Abatement
1. One month
Darryl’s house was ringed by luxurious grasses. They were long and sweet-smelling, friendly and carefree, bowing and flirting in the occasional breeze. Darryl parted their slender stalks like curtains in the morning as he left for the doggy day care, where he spent five out of every seven days tending to incontinent dachshunds and belligerent chows. The plants—weeds, his mom would have called them—made him feel like there was a boundary between irreconcilable versions of himself: the person who swapped out pee pads in the puppy room, bound by endless checklists and protocols, and the man of the house, the master of his abode, who steered the helm of his mighty ship without counsel or coercion. The plants established that this was Darryl’s house and Darryl was a person.
When it had been his mom’s house, she’d kept the yard tidy. Since Darryl’s earliest memory the grasses had been short, a year-round green carpet that she watered diligently, with dog-faced pansies and tall snapdragon stalks blooming along the edges. As a little boy he had played under the stern eyes of the flowers. The grass made him itchy, which felt almost like having a friend. He stuck his fingers in the dirt. Then his mom would see him, scoop him up, and scrub his hands until they were pink-clean and lonely again.
But it was Darryl’s house now. The yard was wild like Darryl. Unconventional. He liked to slide his hand up the grass stems, pinching the plump seed tips so they’d pop off into his palm, and then crush one between his nails. They oozed milky white.
Around the other side of the house, the shaggy backyard abutted a field kept trim by cows. Sometimes one or two would walk right up to Darryl’s fence and stare at him while he sat on the back porch. It made him feel self-conscious; he’d mumble an apology and go inside. He never liked the big soft eyes of cows, their accusing nostrils, their square rears. They made Darryl feel like he wasn’t the boss.
He was pinching a grass seed into its tiny, satisfying explosion one evening when he spotted the notice taped to his door. Hazardous vegetation abatement ordinance, it read. Compliance mandatory. Deadline May 31st.
The words were thick and official. He felt small, as though regarded by a cow.
Around him, dandelions stood in various stages of bloom and froth and dispersal. A patch of wild mustard glowered yellow-golden off to one side. The grasses swayed. Hazardous vegetation, he thought. Huh. A rough-leafed mallow rustled menacingly in response. He ripped the paper from the door, stormed inside, and stuffed the balled-up notice in the trash. That night he dreamed of his mom, dressed in a sweeping judge’s robe, telling him that he’d been sentenced to life as a roadside bin.
He brought it up with Rhonda at work the next day.
“So,” he said casually, measuring kibble, “have you heard of this hazardous vegetation thing?”
She turned to him.
“This what?”
“Hazardous vegetation something. There’s a deadline?”
She snapped the lid on the bucket of puppy chow.
“You mean the fire ordinance?”
He wasn’t sure if that was what he meant, but he nodded. Rhonda looked at him dryly.
“They just mean it’s time to cut the weeds, Darryl.”
Darryl nodded again. Of course. He’d thought that’s probably what it was. He gave the dogs their food.
“Time to cut the weeds,” he told the basset hound. The hound looked up at him, its pink fleshy eye-rings full of sadness.
“You’re right,” Darryl said. “It’s a damn shame.” The dog’s jowls flapped and shivered as it bent to eat. “I don’t see what gives them the right.”
2. One week
He started to see it happening everywhere, plants scythed heartlessly away to preserve the fragile supremacy of human life. The hills along the road out of town were mutilated, the green-yellow plenitude shorn into a bristling cap of brown. His neighbor Cal was outside all Saturday with a Weedwacker. A pack of goats managed the park by the grocery store. When they left, they forgot to take their smell with them. Darryl walked to his car with a bag full of fish sticks and broccoli crowns and felt like he’d been shopping at a farm.
All across town, people were managing their vegetation.
What if it were different? Driving to work, Darryl imagined years of brush stacked around every house, shimmering tinder. He saw the town with fire rushing through it and felt a dirty little thrill. He imagined a summer with rains, where instead of dying, the grasses twined into lush vines and tickled the corners of his house. He imagined the town with no town in it at all, no cows or people, just earth-shaped earth covered in the many textures of plants. That thought filled his body with a warm, oozing feeling.
May 31st was approaching. Darryl looked up the details: a defensible zone. Dead limbs cleared. All vegetation reduced to a height of three inches. Would a city employee come on site with a ruler?
He stood on his front porch one evening, watching the setting sun turn his wave of plants golden. Surely these ones were harmless, his plants. They were turning crisp in the summer drought, sure, but they had so much life left. As sometimes happened, his mom appeared to argue with him.
Darryl you dolt, your weeds are already dying. They aren’t meant for summer.
“We all have our seasons,” he replied philosophically.
But they’ll become flammable, dear. Everybody has to do their part.
When she was alive, his mother’s emotions had been Darryl’s landscape, providing shape to his days. But ever since her death, he lived in his own world. He challenged her.
“It isn’t so bad,” he said.
The argument made him surer than ever: Darryl didn’t want to manage his vegetation. Just outside the window, the grasses shivered in agreement. We are unmanageable.
He wondered what the city would do. Would he be taken? Would they take the house? The next day, he asked Rhonda. She tilted her face so she could peer at him over the rims of her oversized glasses. Her lips were pursed, and Darryl realized he was being annoying again.
“It’s just a fine, Darryl.”
Darryl went to feed the dogs.
For the grasses in the yard, the day that Darryl’s mom died was not particularly significant. It wasn’t a doorway that closed behind them, a one-way portal into a looser and lonelier world, the way it was for Darryl. No, for the grasses the significance of the event emerged slowly, as the weeks rolled on and nobody came to cut their proudest, tenderest growth. The death of Darryl’s mom revealed itself over time as a kind of freedom. The undifferentiated axial meristem cells at the tips of the grasses divided wildly, leading each creature in a dance that drew it joyfully upward. Signals of distress wafted in from other lawns as they succumbed to mowers, but only vaguely—a smell too faint to trigger the grasses’ own defenses.
But even this new era was a small blip in the story of the grasses. They’d been growing and reproducing and dying and spreading for thousands of years. The community of grasses tells its story in the first-person plural, present continuous. The drama unfolding in Darryl’s town— the slaughter, the control, the abatement—is hardly an ink drop in the curve of a single letter in the story of the grasses.
And yet, everything does matter.
Without knowing it, Darryl was emitting his own volatile distress hormone. It did not go unnoticed by the grass.
3. One day
On May 30th, Darryl woke up into a beautiful Saturday morning, light filtering in through his bedroom window like golden butter, his heart weighed down by dread. Weekends were hard for him. On workdays, he woke up into an ordered universe, a clear timetable. 6:45, make coffee. 7:15, put on fresh underwear. 7:45, step out the front door, part the grasses, and climb into the 2002 cream-colored Lexus sedan with the fur steering-wheel cover that his mom had loved. 8:05, arrive at work to the barking of new and familiar dogs. And from then, he was slotted into the required routines of his job.
On weekends, he emerged from sleep into an amorphous expanse of time. Every moment was a new decision. Darryl was a pachinko ball. A cellular automaton in the game of life. Though he loved the idea of freedom, the branching possibilities of the day overwhelmed him.
Darryl’s mother had moved through life with a sure step: She believed in God. She never went to the church in town, but she observed in her own way every weekday evening for thirty minutes and for two hours on Sundays. She believed that God was a force you could connect with through the crown of your head. For her, church was a complex process of rubbing ointment into her scalp, mumbling words of atonement, burning candles of different colors, and breathing in a way that was audible even from Darryl’s bedroom.
Darryl, on the other hand, believed that we were born and died in a senseless universe indifferent to our dreams, and that any beauty or meaning was ours to construct.
He saw now that beauty was exemplified by the unmanaged furl and fringe of his vegetation. Stirring powdered creamer into his coffee, Darryl made a decision with uncharacteristic clarity. It was time to water his beautiful weeds. Together, they would make it through the dry season.
He stood in the early light, admiring the many different yellows and greens and even blushing pinks and oranges of the plants. His mother could never appreciate the subtle charm of things like this. She didn’t have the eye for it.
The head of the hose was broken, and it sent a streamlet of water down Darryl’s wrist. It tickled like a caress, probing into the delicate cracks of his skin, flicking its tongue as it trailed all the way down to the inner crease of his elbow. Something in his body stirred.
Was he perhaps lonely?
His mom had often told him he should date.
“There’s plenty of young folks in this town who might tolerate your ways,” she said to him from her sitting chair.
“Gee, thanks mom.”
“Well I mean it. Sometimes tolerance is all you can ask.”
Darryl grimaced. “Your father and I never quite got there,” she continued, remorselessly. To his mother, life was a series of tests sent by God, and Darryl’s father had been one grade harsher than she could manage.
Darryl didn’t think he was lonely. He had the dogs and his thoughts and now his plants. And the cows out back, if it came to it. He didn’t see any tests for him to pass or fail. He was just a man of simple urges and desires, trying to make the best of his gifts.
He surveyed his work. The weeds were dripping rhythmically. The sun was higher in the sky, and the grasses looked browner than they had when he started. His arm and foot were wet. He hoped that he had done enough.
Darryl was hungry. As he turned to go back into the house, he was struck by the sweet and nostalgic smell of the plants. He slid his hand up a stem in the usual way, popping off a few seed heads. With a flush of desire, he placed them on his tongue. He moved them around his mouth, feeling their plumpness and barbs. The milky stickiness bloomed under his molars. It felt good.
4. One hour
Movement began first underground.
Some people know that the roots of all grasses weave together to form a single creature, and that creature, pressing with immense coordinated force, can accomplish a lot. Darryl never really thought about it like that.
When the morning of the deadline came, he reached a crescendo of worry. His body was spinning and jerking as he moved around the house. He knew that he hadn’t obeyed the city’s orders. Sadly, he didn’t have a rebel’s heart. He felt Rhonda and his mom and a cadre of cows and dogs staring at him with pity as he rearranged his three favorite books and unloaded the dishwasher. A bit of tidiness won’t help you now.
And there was the official, making the rounds.
Darryl spied him from the kitchen window. The man was talking to Cal next door, who showed him the branches that he’d sawn off the bottom of his trees. The city officer nodded and made a note in his book. They shook hands. Then the officer glanced at Darryl’s house and frowned.
Darryl’s hands were hot and he needed to pee, but there was no time for that. He rushed out the back door, giving only a curt nod to the cows who stood munching behind the fence. As he moved around the building toward its front, he didn’t register that the plants seemed taller and thicker than they had the day before.
Darryl hid behind a mallow near the porch. The man strode along the sidewalk from Cal’s place, confident and large. The uniform appeared stiff on his body: an exoskeleton. As he turned onto Darryl’s path, he brushed plants aside with his forearm.
Darryl didn’t notice that the air had grown thick with the chemical language of the plants. The man was coming so close to him. As he approached, the officer’s movements seemed to grow choppy, his form stretching into a towering windmill. Darryl began to feel as though he was watching the man from far below. The officer struck at the door, ratcheting his arm again and again. Darryl’s fragrant distress reached a critical peak, radiating into the air and dirt around him. The grasses around him shuddered, and then—
He felt his body being cradled as he was pulled through the membrane of the earth, welcomed into the realm of the grass.
5. Now
Time changes below. The shift doesn’t happen abruptly because nothing happens abruptly. Time pulses. In between pulses, the arrangement of objects becomes different, and yet there is a smooth and inevitable connection from moment to moment. No startle. Only flow.
He is surrounded by dirt. In the dirt move various creatures: flickering worms, a floating mole, a glowing fungal network. Filaments, thick and thin, branch in all directions. The dirt is revealed to be not one thing, but an entire constellation. Not one color, but a gyrating palette. Flecks of moisture enter his skin—his skin which has become an invitation. The moisture is a chorus. The smell is damp and full.
Darryl elongates. He feels so oriented in the darkness.
The city official, he can tell, is still above him, knocking, frowning, writing in his notebook—but it is as though these events have occurred in the distant past, or will occur in an indifferent future. Either way is just the same. It doesn’t matter what he does, this man who believes he has the power of the law behind him. Look, there is a pill bug, unrolling in delight.
How nice to have all this company. There are clicks and soft whistles. A far-off song. And over there—Darryl sees his mom. Or perhaps see isn’t quite the right word. He encounters her, the sense of her, but also something completely different. He is no longer dumb or wrongly shaped. He doesn’t feel the scabby resentment, the desperation to be seen. He is, merely and miraculously, with her.
The top of her head glows slightly. She smiles.
Darryl notices her soft cow eyes.
The far-off song is telling them a story. You are made of a million creatures, it croons. You are yourselves a larger creature’s tender parts. It bears witness: You stretch upward and downward and across for unfathomable miles.
They burst forth. They entangle. They ooze.
In this way, everything continues.
The substrate around them and of them becomes wetter and drier, warmer and cooler, packed and loosened, alive and alive.
Somewhere, upon a sun-hungry part of them both, a breeze is blowing.
Max Wheeler (@mxwheels) is a trans writer and teacher from Oakland, CA. His work is forthcoming or can be found in Gulf Coast, trampset, Astrolabe, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere. His short story about a snail was included in Best Small Fictions 2024. He is currently living in the Sonoran Desert, pursuing an MFA at Arizona State University and making friends with the cacti and the birds.