She could hear them chirpingfrantically, and then they were silent, and the outside of the hedge was a ruffled wall of green. Thebirdbath-shaped clump of ivy piled up on itself until it was higher than her head; the snails on thepatio were as big as her palm. Even her house seemed to be getting bigger. The knob on thekitchen door she’d passed through a moment ago was as broad as a plate and just out of reachoverhead.“This is my home!” she yelled, but instead of her own language she spoke in a buzzing trill.She looked down at herself: she was shrinking, her skin darkening almost to black and taking ona greenish tint, the white remaining only in streaks. She was turning into a starling. She hatedstarlings. They were noisy trash birds, an invasive species forever stealing her woodpeckers’ nestholes. “Wait. Stop!” High-pitched barks.
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