Trent needed seventy-five pounds of produce to keep his job. He did not care what the dirt cost.
The heat radiating off the cracked asphalt of Higgins Avenue felt like a physical weight pressing against the back of Trent's neck. It was late July in Winnipeg, the kind of stagnant, breathless summer afternoon where the air turned to hot soup and the mosquitoes grew to the size of quarters. Trent stood just inside the chain-link perimeter of the Point Douglas Community Plot, a clipboard pressed flush against his damp chest. He stared at the wilted, yellowing leaves of the heirloom tomatoes. Forty pounds. That was all they had yielded this month. The city grant required seventy-five pounds of fresh, community-grown produce delivered to the local food bank by August first. If he missed the metric, the funding vanished. If the funding vanished, Trent lost his salary, his dental plan, and the only reason he got out of bed before noon.
He dragged the back of his wrist across his forehead, smearing a mixture of sweat and dry topsoil over his brow. A sound broke his concentration. It was a dry, hollow rustling coming from the far corner of the lot, near the rusted-out tool shed. Trent lowered his clipboard. His stomach tightened with a familiar, exhausting irritation. He walked down the narrow dirt path, his work boots crushing dried leaves and discarded cigarette butts.
He found Kyle kneeling in the dirt. Kyle was nineteen, maybe twenty, wearing a heavy black hoodie despite the suffocating heat. His hands were buried in the foliage of the only halfway decent tomato plant in the entire garden.
"Take your hands out of the dirt, Kyle," Trent said. His voice was flat, projecting the theatrical exhaustion of a man who had this exact conversation three times a week.
Kyle flinched, pulling his hands back. Three hard, green tomatoes spilled from the front pocket of his hoodie, rolling into the dust. Kyle wiped his nose with the back of his dirty sleeve, his eyes darting toward the open gate. "I wasn't doing nothing, man. Just looking."
"You are a thief, Kyle," Trent said, stepping closer. He pointed the edge of his clipboard at the rolling green spheres. "A petty, predictable thief. Those are not even ripe. They will taste like battery acid. Why do you insist on stealing garbage?"
"I'm hungry," Kyle muttered, kicking at the dirt with the toe of his ruined sneaker. "It's a community garden, right? I'm the community."
"This is a structured municipal program," Trent said, leaning in. He could see the dark circles under Kyle's eyes, the faint tremor in the boy's jaw. "Do you truly believe I stand out here in ninety-degree heat just to subsidize your midnight snacking? Every ounce you steal is an ounce I have to report as loss. I am accountable to an Excel spreadsheet, Kyle. The spreadsheet does not care that you are hungry."
"You don't gotta be a dick about it," Kyle said. He took a step back, his eyes narrowing. "It's just plants."
"Leave," Trent said, pointing toward the street. "And if I catch you hopping the fence again, I will call the police. I am entirely out of empathy today."
Kyle scoffed, a wet, rattling sound in the back of his throat. He turned and slouched toward the gate, kicking a plastic watering can out of his way. Trent watched him go, feeling nothing but a dull, throbbing ache behind his eyes. He bent down, his knees popping audibly, and picked up the stolen green tomatoes. They were hard as stones. He tossed them into the nearby compost bin, a plastic tumbler that smelled faintly of sour milk and rot.
Before Trent could return to his clipboard, the heavy crunch of tires on gravel drew his attention. A white panel van, streaked with rust and missing its rear license plate, idled by the open gate. The side door slid open with a screech of unlubricated metal. A man stepped out. He wore a stained white apron over blue coveralls.
"You the manager?" the man asked. His voice was a low, gravelly bark.
"I am," Trent said, walking toward the gate. "Can I help you?"
"Donation," the man said. He gestured to the back of the van. "Got surplus compost. Dispatch said to drop it at the nearest municipal plot. You want it or not? I ain't hauling it back."
Trent looked into the back of the van. There were ten thick, unmarked black plastic bags stacked on the ribbed metal floor. No logos. No ingredient lists. Just heavy, sweating plastic.
"Where is it from?" Trent asked, pulling a pen from his shirt pocket. "I need to log the origin for the soil purity metrics."
"Kildonan Meats," the driver said, leaning against the side of the van. "Slaughterhouse up north. It's bone meal, blood meal, organic refuse. Best fertilizer you'll ever see. Burns hot. Grows fast. You want it, sign the paper. If you don't, I'm taking it to the dump."
Trent hesitated. Unregulated compost was a risk. It could introduce pathogens or invasive weeds. But he looked back at the yellowing, pathetic tomato plants. Forty pounds. He needed seventy-five. The deadline was creeping up like a collection agent.
"Fine," Trent said. He grabbed the crumpled invoice from the driver's hand and scribbled his signature.
Trent spent the next four hours hauling the heavy black bags into the garden. The physical exertion left him dizzy. His t-shirt stuck to his back, soaked with sweat. When he sliced open the first bag with his box cutter, the material spilled out in a thick, wet slump. It was completely black, texturally resembling wet coffee grounds mixed with coarse sand. Trent plunged his gloved hands into the pile. It was hot. Unnaturally hot, like a living animal running a fever.
He began spreading it around the base of the tomato plants, working it into the dry, cracked earth. As the dirt stuck to his palms, leaving a slick residue, a heavy scent rose from the soil. It coated the back of Trent's tongue with the distinct, metallic taste of old pennies mixed with the sharp, gagging reek of meat left in the sun. He dragged the back of his hand across his nose, coughing. The smell was vile, sticking to the inside of his nostrils.
But the soil looked rich. It looked like salvation. Trent worked until the sun dipped below the tree line, spreading every last pound of the slaughterhouse dirt. When he finally locked the rusted padlock on the gate, his hands were stained black, and his muscles screamed. He didn't care. If this worked, the metrics would balance.
The next morning, Trent arrived at the garden at seven. The city air was already thick and humid. He walked toward the gate, holding a lukewarm coffee, his mind replaying the exact phrasing of the grant extension form he needed to file. He fumbled with his keys, unlocked the heavy iron padlock, and pushed the gate open.
He stopped dead on the gravel path. His coffee cup slipped from his fingers, hitting the ground and splashing pale brown liquid over his boots.
It was impossible. The garden was unrecognizable. The yellowing, pathetic tomato plants from yesterday were gone. In their place stood towering, aggressive structures of green. The vines were thicker than Trent's wrists, covered in coarse, hair-like fibers. They had climbed the wooden trellises, snapping the thin lattice under their weight, and were now spilling over into the walking paths. But it was the fruit that made Trent's stomach turn over. The tomatoes were massive, the size of cantaloupes, hanging heavily from the vines. They were not the pale, anemic red of early yield. They were dark. A deep, bruised, purplish-red, like a blood blister ready to burst.
Trent walked forward slowly, his boots crunching on the gravel. He reached out and touched one of the thick vines. It was warm. It pulsed slightly beneath his fingers, a rhythmic, steady throb that felt horribly like a heartbeat. He yanked his hand back, wiping his palm on his jeans.
"What the hell did they put in that dirt?" he whispered to himself.
"Yo. Trent."
Trent spun around. Kyle was standing by the gate. The boy looked terrible. His skin was a pale, waxy yellow, and he was sweating through his black hoodie. He leaned against the chain-link fence, shivering violently despite the morning heat.
"Kyle, I told you you are barred from this property," Trent said, finding his authoritative voice despite the rapid hammering of his heart.
Kyle didn't seem to hear him. He was staring at the massive, dark red tomatoes. "Man, those got big," Kyle mumbled. He stumbled forward, dragging his feet. Before Trent could intervene, Kyle reached out, grabbed one of the enormous fruits, and tore it from the vine. The stem snapped with a wet, meaty tearing sound.
"Put that down," Trent ordered, stepping forward.
Kyle brought the tomato to his mouth and took a massive bite. Dark, thick juice exploded from the skin, running down Kyle's chin and staining his hoodie. He chewed twice, swallowed, and then froze.
Kyle's eyes went wide. He dropped the half-eaten tomato. It hit the dirt with a heavy, wet slap. Kyle brought both hands to his throat, his fingers digging into his own neck. He let out a choked, gurgling gasp.
"Kyle?" Trent asked, his irritation momentarily giving way to alarm.
"It's moving," Kyle gagged, falling to his knees. He clawed at his throat. The skin of his neck bulged outward, a rolling, erratic ripple moving beneath the surface, as if something thick was pushing its way down his esophagus. "Something is moving in my throat, man!"
Kyle pitched forward, vomiting a stream of dark, blackish fluid onto the dirt path. He curled into a fetal position, shivering uncontrollably.
Trent stood above him, his jaw clenched. He had seen drug withdrawals before. He had seen bad trips down by the river. This was just another Tuesday in Point Douglas. "I am not dealing with your fentanyl drama today, Kyle," Trent said, his voice entirely devoid of sympathy. "Get up. Get out of my garden, or I am calling the paramedics and the police."
Kyle groaned, a wet, rattling sound. He slowly dragged himself up, his eyes glassy and unfocused. Without a word, he staggered toward the gate, leaning heavily on the fence until he disappeared down the street.
Trent sighed, rubbing his temples. He turned back to the garden. That was when he saw Barb.
Barb was seventy-two, a retired schoolteacher who lived in the low-income high-rise two blocks over. She practically lived at the garden, meticulously tending her small six-by-six plot of zucchini and squash. She was already on her knees, wearing a faded floral sunhat and thick gardening gloves.
"Good morning, Trent," Barb called out, her voice cheerful but thin. "The growth today is simply extraordinary. I've never seen anything like it. It's a miracle."
"It is something, Barb," Trent said, walking over to her plot. The squash vines had erupted outward, thick and aggressively green.
Barb reached into the dense foliage with her pruning shears. "These stems are so tough, though. I can barely cut through—"
There was a sharp snap. Barb hissed, jerking her hand back.
Trent hurried over. "Are you alright?"
"Just a scratch," Barb said, peeling off her right glove. A thick, dark thorn from the squash vine had sliced deep into the fleshy part of her palm. Blood welled up instantly, spilling over her wrinkled skin and dripping down onto the dark black soil below.
Trent watched the blood hit the dirt. His breath caught in his throat. The soil did not just absorb the blood. It seemed to reach for it. The dark, wet granules shifted, parting like tiny mouths. The thick root of the squash plant, exposed near the surface, twitched. Trent watched in paralyzed horror as the root elongated by a fraction of an inch, pressing itself directly into the small puddle of Barb's blood. The deep green of the vine flushed with a sudden, violent streak of red, racing up the stem.
"Well, that is quite a bleeder," Barb said, oblivious, pressing her uninjured hand against the cut.
Trent blinked hard, rubbing his eyes. The heat. It had to be the heat. Capillary action. Soil physics. It was not drinking her. That was insane.
"Go home, Barb," Trent said, his voice shaking slightly. "Wash that out. Put pressure on it. I will finish weeding your plot."
"You are a dear, Trent," Barb said, smiling weakly as she stood up. She left her bloody glove on the edge of the wooden planter box and walked slowly toward the gate. Trent stood alone in the garden, staring down at the soil. The puddle of blood was completely gone. The dirt was perfectly dry.
The heat wave did not break. By Wednesday afternoon, the air felt like breathing through a wet wool blanket. Trent unlocked the garden gate, the metal burning his fingers. He had his clipboard ready, fully intending to log the massive yield of the tomato plants and finalize his grant report.
He walked down the center path, noticing how the vines had grown even further overnight. They were creeping across the gravel now, establishing new root systems right through the weed barrier. He reached Barb's plot and stopped.
Barb wasn't there. This was highly unusual. She arrived at eight in the morning and never left before three.
Trent looked down at her wooden planter box. The bloody gardening glove was still sitting exactly where she had left it yesterday. Except it wasn't just stained anymore. It was completely soaked through, stiff and brown with dried blood.
"Barb?" Trent called out. The garden was silent, save for the low, buzzing drone of fat black flies circling the plot.
He stepped closer to her planter. The squash plant had consumed the entire six-by-six box. In the center, resting directly on the dark soil, was a single, massive squash. It was the size of a car tire, pale and bulbous, its skin stretched taut and translucent. Blue and purple veins pulsed visibly beneath the surface of the vegetable.
Trent’s stomach pitched. He leaned closer. The massive squash was radiating heat. As he watched, the surface of the vegetable heaved slightly, expanding and contracting in a slow, rhythmic breath.
Trent backed away, his boots kicking up gravel. He turned and ran to the tool shed. He ripped open the door, grabbed his satchel, and dug through the crumpled papers inside until he found the dirty invoice from the white panel van.
Kildonan Meats. 402 Industrial Way.
Trent practically sprinted to his rusted Honda Civic. He threw the car into gear, ignoring the broken air conditioning that blasted hot dust into his face. He merged onto the highway, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. The city blurred past him, an ugly stretch of concrete overpasses, billboards, and strip malls.
He needed to know what the hell that compost was. He needed someone to tell him it was just an experimental fertilizer, some aggressive genetic modification. He needed a rational explanation for the pulsating thing sitting in Barb’s planter box.
It took forty minutes to reach the industrial park on the edge of St. Boniface. It was a desolate stretch of road lined with corrugated metal warehouses and cracked pavement. Trent slowed the car, reading the faded numbers on the mailboxes. 398. 400.
He pulled up to 402 and slammed on the brakes.
Trent sat in the idling car, staring through the bug-splattered windshield. There was no slaughterhouse. There were no white panel vans.
Kildonan Meats was a husk. The massive concrete building had been gutted by a fire years ago. The roof had caved in, leaving jagged black beams pointing toward the sky like broken ribs. The loading docks were choked with weeds, and a heavy chain-link fence surrounded the property, locked with a rusted padlock that hadn't been opened in a decade. A faded, graffiti-covered sign hung crookedly on the fence: CONDEMNED PROPERTY. CITY OF WINNIPEG.
Panic, cold and sharp, flooded Trent's gut. He killed the engine and stepped out of the car. The silence of the abandoned lot was deafening. He walked up to the fence, his fingers gripping the hot wire diamond mesh.
"No," Trent whispered. "No, no, no. There was a driver. He had an invoice."
He looked down at the crumpled paper in his hand. The ink was cheap, bleeding into the cheap paper. It wasn't an official document. It was a prop.
If this place had been abandoned for ten years, where did the compost come from? What had he spread into the soil of the Point Douglas plot?
Trent turned and vomited his morning coffee onto the cracked asphalt. Acid burned the back of his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, gasping for air. The image of the massive, breathing squash flashed in his mind. The way the soil had aggressively swallowed Barb's blood. The way Kyle had choked, screaming that something was moving inside him.
Trent sprinted back to his car. He had to tear it all up. He had to burn the garden down to the soil. He didn't care about the metrics anymore. He didn't care about the grant. He threw the car into reverse, the tires screaming against the pavement, and sped back toward the city.
The sun was dipping below the horizon by the time Trent returned to Point Douglas. The sky was an angry, bruised purple, casting long, dark shadows across the neighborhood. The streetlights flickered on, buzzing loudly.
Trent pulled up to the garden gate. He popped the trunk and grabbed a heavy steel machete and a rusted red gasoline canister. He wasn't going to call the city. The city would take weeks to investigate. He was going to hack the vines to pieces and burn the soil until it was glass.
He unlocked the gate and kicked it open.
The garden had changed again. The vines had exploded over the course of the afternoon. They had entirely consumed the chain-link fence, weaving through the metal diamonds to create a solid, impenetrable wall of dark green foliage. The trellises had collapsed under the sheer weight of the massive red tomatoes and the bloated, pale squashes. The air inside the enclosure was heavy, smelling sharply of wet copper and rotten meat.
Trent gripped the machete tightly, his palm sweating against the taped handle. He took a step forward.
"Trent?"
Trent froze. His heart slammed against his ribs.
"Trent, dear, could you help me with this weed?"
It was Barb's voice. It was cheerful, thin, and perfectly calm. But it wasn't coming from the gate. It was coming from the center of the massive squash patch.
"Barb?" Trent called out, his voice cracking. He raised the machete.
"These stems are so tough, though," the voice said again. It was an exact replication of her tone from yesterday. A recording playing back. "I can barely cut through—"
The massive, bulbous squash in the center of the planter heaved. A thick, wet tearing sound echoed through the garden as the skin of the vegetable split open. Trent gagged as a thick, viscous red fluid poured out of the split, soaking into the dark soil.
"You don't gotta be a dick about it," another voice whispered.
Trent spun around. The voice had come from right behind him.
Kyle stepped out from behind a towering wall of tomato vines. He did not look human anymore. His skin was gray, pulled tight over his skull. Thick, black veins webbed across his face and neck, pulsing with the same rhythmic heartbeat as the plants. His eyes were entirely black, the whites consumed by dark, fibrous growth.
"Kyle," Trent breathed, taking a step back.
Kyle opened his mouth. A thick, green tendril, slick with dark fluid, uncoiled from his throat and slipped over his bottom lip. "It's a community garden, right? I'm the community."
The voice wasn't Kyle's anymore. It was an echoing, rattling imitation, forced through vocal cords that were being puppeteered from the inside.
Kyle lunged. He moved with terrifying, impossible speed. He crashed into Trent, knocking the machete from his hand. Trent hit the gravel hard, all the air rushing out of his lungs. Kyle fell on top of him, pinning Trent's shoulders to the dirt with unnatural strength.
Trent screamed, thrashing wildly. He struck Kyle in the face with a closed fist. The boy's jaw dislocated with a wet crunch, but Kyle didn't even blink. Kyle's hands clamped around Trent's throat. His fingers were cold, hard as wood.
"Get off me!" Trent choked, kicking his legs, trying to find leverage.
But leverage was gone. The ground beneath Trent was moving. The dark, black compost Trent had so eagerly spread was churning. Thick, hairy roots burst from the topsoil, wrapping around Trent's ankles. They were warm, seeking out the heat of his blood. The roots tightened, pulling Trent's legs down into the loose earth.
Kyle leaned in close, his dislocated jaw hanging slack. The green tendril in his mouth writhed, brushing against Trent's cheek.
"I am entirely out of empathy today," the Kyle-thing whispered in Trent's own cynical, theatrical voice.
The vines wrapped around Trent's waist, pulling him downward. The soil parted beneath his back, swallowing him inch by inch. The smell of copper and rot filled his nose, choking out the summer air. Trent clawed at the dirt, his fingernails tearing, but the earth was too heavy. It was pulling him under, wrapping him in a suffocating, hot embrace.
As the black soil crested his chest, pressing the last breath from his lungs, Trent stared up at the massive, blood-red tomatoes hanging heavy on the vines above him. They were huge. They were perfect. The thought pierced through his sheer terror, cold and bureaucratic.
The metrics were going to be phenomenal this year.
“The thought pierced through his sheer terror, cold and bureaucratic: the metrics were going to be phenomenal this year.”
