Before the exodus, looking out onto the yellowing zoysia, Simon told R, “I want to start a garden.”

“Yeah, right,” R said, putting the dried dishes away. “You couldn’t even get grass to grow.”

Simon took a drag of his cigarette and tapped the ash into the sink. It wasn’t the right climate for St. Augustine. The Bermuda’s root system never took hold. It’s supposed to go down six feet. Six feet! Nobody had Bermuda in their lawn. Did R not get it? They lived in a land of fescue, of that pastoral shit that had grown even in the Dust Bowl. What fucker couldn’t grow that? St. Augustine didn’t have as complicated a root system, but the climate just wasn’t right. 

R poured coffee. Red-eyed Mr. Buttercakes watched them. When R left, he plodded along the counter. 

Simon spent his new time reading every gardening book he’d ever impulsively brought home—the Artful Garden, the Night Gardener, A Biodynamic Manual, Therapeutic Landscapes—and started planting. Shasta daisy. Ander. Pink and purple spiked verbena. Soon, he ran out of lawn. He asked the neighbors if they wanted him to work their lawn too. 

“No thank you,” they shifted looks to each other, their legs connected to keep the dog from running out, “We like our lawn.” 

The floorboards came up easier than expected. Nobody would help him dig through the foundation so he would have to cultivate a new soil layer. Simon shredded all of the gardening books he’d collected and mixed the refuse with the soil he brought in. He unplugged his refrigerator and threw out the contents, cancelled payment on all bills, and stopped showing up to his job. He fingered leftover chocolates from Little Jonathan’s last Halloween into old meat and threw handfuls into the neighboring yard over the fence. He saved only a few things—coffee grinds, mustard, old bread and veg—nitrogen-rich treasures he ground up and dispersed throughout the soil. He pulled the old couch to the curb and all the memories that slipped beneath it—Little Jonathan’s toys, Mr. Buttercakes’ treats, one of R’s lacy things from their last half good anniversary.     

A mist settled over the house during that first year they had brought Little Jonathan home. Then, Simon couldn’t look out the window and see anything but the dense mist that held them gently in. Now, he could no better remember that time than he could have seen through the mist in that delicate first year. He’d lost memory of it as certainly as Little Jonathan had in his infancy.

Fertilizing the soil had to be done right. He’d had failings in the past—reseeding the lawn to St. Augustine, reseeding the lawn to Bermuda, the herb garden, tulips, reseeding the lawn to zoysia—and he was too far gone to let in failure again. Trudging through his lawn-sized garden, carrying in slimy commercial garbage sacks from the fruit stand nearby, he caught the rancid butter smell from the gingko fruit in the neighbor’s backyard.

The neighbors had always liked R more. They probably kept in touch.

Gingko was the perfect fruit to supplement the house-soil: the fruit began to decompose as soon as it fell off the tree. Within no time, it would breakdown into the soil. Once, Simon had taken Little Jonathan to the gingko trees there. The neighbors watched them from the porch awkwardly, always keeping an eye on Simon. Little Jonathan crinkled his face at the smell while Simon told him that gingko trees like these survived the bombing of Hiroshima.

He crept over in the night and stole a laundry hamper’s worth of gingko fruits. Soon, organization in the house broke down. The tomato rows in the living room grew purple loosestrife. Japanese barberry took over the foyer. He grew watermelons hydroponically in the kitchen. In the dining room, Three Sisters. Floating watermoss in the toilet. He diluted his and Mr. Buttercakes’ piss and spray-bottled it through the house.

The hare came in handy. He’d been against getting Mr. Buttercakes. Now, he was an important part of the churning of the ecosystem. He gave it reason and life. He ate the vegetation, and he released organic matter back. Eat and shit. Eat and shit. Eating and shitting, Mr. Buttercakes walked in the garden with him. 

Simon came to suspect from the silence, the lack of barking throughout the cul-de-sac, the noted change in tremor of Mr. Buttercakes, that the neighbor’s dog died. He was surprised the mongrel hadn’t found the chocolate sooner. Spying on his neighbors through the glassless window arches wrapped in kudzu: the crying of the woman, the kids, even the husband in his knit tie.

From the welcome mat he asked if he could have their dog.

The husband-neighbor had bags under his eyes and couldn’t leave his head alone. He had messed his hair, his skin red and sensitive from shaving.

They hadn’t let Simon in—he wasn’t that kind of neighbor.

“I noticed. I’m sorry, but I want the body. For my garden.”

The husband blinked at him, then scanned back for his wife, nowhere to be found. Hands slack to his sides as the husband turned, he let the doorknob go absently but Simon stopped the door with his hand.

“See, it’ll be really beautiful. Pepper will decompose and a new life will grow from her—”

One of their young boys started crying—Jake or Timothy or something else Simon should know. Simon waited at his curb to talk to the police. He couldn’t have them going inside. 

R came by later that week. She didn’t call ahead, she just showed up. It didn’t matter—there wasn’t a phone to ring anymore. The old house had started to swell and seep into the earth. Paint was chipping off and the jungle in the front lawn had begun creeping up the house’s façade. The sagging house loomed larger than last she was there. Now animated, it seemed to be falling in on them.

The front door hadn’t been closed in ages. Moss and ivy and all kind of creeping plants had grown over the threshold. Inside, Simon lay on a rotting log. She had trouble picturing how he must have dragged it in.  Where did he even get it? Questions budding and multiplying unanswerable until the thoughts were cut by the smell in the air, wet and heavy, a density surrounded them, like creosote and profane and to the point.

“Simon? Simon, what have you done to the house?”

Simon opened his eyes.

“When this gets discovered, they’ll take the house, and you won’t bounce back.”

R looked at the oxtails growing in a patch around Simon. Dandelions. Chickweed. Wild violet. Yarrow.

She had Little Jonathan with her. Simon offered R fresh basil, celeriac root, carrot. He didn’t want to tell her about the mushrooms. She declined.

Little Jonathan asked to see Albert.

“You mean Mr. Buttercakes?”

“That’s not his name, Dad.”

Little Jonathan asked if he could take Albert home.

“It’s not your hare.”

“It’s a rabbit,” Jonathan said. 

When they left, Simon stayed in the living room. He didn’t walk them to the car. Didn’t watch as the car rolled down the cul-de-sac and away forever. Didn’t try to spy, half-imagining Little Jonathan looking back through the SUV’s rear window. R didn’t love him anymore and neither did Jonathan. He’d overheard a neighbor kid to another call it a witch-house. Maybe it would be the right thing to burn down the house. Nobody knew what it was like inside. Nobody yet. They could take the insurance on the house. It could be their new start. The house would never sell with how it was, only waiting to be discovered. Witch-houses don’t help the neighborhood property value. It was worthless, except to Simon.

As a child, Simon had always loved camping. He was no boy scout, but his uncle once taught him how to start a fire. Sometimes his uncle would catch rabbit. Rabbit was simple. Garlic and a little herb to wonders, he was told. It doesn’t matter how you kill the rabbit, his uncle had said, gunshot, knife. He could wring it’s neck like a chicken if it trusted him enough to hold it. Simon had to move while Mr. Buttercakes was still warm. His uncle had taught him how to cut open the belly. Simon worked his thumbs into the membrane, separating the hide from the fat and muscle. The rest of the hide would come off, peeled by hand like a banana. To get the skin over the paws and the tail, Simon had to remove the feet. The kidneys and liver were plucked out; the body gives them up easily. He sliced the saddle into filets and fried them. After eating the filets, Simon threw the legs over the fire. Impatient, he ate them half raw and continued on to the liver and kidneys.

The sun went down over the cul-de-sac. Identical houses reflected the same gleam. All except for one. In it, Simon hunched over the fire, sucking the bones.