Garden
By Daniel David Froid
“Oh! Hi! Hello!”
My tripartite greeting likely suggested surprise, as though I hadn’t seen him coming. Yet he had seen me and I had done likewise. From across the park, he must have spied me in my costume of enormous sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat, atop a cloaklike garment too warm for the season. It would seem impossible to identify me, to determine whether I was or was not his colleague. I could have been anyone, anyone in the world who just like he had paid dearly for a ticket that granted entrance to this fine walled garden, this garden whose purpose was to replicate, precisely, gardens common to a far-off nation I had never heard of and which, when I first heard its name, sounded fake. But I wanted to see this garden with its rows of strange, too-short, limp-looking trees, which were apparently some variety of cypress, and its carpets of bluebells and its lovely indigo ponds in which swam strange imported fish with bulbous eyes. Where on this planet these plants naturally congregated, in this arrangement, in this so-called nation, and where these fish were born to swim, remained obscure to me. But I wanted to see every inch of the garden and get lost for a while within it.
Anyway, I thought he saw me, as I saw him, having had a much easier time making an identification. Down the paved garden path we passed in silence, sneaking glances at each other, and it was not until we circled the path once more that he approached and addressed me with caution—turning my name into a question—though also, I thought, some modicum of amicability.
“Oh! Hi! Hello!”
Surprise, whose artificiality I hoped might remain undetected. My smile was strained, lips stretched manically, my eyes cloaked behind the blackest of glass. One hand gripped tightly a large canvas tote bag, stuffed to the brim with overpriced souvenir junk: candy, postcards, a stuffed animal, species unknown, and a mask that resembled a demon’s leering visage. (The gift shop did not sell maps. And even its clerk, when asked about the nation, its location and immediate neighbors, simply shrugged.) As for the other hand, I kept it tucked discreetly in my pocket.
“Hello,” he said and nodded. He wore a flannel shirt and corduroy pants, and his tall frame appeared somehow at odds with the garden: too big, a giant in a fairy paradise. An equally tall man accompanied him, but I did not know who he was, and my colleague did not introduce us.
Beyond the perimeter of the garden, someone was laughing. It struck me as loud, too loud.
He asked how I was, I replied in kind. Our conversation was brief, he departed, and I took a deep breath. Further into the garden I plunged, still hearing indiscreet laughter from somewhere to the north, outside the walls.
Nothing against him, no ill will lay behind my urge to avoid our brief and pointless encounter. No: a perpetual reluctance to be seen afflicts me, a predilection for disguise—a tendency to hide—a wish for invisibility.
I stopped near a cypress tree to catch my breath. A peculiar-looking bench, which looked carved from a tree trunk, offered respite. I took it. Running my hands on the bench, I thought I detected hard plastic, nothing natural. Diagonal to my bench was another one identical to it, where sat two ugly teenagers wearing oversized clothes, their hair bizarrely made, combinations of mullets and ringlets that I thought it best not to consider too deeply. The teenagers began to make obvious maneuvers, they were heading toward something I preferred not to witness, and so, distraught, I fled. Cypresses flanked me on either side (if they were cypresses), and I ran until I reached a patch of bluebells.
Over the garden wall, more laughter pierced my ears. Something hilarious was unfolding quite close to me, something I would never know, but which provoked a response that I was coming to know quite intimately, far more so than I ever would have wanted. I do not ask for much from this world, I said to myself. I thought I was heading toward the entrance to the garden, but the path had deceived me, the path or my ability to follow it, hampered or fizzled by my aversion to amorous youth.
It is likely that, from afar, I looked absurd as I ducked and ran, my cloak trailing behind me, one hand pressing my hat to my head as its brim flapped in the wind. I fled like a thief in the night. Wherever it was I emerged, near a pond in which I was told fish swam, though no fish made themselves visible, I saw my colleague again. He was speaking in a low voice with the other man dressed much like him. They looked so tall there and again so incongruous. They saw me, and the one I knew raised a hand in a halfhearted wave. “Oh! Hi!” I said, and now I was the one laughing, I was struck by unaccountable hilarity—“Hi! Hello!”—and I ran away, wishing he had not seen me, wishing nobody could, wishing I knew precisely which nation’s gardens served as the model for that which enclosed me. I was well and truly lost. Where I was perhaps nobody knew, just as nobody could pinpoint this nation on a map. Perhaps nobody could see me now as I continued to move, to snicker, and to search, lost, for some way out, if a way out were there to be found.
Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona and has published fiction in Lightspeed, Weird Horror, Black Warrior Review, Post Road and elsewhere.