Garden Gaffe

By Rose Q. Addams

Apprentice wizard—a glorious job fraught with adventure and magic, one sure to gain the attentions of the ladies. Especially if you’re not up to the whole hay baling and Adonis-body-building thing.

I rest my dirt-caked hands on my knees. Ha. Some adventure. Then again, pulling weeds is no small feat, especially if they’re asking you to get the roots and all.

I seize another dandelion. Personally, I think digging for roots is a waste of time; if there’s no leaf, there’s no nutrition for the roots. So, I return to snapping off the tops of every weed in my mentor’s garden.

If I wanted to weed, I’d have stayed in Gardendale. My hometown is known for our collective green thumbs. It’s flooded with the sort of guys I mentioned earlier: blond giants who think nothing of picking up a cow or three and singlehandedly bringing in the harvest in one afternoon. Guys who come home dripping sweat, smelling of the aforementioned cow, yet somehow are still surrounded with ardent female admirers just because they’re blessed with a little more meat on their bones.

I jerk at the stubborn stem. Come on!

It snaps off, and I fall back heavily. It’s just not fair. Some of us work smarter, not harder. I built an irrigation system for our family garden and our closest neighbors’—saved us all hours of back-breaking labor—and received no thanks beyond a bouquet of parsnips anonymously left under my window. Parsnips. Egads.

At least that work caught my mentor’s attention. I’m now proudly—more or less—apprenticed to Wizard Milo, sorcerer for the ages, and owner of a lovely crop of mandrakes. Though I wish I had a better story for the letter I promised to send home:

Dear Mom,

New beginnings start out slow, I suppose. I’ve been weeding…

“How’s it coming, Spencer?” Wizard Milo’s voice rings out the window.

I drop the last shred of withered greens in my bucket. “Almost done, sir. I just have to burn them.”

“Good. When you’re done I’ve got another task for you.”

Something more exciting, I hope. I stoke the garden firepit and toss the bucket’s contents into it, then return to the solarium.

Milo lounges in a chair, studying a thick volume with so many characters crammed onto the page that it seems nigh-on illegible. “Ah, Spencer. I’d like you to prepare yourself lunch. We’ll start your training with some exercises after you eat.”

Cooking? Guess I didn’t leave that in Gardendale either. Still, I’m promised something different afterward, and Milo’s already made his own lunch, judging by the crumbs on his jerkin.

“Yessir!” I salute, perhaps too enthusiastically, and hurry down the hall.

As I open the kitchen door, Milo’s voice floats after me. “Oh, and could you clean up when you’re done, please, Spencer? Appreciate it.”

Clean up after I’m done? I gape at the bread, meat, and cheese strewn over the counters, the open jar of mayonnaise, and the spilt bottle of pickled peppers. What a slob! A pig would eat more tidily.

Still, Milo’s a wizard. He might be absentminded about things other than his craft. I sigh and make myself a sandwich. I scrape the loose food into the icebox and wipe up the pickle juice. The peppers themselves I leave. I don’t eat pickled peppers, and can remind him later—gently, of course—that that part of the mess was his.

“Spencer!”

Uh-oh. What now?

I trot back to the solarium, lunch in hand, and almost drop my plate as several whitish, globby… er, people, about six inches high, scuttle in front of me waving their arms and gabbling in a high-pitched tongue.

More of them swarm the solarium, their strange, green frond-like hair waving as they swing from the chandeliers and chase each other across the floor. Most of them, however, teem around Milo’s chair, their wild gestures punctuated by angry shrieks.

I suddenly realize why their hair looks familiar—after all, I’d been weeding amongst them all morning. Milo catches my eye with a deep scowl and stamps a foot. The shrieking and gabbling stops, and they all turn to me.

“You didn’t weed the mandrakes.” Milo rubs his forehead. “Not properly. They’ve come to complain.” His voice is weary, not angry, and my face heats. One of the plaintiffs chitters ominously, and I take a step back as the one nearest me waves a clump of ragged roots without a top.

“I’m sorry?”

“You will be,” he says. “You’ll have to spend the rest of the day digging the roots out. They can’t sleep well with the roots crowding their space, and they get cranky if they don’t get a solid eight hours.” He hands me a trowel. “They’ll point out the roots to you. Pay attention, and do it well. And remember that tasks I ask you to do here are important, no matter how insignificant they feel. You’ve failed the first test of readiness for this job. If you fix it, you’ll earn back that lesson I promised. If you don’t, you’ll be on root duty for two weeks.”

“Yessir.”

I droop my way through the weeding, even though the mandrakes are happy to show me where I should dig so I don’t have to search.

Once their beds are cleared, the creatures aren’t so bad, really; they even shake my hand or hug me with their little starchy limbs. I should’ve just done a good job in the first place.

But I can do better. And I will. I’ll make Milo proud, and really accomplish something here. I toss the last of the roots in the firepit with these and other noble thoughts in my mind.

A yell splinters the air. “Spencer! You—”

A deep growl interrupts, and a flash pierces my retinas. The kitchen wall explodes outward. A massive, six-legged pepper careens from the wreckage, trailing pickle juice in its wake.

Dear Mom,

I might be home earlier than I expected…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rose Q. Addams loves cheesecake, hats, and her family, who she blames for her love of reading. Some of her best memories are hearing tales of Heidi, Winnie the Pooh, Beauty and The Beast, and the prophet Ehud— which explains how her taste runs wildly throughout genres. She can be found scribbling madly on any paper she gets, or sneezing in the dust of the curious shop where she pretends she’s sane.

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