First posted June 2023.

I can’t stop killing my plants. At first, I thought it might be the climate. The inescapable, searing light of the sun does nothing but scorch the grass into spiky brown blades that prick bare feet bloody. I remember the last time I saw rain, the summer before I left my hometown. Lightning sparked in the distance and we watched from the covered patio, sipping malbec and complaining about the humidity. A few months later, everyone’s grandmothers were idly muttering about how badly we needed rain. A few months after that, they stopped. The silence stood stagnant in the air in place of water.

I tried to grow a cactus. I thought I was being a little bit funny. I couldn’t possibly kill a cactus out here, I told everyone. The laughter faded as we all watched its skin bruise yellow and grey. Holes like cigarette burns, ashy and smouldering, grew like polka dots on the leaves.

But even without rain, clouds of mint and lavender spill over the sides of my neighbours’ raised beds. Cute rows of plump succulents line my friends’ coffee tables, unburnt by the scathing sun. It isn’t the climate. Other life thrives here.

So it’s me. Something about my touch makes red petals crumple into withered brown leaves, makes strong stems bend and wilt into soggy mush. I’ve cremated chrysanthemums, obliterated orchids, slaughtered snowdrops. I over-water, I under-water, I give them too much sun, I don’t give them enough, I do everything right, I do everything wrong.

Normal people might be able to accept this. Buy a plastic fern, put it in a pot by the window, trick their brains into producing whatever chemical seeing plants is meant to produce. Put down their scythes and leave the tending to those with gentler tools.

I can’t stop. My black thumbs itch. I crave sticking my hands in soil the way teenagers crave popping a zit. It gnaws at my rib cage and aches in my gut. I dream in threadlike white roots, delicately ripped from sun-warmed beds. Seeds pile in my hands and they already feel like tiny corpses as I bury them where they will die.

The plague pit of my garden teems with the brown, limp bodies of those who came before. I push them into the dirt to let their rot give the next generation a chance. As they decay, their wasted potential seeps into the earth: to spring up in those who come after, to try again.

At the head of a thorned, woody stem, a black-tipped rose with petals like ancient paper pushes through the soil. Ghostly white-brown vines spiral into the air as they rise. Brittle leaves shake in the breeze as they break through the dirt. A rattle like dying breath fills the air around me as the bones of my garden reanimate.

Tangled briars weave a danse macabre into a cage as chains of ivy wrap around my wrists and ankles. As the thorns sink into my cheeks, my blood makes mud of the dirt rapidly filling my vision, and I think how wonderful it will be to finally make something grow.