Protector of the Garden

     For the first time in her life, Maria decided to plant a garden. She had tulips and daffodils and crocus planted around her house for the spring, and a rose garden beside the patio, but this year she wanted a vegetable garden. She planted a few rows of corn, a few rows of peas and beans, some tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers and even some carrots, although she didn’t much care for carrots. Then, because she had room enough in her garden plot, she planted a few watermelon seeds. Hot, tired and dirty, Maria stood back and gazed lovingly at the dark, rich earth for a moment, then looked beyond the garden to the nearby forest. The old rabbit doe and her young leverets peered out at her from under the ferns. Maria sighed and went in her house. She would have to build a fence, but she was too tired to think about it today.

     Over the next two days, Maria drove posts into the ground around her garden and strung up a fence of chicken wire, leaving one end that could be swung open as a gate. None of her seeds had sprouted yet. She watered them regularly during the following week, pulled the little weeds that appeared, and was thrilled when the tiny sprouts pushed their way up out of the soil and spread their leaves to the sun. Soon, only the patch where the watermelon was planted lay bare. Must have been bad seeds, Maria thought, a little disappointed, but she left it a while longer to see if maybe something would happen.

     The next morning, Maria woke to the most awful screaming sound. Terrified, she grabbed up her aluminum baseball bat, and ran for the back of her house, where the sound was coming from. It grew louder as she neared the garden, then stopped. The silence that fell was even more frightening than the screaming and Maria felt like her heart was about to leap out of her chest. Out in the garden, in the bare watermelon patch, stood her large tiger-striped cat, his coat spotted with blood. At his feet lay a small blood-soaked lump of fur, a lump with long ears and a little cotton-tail.

     “No, Tiger, no!” she cried, dropping the bat and grabbing up the broom leaned against the back door. She chased the cat away from the little leveret, but it was already dead. Crying, she took the little rabbit out to the edge of the woods and buried it, then watered the murder site until all traces of blood and fur were gone. Tiger sat atop an old rain barrel and washed himself, stopping every now and then to look crossly at Maria.

     After she had calmed down a bit and had several cups of coffee, Maria wondered how the rabbit had gotten into the garden in the first place. After another cup, she decided that she must not have closed the gate tightly enough. Well, she would be more careful from then on.

     Later, when she went out to weed the garden, she was surprised and delighted to discover one tiny watermelon sprout poking out of the dirt. Must have been all the extra water, she thought, and began to whistle as she set about weeding. She stopped her joyful whistling, though, when she discovered rabbit prints around her carrots and teeth marks on her peppers. Now how were they getting in? She was sure she had closed the gate.

     The next day, she found that the watermelon had practically exploded overnight. Vines a foot long curled out in all directions. Pleased to no end by the success of her new found green thumb, Maria made sure to give the melon plenty of water and by that evening the vines had nearly doubled in length. A flower bud had even appeared. Maria looked through every garden book she owned, which wasn’t many, some of them having never been opened until now, but she could find no mention of a watermelon growing this fast. The leaves, too, she noticed now, were different than the leaves in the books. Hers had brilliant red veins running through them. She wrote it off as some sort of a mutation.

     In just two days, she had her first watermelon. The fruit was only as big as her fist when she first saw it, but it almost seemed to grow before her very eyes. She poured the water onto her melon.

     While weeding in the corn, she discovered a hole had been dug under her fence. So that was where the rabbits were coming in. She filled in the hole for now and set about trying to figure out how to keep the little monsters from digging another one.

     The next morning, she still hadn’t come up with anything, but, upon inspecting her garden, she saw no new damage done by the rabbits. In fact, the melon looked healthier than ever. It’s leaves were huge and the red veins glowed in the sunlight. The fruit was deep, dark green with red-brown stripes and was bigger than a bowling ball. Maria loved to sit outside in the sun, sipping lemonade and watching her watermelon. It was so beautiful, she was thinking about entering it in the county fair. She was sure it would win first place.

     Looking up from her melon to the forest, she saw the rabbits watching her, but it was only the old doe and a few leverets. Foxes must have got them, she thought, with only a little sadness. At least they wouldn’t be able to damage her watermelon.

     Later that day, while Maria was weeding around the watermelon plant and loosening up the soil, her fingers came across something hard. Frowning, she picked it out of the dirt and brushed the earth off of it. It was long and thin, lightweight, like a stick. There shouldn’t have been any sticks in the garden, though, for she had spent a fortune on the finest soil and compost. She snapped it in half, surprised to find it hollow. How strange, she thought. She went to the back faucet and washed the rest of the dirt off. It was a little bone.

     “Now, how did this get in my garden?” she wondered aloud. Did cats bury bones? No, that was a dog thing. Perhaps the foxes. This could be a rabbit bone that one of them buried for later. That seemed most likely, so she tossed the bone out towards the woods and went back to her gardening.

     She found more bones, many more, most of them broken, and three tiny rabbit skulls. Repulsed, she gave up the gardening for the afternoon, now wondering what to do about her fox problem. They didn’t seem to be digging under the fence, were they jumping over it? Not likely. The fence was five feet tall. And why bury the bones around her watermelon? She couldn’t understand it.

     The next morning her alarm went off an hour before dawn. Yawning, she stumbled out of bed, threw on her clothes and made a quick cup of coffee, taking a blanket out back and curling up in a patio chair to watch her garden. She would find out how those critters were getting in.

     The sun rose slowly and her eyelids seemed to drop just as slowly, and, like the rising of the sun, she was powerless to stop their progress. Her head lolled to one side and the coffee cup in her hand began to slip from her fingers, tilting to one side. A trickle of hot coffee dribbled down into her slipper and she found herself suddenly awake. Kicking off the slipper with a muted curse, she started to get up, but froze as a movement from the edge of the forest caught her eye. It was the old doe, hopping leisurely toward the garden fence. Sitting slowly back down, Maria watched the rabbit come up to the fence and then slide under it! Maria had left too big a gap between the bottom of the fence and the ground. She hadn’t even noticed.

     The rabbit hopped to the watermelon and Maria started to reach for her broom, afraid that the doe would harm her prized melon, but then she stopped, and watched the doe begin to chew on one of the large leaves. Like a snake striking, the leaf curled around the doe’s head, blinding and suffocating her while the vines snaked across the ground and began to wrap around their prey. The rabbit kicked its legs, throwing dirt around and punching holes in the watermelon’s leaves, which began to bleed. Maria watched silently with a mixture of horror and wonder as the vines curled tighter and tighter, crushing the rabbit to death. She heard the bones snap in the silence.

     When the rabbit stopped kicking, the vines relaxed and dropped off, all but a few, which began to bear the crushed corpse toward the melon itself. Maria’s breath nearly stopped as the side of the melon facing her cracked open, revealing a gaping maw dripping with juice that looked very much like saliva. The vines pushed the rabbit into the melon’s mouth. When it closed, it looked like a normal watermelon.

     Maria sat there and watched the wounds in the leaves stop bleeding and begin to heal, her head spinning, memories of what she had seen flashing through her mind like a terrible nightmare. She sat up with a start. That’s what it was, just a horrible nightmare. She walked to the garden fence and looked down at her melon. It was so beautiful. She loved it. No, it was not a monster, it was just a fruit.

     Just then, the melon cracked open again and spat out a pile of bones and a little soggy fur, which the vines quickly carried away and began to bury.