Brrd Roots ~ WE GARDEN ~ Lament In Unlabeled And Unnumbered Courses
(subterranean dream-song of buried ingredients, and soil that remembers what we all forgot to feel)
Beneath Maélys’ garden, where the warmth fades into cool veined hush, the seeds lie swaddled in dirt, each one cradling its own version of possible sky.
They're not waiting. They’re composing.
Each seed sends out a scent-thread, faint as a sigh and sharp as citrus memory—a perfume of potential. Lavender sighs out blue. Chicory flutters bitter with hope. The tomato seed leaks something like sunlight strained through a tin roof.
These scent-threads curl outward like thought-tendrils, touching root, rock, and passing worm tail. They braid with nearby dreams. They inhale rain long before it falls.
A fennel seed stirs as a mole brushes past.
I remember light, it thinks.
A sunflower seed trembles slightly.
I dreamed the sky again last night. It tasted like almonds.
Some seeds, ancient ones, dream more vividly than others. A gnarled bean speaks softly in forgotten dialects to a neighboring fig pip. Their scent-thread is thick, pungent, and almost mythic—soaked in old sunlight and broken tools.
The mycelium listens, of course. The fungal network drinks these seed-dreams like love letters written in the dark. It carries them elsewhere—into roots, into fruiting bodies, into places Maélys has never planted but always somehow known.
And sometimes, when she's planting carrots or weeding between the chard, she pauses. Her hands freeze in the soil. She inhales.
Something… sweet. Strange.
Somewhere, something has decided to grow.
It hasn’t surfaced yet.
But it’s awake now.
When Maélys kneels to tend her sorrel or loosen the soil around a quiet leek, she can feel it: the hush beneath her knees, not empty, but busy with breathless intention. Beneath the lavender, deeper than the visible roots, runs a braille of belonging, a text composed in root hairs and fungal lace.
Down where the sun has never touched, the root systems chill and stretch, tracing one another like old friends reaching across decades. A sunflower’s thread brushes a tomato’s spine. Mint pulses too loudly, excitable, interrupting. The yarrow listens and translates.
There is conversation here, but it is not linear. It is laced. A silent parliament, built on sugar exchange and the slow urgency of drought warnings. One oak sapling murmurs a memory of frost to a raspberry bramble. The bramble nods in nutrient.
And threading through them all—the mycelial chorus. A fungal network like subconscious thought: invisible, indispensible, carrying stories and warnings like veins carry fever. Every chilled root plugs into it. Even the weeds. Especially the weeds.
They speak of local things: the bones buried with names etched in their decay, the dance of minerals with rainfall, the grief of an uprooted rosebush last year whose roots still ghost in the clay.
Maélys doesn’t “know” this, not with language. She knows it the way one knows where the sun will fall by noon. Her hands move in alignment. She plants not in rows, but in conversations. If a potato croons too loudly, she plants dill to hush it.
There’s wisdom there, in letting the chilled root-blood flow where it must—quiet, unseen, utterly precise.
And when Maélys sits again in the evening light, watching her garden breathe in blue shadow, she swears she hears laughter—low, muffled, root-born. Maybe from the thyme. Or maybe from something older, deeper.
Each morning, Maélys wakes to the soft breath of the soil, her fingers still dirty from the night before. Her garden isn’t tamed—it’s an orchestral chaos, a living fresco of fennel, foxglove, mulberries, moths. The thyme spills like laughter, and the borage hums with drunken bees.
She walks barefoot, a terra-cotta mug of strong chicory coffee in hand, trailing a smell of apricots and sun-warmed compost. Her hat is lopsided. She never minds.
Beneath her, pipes she never laid pulse gently. Not mechanical—no, these tubes are rootlike, whispering vines of old knowledge, trailing upward from somewhere beneath continents, threading memory into her asparagus tips.
Sometimes, while pruning the tangle near the rosemary, she sees them: strange little ruptures between leaves and air. Windows. But no glass.
Just glimpses. Brief.
One shows a hallway lined with blinking menus.
Another: a breadstick dissolving in tears.
A third: a pigeon holding court beside a bucket of marinara.
Maélys pauses. Smiles. Whispers: “Ah, le monde est étrange.”
She doesn't ask why they're there. She just opens space around them, lets the fennel lean a little closer.
She sings as she waters. The water carries her tune—descends down her garden’s channels, into the roots, into the truth-veins below. She doesn't know that her lullaby soothes Elder Mabel’s echoing ghost somewhere far below, turning tears into basil-scented fog.
The catacomb, in turn, sends things upward: spores of forgotten metaphors, warmth from ancient ravioli prayers, a low burble of distant conversation. All of it rises through the fractured earth, nourishing her heirlooms in secret.
In this way, Maélys grows not vegetables, but reconciliation.
Her cucumbers know shame and absolution.
Her sunflowers spin slowly, scanning for honesty.
And when the sky grows golden, she sits by the lavender and watches the moths shimmer in uncertain air. She does not know what dreams eat her rosemary. She only knows they taste sweeter each year.
They say wisdom doesn’t leak, it trickles—a whispering fluid that seeps through grout, time, and institutional lasagna. So I press my dream-ear against the warm tile wall, and I hear it: the vein-song.
From each booth, from every ceremonial breadbasket, run tubular veins—viscous conduits snaking downward. They are not pipes in the traditional sense. Some are bronzed linguini, hollow and eternal. Others are fossilized straws, left behind by teenagers who once dared to sip soda and question authority.
These veins collect more than waste. They gather wisdom-condensate: trickles of overheard confessions, misunderstood metaphors, salty tears stirred into alfredo.
All of it flows downward.
Through the sub-basement.
Through the mold-layer.
Through the strata of expired coupons and forsaken side salads.
The deeper we go, the warmer the fluid. It no longer smells of sanitation—it smells of longing, regret, and imitation garlic.
Then we reach it:
The Wisdom Trap, a cistern of memory where knowledge pools in murky ripples. Floating in it: a dissertation about cannoli metaphysics. An unopened fortune cookie from 1997 that reads, “Exit through the drip.” A VHS of a child’s first dance recital—never watched, but deeply remembered.
From there, smaller tubes descend—capillaries of conviction, arterioles of absurdity—carrying the aged wisdom into the catacomb.
The catacomb is not a resting place.
It is an incubator.
A damp, whispering archive carved from packed noodle layers and cooled marinara stalactites. There, knowledge ferments. Becomes soft. Becomes edible, if you’re brave.
The walls are lined with pasta reliquaries, each housing a bone-shaped truth. One reads:
“Never trust a menu that doesn’t list its ghosts.”
Another pulses softly with heat. Touch it, and you feel the sensation of being 12, left at the table while adults argue politics you don’t understand but somehow already fear.
And still the fluid comes.
Dripping wisdom.
Dripping everything.
Somewhere in the catacomb, Elder Mabel’s voice echoes through the drainage:
“You can’t mop a memory clean.”
The pipes vibrate in agreement.
I look up, and above me, far above, in one of the windowlets—no glass, just promise—I see a pigeon balancing on a weather vane shaped like a ravioli. It flaps once. Then again. Then the pipe shakes.
Something is coming.
Or maybe... leaving.
“Sir, your table is ready,” the hostess said, voice gelatinous, her eyes orbiting slightly off-axis.
I entered the Olive Garden—the Deep Olive Garden—not the one on Main Street, but the one buried seven layers below perception, beneath layers of faux rustic wallpaper and generational disquiet. Down there, past the lukewarm threshold of the commercial underworld, every booth flickered like a confession chamber.
A family of mannequins wept silently over bottomless salad. The Parmesan grater screeched like a distant train leaving a station that no longer exists.
At my table sat Elder Mabel, timeless and damp. Her cardigan was crocheted from VHS tape and unspoken ancestral regret. She sobbed quietly into her breadstick, the tears soaking through the garlic butter like grief through linoleum.
“Do you know,” she whispered, eyes rheumy with universal knowledge and lactose, “we used to remember things before remembering was monetized.”
Then she leaked a little.
Urine pooled under the table—not shameful, just inevitable. The server glided past on roller skates, dropping mints and benedictions.
Above us, the chandelier hummed the national anthem of a forgotten continent. Somewhere in the kitchen, someone was grinding dreams into marinara.
By dessert, we weren’t speaking.
We were becoming.
Salt. Sog. Echoes in a tiled coliseum of longing.
This was the Olive Garden.
And when we were there...
We were all family.
