Gardening Follies, II

I woke with a horrific headache.  I turned to my side on the bed and realized that this was not my bed.  Rubbing my eyes, trying to focus them, I realized I most definitely was not at home.  I tried to piece together the night before to see if maybe I could figure out where I was.  I remembered being pulled down the hole I was digging in the garden, but that had all been a dream!  I remembered waking up from the dream thinking about how silly it was that I had been gardening, but I couldn’t remember anything after that.  My only choice was to look around and figure out where I was.

 I was in a cell.  The floor, walls, and ceiling were earthen.  Only the door was crafted of something other than dirt.  It appeared to be iron and it was not really a door in the traditional sense.  It as more of a prison door.  One made of bars.

What I had thought previously was a light fixture was not a light fixture at all.  The ceiling was covered in the roots of the plants above.  There were several large lightning bugs foraging within the roots.  They were significantly larger than any I’d ever seen before with bulbous glowing back sides the size of my palm.  I had thought that lightning bugs lived in the underbrush above ground, but apparently some like it below ground.  The light from the lightning bugs backsides seemed to be the only light source.

I didn’t want my captors to discover I was awake before I’d had a proper chance to evaluate my surroundings and figure out as much as I could.  I tried to listen to the sounds outside the cell.  There was a low-level hum coming from all around.  Even my lightning bugs were humming.

The air smelled heavy, damp.  The recent snow had melted and the temperature had warmed to the 50’s so the air should smell like that.

I couldn’t see a way out, so I decided  my only recourse was to call out.

“Hello?  Is anyone out there?  My name is Petra and I’ve been abducted.”

I heard hissing and then slithering….

Gardening Follies

The sun finally broke through the clouds today.  The heat of the sun beat down through the sky, warming my face, my hands, my back.  I had a few hours to myself, so I went to The Home Depot store to get some winter flowers.  I picked out some pretty and inexpensive annuals, knowing full well that their time in my garden might be short. 

By early afternoon, I was wearing my favorite gardening gloves and digging in the earth.  My handheld shovel loosening the earth, making a shallow hole for each flower.  Honestly, I’m not a great gardener, but every once in a while the dirt calls for me to dig in it.   The knees of my jeans were damp from the moist soil.  I was wearing the same mules I wear everyday, knowing they would be a muddy mess by the time I was finished and not caring in the least.  The sun on my back made such worries moot.

I planted the first flat of flowers along one side of the brick fence and had moved onto the next.  Breaking the earth for each new flower, feeling the soil yield to the pressure of my trowel, the heat of the sun warming my skin. It was a perfect afternoon.

I was halfway down the second wall of the fence, digging another hole, when suddenly, the ground started crumbling and opening downward.  A tiny, rodent-like hand reached up and grabbed my arm.  Before I knew what was happening, I was being pulled into the hole!  There were hands all over my arm, pulling me further and further into the hole, when suddenly I was entirely within an underground tunnel.  There was a dim  light emanating from somewhere.  Somewhere, but not the sun because the hole had sealed itself.  I was being pushed down the tunnel  by someone or something at my back.  I tried turning around to see who my captor was, but there were multiple hands at my back impeding my movement.  I decided to look ahead, to see what my surroundings were in the hopes of figuring out what had happened to me.  The earthen corridor was long, with doorways every so often and overhead lights that reminded me of the light fixtures in scary hospitals from B movies made in the 1980s.

“Who are you? Why have you taken me?” I asked, hoping for some kind of answer.  All I got was squeaking in return. 

 Somewhere off in the distance, I heard the roar of what seemed to be hundreds of these grunting things.  I still didn’t know what my captor looked like.  I tried to look back again, only to have my head shoved forward again.  There were long thin branches coming down from the ceiling. Roots?  I couldn’t be sure.

Had I been shrunk?  What was going on??

And then I woke up.

Thank God I did because gardening? Seriously??  I am SO NOT a gardener!  I would have gone shopping with a free afternoon.