There’s life outside the garden, my husband’s fond of reminding me, whenever I’m lost among the weeds and the grass, the vegetables and fruits, the bugs and the earth and everything to be found underneath. Whenever I’m lost in the ritual of the garden. As though it was something I’d forgotten.

I know, silly, I remind him, again and again. As though it was something I could forget.

We came into this place, our small acreage south of the city, after my aunt Cecelia died. She left the property, free and clear, to me, being her only sister’s only child. As a kid, I’d visited the place often, helping her and Uncle Jed tend the garden, picking cherry tomatoes, snap peas, carrots and the like. Or running with imaginary friends through the woods, chased by all manner of unnatural beasts—beasts I’d long thought imaginary, as well—while ostensibly helping gather sticks for a bonfire out back, wind singing through the trees a mournful melody. How those flames would toss and twist our shadows into shapes, all too inhuman. It has always been a special place for me. Cecelia and Jed had had no children of their own. None that lived, anyhow. Still, it came as a shock when Cecelia died and her lawyer sent me a copy of the will, whereby the property and what little Cecelia had left in the bank were now mine.

At first, my husband and I toyed with the idea of selling the property, paying off our condo in the city and investing the rest. But by the time all the legalities had been cleared, the property and the funds rightly ours, I’d had a change of heart. We’d just lost a pregnancy, and I needed a change of scenery. Why not sell the condo, bank the modest profit—the market was a seller’s, just then—and live free and clear in the country? My husband could commute, it wasn’t far, and I could work remotely.

The house itself was in need of some repair, though mostly cosmetic. Ditto the grounds, which Jed had managed well enough before he’d died a decade earlier. Cecelia had kept up her garden well enough, all things considered. But the bush had encroached on the property, while the unrelenting grass had overtaken her garden in the time since her passing.

The garden would be my project, I assured my husband. Living in the city, we’d often frequent the markets that popped up each summer, and I’d long dreamed of having my own booth—selling veggies, jams, whatever really—chatting with customers and beaming with pride each time someone walked off with something we’d grown, made or fashioned. It had always seemed an impossible dream, living in our condo.

But then it didn’t seem so impossible after all.

That first year, we moved onto the property in September and busied ourselves with getting the house itself in order. Come spring, the garden had lain fallow for a couple years. While I was keen to get in there, to get my hands in the dirt and get the crops growing, starting tomatoes, squash, peppers and more indoors in anticipation, it proved a far more daunting task than I’d been prepared for. It turned out, though, that my husband had a bit of a green thumb himself. He was right there with me, scraping his knuckles bloody pulling quack grass out by the roots.

Look at this stuff, he’d say, as though surprised anew with each filthy fistful, marveling at those bonelike white rhizomes and the green stalks. We’d toss the lot into piles, which we dutifully burnt at the end of every day, their ashes raked back into the soil the next morning. This is wild.

Neither of us knew then how much the garden would become a part of us. Nor we it. How could we?

But there were signs. After long days weeding, my husband would sometimes toss and turn in the night. What’s wrong? I’d ask. Nothing, he’d say. Just dreaming of weeds. The crab grass. I close my eyes and there’s, like, waiting to jam those spindly stalks right through my eyeballs and into my brain. Waiting to suck out the juice.

I know what you mean, I’d tell him. I had the same visions—the flash of those pernicious weeds, working away at the earth while we lay in bed, dreaming, resting—and more besides. For weeds never rest. From the time their seeds germinate in the spring to when they die in the fall, or when we cut their lives short, ripping them from the soil and burning them in our piles, weeds march relentlessly onward, tirelessly extending their purchase upon the earth. Even in the depths of winter, they haunt the frozen ground, waiting, patient as any spectral being, on that celestial signal to emerge and resume their creeping campaign.

Despite the weeds, the progress we made over the first summer emboldened me to start thinking bigger as the second summer approached, revisiting those market garden dreams.

Dreams do come true, I’d tell my husband, if you truly believe in them.

Or, if they believe in you.

That summer, I monitored our yields closely, planned the garden with an eye to what might work best, given its location, conditions and all the rest. We visited farmers markets two, sometimes three times a week, taking stock of what was offered, at what price, and when. I drafted a business plan, but it fell to the wayside as we dealt with the harvest. 

That winter, I got laid off, just after the holidays. Suddenly the idea of making some extra cash from the markets seemed not so crazy an idea after all. I had a significant severance package, we owned the house and property free and clear, and our investments from the sale of our condo were doing fine. If things went well enough, I hinted, perhaps we could try for a baby again, which had been a subject I’d nipped in the bud ever since the last pregnancy had come to such a heartbreaking end.

What the hell, my husband perked up at that suggestion, as we looked over the plan I’d drafted one dark January night, moon reflecting its cold white light in through the old bay window. Why not, eh?

It was around this time that I began waking each morning, recalling strange dreams—spirits and animals walking among the woods in ways most unnatural—that would dissipate like mist as the day wore on, my mind already running with ideas of what we could plant and when, things we could add into the mix that would encourage the primary crops, products we could easily make and sell ourselves. All we needed was the world to keep turning, the snow to melt, the ground to thaw.

To do so would mean digging up more of Aunt Cecelia’s long neglected back garden—an area my husband had dubbed the Back Forty—a half-acre of land cleared decades earlier by my uncle and worked steadily by Cecelia over the years, until her health began to deteriorate. My recollections of the back garden, as a child, were of unbridled abundance. A piece of land bursting with life. These many years later, while trembling aspen grew thick in back of our place, its leaves shimmering tenderly with the breeze, scraggly limbs reaching out towards the plot, the old garden was a shadowy, dark realm, overrun with grass, wild roses, and raspberry bushes, among other hearty, well established weeds: burdock, purple loosestrife, and others. To open up the Back Forty would unlock a whole new world, we figured.

Just what else would we unearth in doing so we had no way of knowing, outside of the hazy, half-remembered visions conjured in the darkest hours of night. Dreams forgotten, misremembered and uninterpreted until much later.

That fall, before the ground froze and the snow fell, I tasked my husband with clearing the roughest stuff and trimming the aspen back, while I transplanted many of the wild roses and raspberries to our sunny sideyard or elsewhere around the property. Come spring, I figured, we’d really be cooking.

Life, of course, doesn’t work that way. First, the winter held on long past its worn-out welcome, with snowstorms occasionally blanketing the prairies in white well into May. The ground stayed soggy, the garden proper muddy well after the date we’d begun weeding and prepping the year before. Then, once temperatures returned to seasonal norms after Victoria Day, it rained damn near incessantly, turning the garden and Back Forty both into quagmires of mud and weeds.

I took to clearing the Back Forty with manic intensity, rains be damned. During the longest days of the year, I was up with the sun, when it managed to break through the heavy clouds that haunted our corner of the prairies that spring and early summer. Each morning, I’d tromp out back with my garden fork and a bottle of water and begin a new campaign against the weeds.

On one such morning, I unearthed the first bone.

The bone itself, what I took to be part of a leg from some small mammal, was wrapped up in the rhizome mass of a fistful of quack grass I’d torn from the earth. Huh, I muttered, after I’d pulled the bone from its tendril tomb. I tossed it to the side, not far from the pile of weeds I planned to burn, so as to show my husband. Little did I expect that before long the pile of bones would come to rival the mound of dead weeds itself.

Strange, my husband said when he’d returned from work. But the ground around here’s gotta be full up with bones. Animals are dying all the time, right?

Sure, I said. He wasn’t wrong. Not entirely. Maybe the little critter had lain down to die many years before, and the grass grew through its body and over its bones, earth subsuming it over the course of some seasons. That must be it.

They emerged slowly over the next couple days, as I made my way further into the Back Forty. A tibia, a fibula, what I took for a pelvis. Indistinguishable shards, as well. When a miniature skull came up, wrapped in roots, a chill ran over me, despite the full heat of the day pressing down like a smothering blanket. I peeled away the vegetable matter, brushed off the dirt, and set it atop the other bones, nearly a skeleton entire. A mink or an otter, some small fur bearing varmint, as uncle Jed was wont to call them.

Before long, the piles contained the skeletal remains of what I took for at least a baker’s dozen small animals. This couldn’t possibly be the final resting place of random wayward rodents lying themselves down to die upon the lone prairie. No. The Back Forty was a veritable boneyard whose surface I had only begun to explore when harvest cut off my explorations.

While dragging some chicken wire fencing from the front garden to the lean-to shed we’d built out back, when we were quickly tidying the yard up in the face of an early October storm that promised to prematurely bury the prairies in ice and snow until spring, I came across the bones again, piled neatly into ivory cairns, a skull atop each one. The empty eye sockets of the little skulls seemed to track us as we made our trips back and forth and back again across the yard until the snow covered them, thirteen small white mounds, which in turn became just another drift as the winter wore on.

During those cold, dark months, my mind would wander from plans for the garden—how we could work it, what we could add, what we could do to make our time at market more successful—to what I’d found beneath the folds of the earth itself. To the bones I’d pulled up with the roots, both waking and in dream.

Where had they come from? When had they been interred? How had they died? Who had killed them? Why were they laid to rest where they were?

If animals had souls—and I’m certain that they do, of a sort—would they come to reclaim the bodies they’d lost?

Were there more? How many?

No answers were forthcoming. Cecelia had never mentioned anything at all related to what I’d discovered. Sure, Uncle Jed would occasionally grouse about varmints getting into the old chicken coop out back, or digging up the potatoes or snatching the tomatoes off the vine before they’d had time to ripen. But nothing to account for what seemed a mass grave for small mammals.

One evening, while I pondered these questions aloud, my husband suggested perhaps the area had once been home to a fur farm. This whole area was big on furs, he claimed. Heck, the whole country was practically founded on European demand for them, wasn’t it? I could only shrug, for what he said rang true enough. I’d never been much of a student of history, local or otherwise. I searched about on my phone for information, but I didn’t get far with the slop the algorithm churned up.

The next day, I made my way to the agricultural college on the south side of town. The library tech at the reference counter was helpful, if not terribly knowledgeable on the subject itself. She directed me to a few books on the local fur trade. From what I gathered after hours of reading, there had indeed been fur farming along the river valley in the first half of the twentieth century, but it had mostly been concentrated to the north of the city, where the land was less well suited for crop cultivation.

Still, I found some evidence that there had been at least one such farm within the general area of our property, if not on the land itself. Could the boneyard be a byproduct of the demands of century-old fashion? I wasn’t convinced.

Cecelia turned the soil every year, I told my husband. There’s no way that many bones just sat there untouched until now.

What’s your theory then? he shot back, more than a little peeved. Magic?

Dunno, I shrugged. But if this had been a fur farm, wouldn’t Cecelia have mentioned it? If only in passing? Wouldn’t there be some other evidence? Old equipment, or half rotten sheds, or foundation, or something?

It was my husband’s turn to shrug. If nothing else, he suggested, a former fur farm in the area might have led to escaped critters or their descendants living in the woods for generations to come. Which just might be why so many of their bones kept coming up from the ground.

Or maybe not. The dreams I’d been having, the visions I’d had, running through the woods as a child, suggested that the bones came from older times still, before farms had been laid across the earth like so many domino tiles spreading outward from the rivers. What did I know of the old ways, though? Only what I’d learned in school. Which is to say, nothing of substance.

As spring approached, and the prep work ramped up, I pushed the question of the bones aside. The garden would need to do better going forward to make up for the lost income, to justify the time we spent in it. Or so my husband seemed to believe. I was happy enough just to be there, my hands in the earth, watching the green life flourish all around me. But I also knew that happiness doesn’t show up on the bank balance.

While winter had come early that year, so too did spring. The snows were gone by early April, and they didn’t linger around. If anything, we had too little moisture. But we had a well, so I wasn’t worried. Long before I was willing to transplant anything, I was able to get started on the weeds and tilling weeks earlier than previous years.

Curiously, when the snows had receded, the mounds of bones I’d diligently piled along the perimeter of the Back Forty were nowhere to be found. My husband suggested the melting waters had washed them away. It seemed unlikely. Besides, there was no trace of them at all. They were just gone. Maybe they’d been sucked back into the mud, he countered. Maybe, I offered, though I didn’t believe it. Not truly.

Although I’d cleared a good strip from the Back Forty—or the Boneyard, as my husband had taken to calling it—the year before, the grass had been aggressive in re-establishing itself, tendrils worming through the soil, sprouting new growth beneath the warm spring sun. Still, I was able to clear the new growth in good time, and without unearthing any new bones or other oddities. Yet once that first strip of land had been cleared, with beets and carrots planted in the otherwise empty earth, and I began breaking fresh ground, it all started again.

The gradual skeletal emergence mirrored that of the previous summer. Tibia, fibula, pelvis, spine, ribs, skull. Again and again and again. Within days, the mounds numbered a dozen and counting, while more than half of the Back Forty remained uncleared. When I drew my husband’s attention to the bones, he said, See, they must have just washed back in there.

I told him there was no way.

Bones gotta go somewhere, babe, he shrugged.

The fair weather continued through the spring. The garden replied in kind, and we were kept busy tending to it and attending the first markets of the season. Still, the Back Forty continued calling to me, luring me from my daily tasks with the promise of more space to be made arable.

More space to grow, my dreams whispered. More mysteries yet to uncover.

We marked the solstice that year with a small gathering—a few friends, some family—at our place. We’ve got so much beauty here, I proclaimed, voice ringing out across the fields and into the trees. We need to share it with the ones we love. So we mowed the yard to the north of the house, grounds which were nearly always in shadow during the day and which had therefore never been tilled for gardening. We piled the bones we’d collected in the center of the clearing, then covered them with dead and dried sticks my husband had gathered from around the property into a pile. When the sun set, we lit a large bonfire as far from the house as we could manage without crowding into the woods. All through the night, we stood around, laughing, dancing, drinking, singing songs and playing music most joyful, howling at the bright white stars above as though to remind ourselves that we were here, we were alive, and to forget that before long we’d all be gone, as though we’d never even been here at all. Our shadows, shapes inhuman, dancing through to dawn. It was a wonderful night, a beautiful reminder of the power of community, nature and our place in the majesty of the cosmos. In the early morning light, embers of the great fire still burning bright, my husband and I pledged to do it again, year after year.

After that the dreams of bones and beasts, more vivid by far, came increasingly to haunt my sleep.

Each night, or near enough, a variation on the same theme. I’m in the garden, tending to the crops. Bones sprout from the soil in place of carrots, beets, potatoes or leeks. Instead of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini or squash, I pull up skulls and spinal cords, blood dripping from blackened vines. Carefully, as with the ripest fruit, I place each bone in a wicker basket slung from the crook of my arm. Once the basket is full, I find myself in a glade of trembling aspen, assembling the pieces into beasts of heretofore unknown genus.

The skull of a crow on the body of a cat. The head of a royal stag upon the body of a dire wolf. The head of a fox atop the body of a human child.

Upon completion, these skeletal mongrels move about, as though tendons and muscle bound them together. As though spirits compelled them. But they are bones and bones only. When I look down at my own hands doing the assembling, I find them to be bone as well, flayed of all flesh, drained of all blood, white rhizomes snaking up to pull me down, down into the dirt.

I’d wake sweating, to check first my hands, my face, my breasts, belly, and thighs, to see if I was still all there, still made of flesh and pumping blood. To ensure that plants had not taken root among my muscles during the night. That they weren’t eating me alive.

Once I was up and moving with the day, the images would linger in my mind. As the dreams returned nightly, the haunting skeletal visions would return, stronger, more realistic with each phase of the moon. I took to avoiding work in the Back Forty. Not consciously, at first. But before long, I could not help but acknowledge that I found clearing the brush back and the ensuing unearthing of new bones unnerving. I told my husband as much, without going into the details of my recurring dreams.

No need to push it too far, babe, he said. We’ve already got more than enough on our plates.

While I appreciated his kind words, we needed the added space for cultivation. One bad bout of weather, and our margins would disappear. I couldn’t bear the thought of applying for new comms jobs, or a new job period, after growing so used to life in the garden, not to mention the social hustle and bustle of the weekly markets. So I pushed the unsettling thoughts aside as best I could and continued clearing the earth of weeds and bones both, yard by yard.

Once the chill of autumn started creeping into the late August mornings, I’d cleared yet another quarter of the Back Forty, uncovering mounds worth of bones in the process. Once again, I placed them around the edge of the plot, skull resting atop the assortment of other bones, as though for safe keeping. There seemed no end to them.

We did well that summer and into the fall. My husband was pleased as much by the extra funds it was bringing in as by the glow I got from the work itself. When I told him I wanted to plant the full two plots next spring, he said he was on board. One hundred percent.

That fall, we had an early frost, for which we were more or less prepared, though it did mean one long evening of frantically picking what remained that wasn’t hearty enough to sustain the cold night, and harvesting the rest over the next couple days. After that, we enjoyed a long, mild, drawn out autumn, which gave me plenty of time to finish clearing the Back Forty.

As with the first half, the back half was full of bones—bigger and longer ones, even. Coyotes, perhaps, if not something larger. Certainly a young deer or two, as there were antlers as well as skulls hidden within the earth. Other pieces I could not readily identify, all heavily weathered, as though they had been at rest for many years. When I’d finished, not a full day ahead of a cold front, two days before Halloween, the mounds stood sentinel along the perimeter of the fallow field as the first snows of flakes of the yield tumbled down from the gray skies, blanketing the earth all around.

Once the snow started falling, the dreams became more intense still. I dreamt instead that I was standing outside in the field, ankle deep in the earth and sinking further, surrounded by the beasts whose bones I had been collecting, reconstructed as though the dirt and the worms had only half eaten away the flesh and pelts that had once girded them through life.

A lynx with the head of a snowy owl. A jackalope that stood as tall as a royal buck. Mountain lion and timber wolf stood on hind legs, each bearing the head of the other. Dozens of others who stood silently beside them. All facing me. The child with the head of a fox, reaching its tiny hands towards me. Beckoning. The frigid night was silent but for the creaking of the frozen limbs of the trees in the forest beyond. I’d wake up, heart hammering, soaked in sweat.

I didn’t mention the dreams to my husband, not at first. But then he woke one night to find I’d left our bed and made my way, noctambulant, out into the Back Forty.

It was the winter solstice, a little after midnight. He said he couldn’t recall if it was the sound of the door creaking open, or the cold draught that quickly wound its way through the house that woke him. Upon seeing my side of the bed empty, the sheets thrown back, he called my name three times before climbing out of bed himself to see where I had gone. The house was cold—no surprise, considering the temperature outside had dipped below minus twenty, the wind blowing from the north only adding to the chill. He’d checked the bathroom and the kitchen when he noticed snow twirling in through the open back door. He pulled on his boots, raced out into the snow, following my footsteps to find me in the middle of the snow-covered boneyard in my bare feet, wearing only my nightgown, arms outstretched as though in welcome, staring down at the frozen ground, blood running down my legs into the snow from my period. He grabbed me, jolting me from my dream, the half-decayed beasts that surrounded me disappearing as he rushed me inside and slammed the door behind us.

What happened? He repeated his questions as he wrapped me up in quilts, put a kettle on to fill a hot water bottle. What were you doing out there?

It was only a dream, I told him. Only a dream.

I’m lucky that my husband’s a light sleeper. I’m lucky he had the foresight to hop out of bed instead of rolling over and pulling the blankets up over his head to keep the chill at bay. But for his swift action, I’m not sure what would have happened to me. Frostbite, at the very least, beyond the light touch, barely a kiss, even, that my toes received that night. No doubt much worse. Though I wonder, now and again, if succumbing to the elements that night would have put an end to the dreams, to the visions, and all that came after, or if I would have found myself locked forever into the world I’d been slowly exhuming, bone by bone by bone.

I told him everything, then. About the dreams. How I’d found myself in them for some time. Told him about the beasts who circled the garden, staring at me, waiting for me to do something, or something to happen. Waiting, regardless, empty undead eyes all staring at me, staring into the center of the night garden, while the wind whistled a familiar melody through the naked, bonelike branches of the aspen stand.

When I finished, my husband didn’t say anything for some time. We sat there in the dark, in silence. When he spoke, he said something I never would have expected. He said, We should leave this place. Sell it, move back to the city. We should put whatever this is behind us and move on.

I cried, then, hard and long, wracking sobs, as though grieving not only those I’d lost on my way—my parents, Cecelia, our stillborn child—but all that would never be if we were to leave. We’ve put so much into this place, I told him. We’ve laid roots. Planted seeds. Bled into the soil itself. We can’t leave. We can’t. I will not.

My husband tried to comfort me. He did his level best. We could grow another garden in the city, he said. Or get a plot at a community garden. But we shouldn’t stay here. Not any longer. Something’s off. Way off.

No, I wept. No no no. I couldn’t articulate then, exhausted, nearly hypothermic, what the place meant to me, what being rooted to that part of the earth meant to me, what I hoped it would mean to us. But in the weeks and months to come, I tried. I really did. Over and over and over again. I’d make some headway, feeling my husband understood, only to have him repeat his entreaties after finding me, hollow eyed, gaunt, staring out the window towards the garden, buried though it was in drifts of snow.

I will not leave this place, I told him. The dreams are dreams only, dearest. This place is special. It’s ours. We belong here. Don’t you want to see it bloom? To pass it on to our children?

Of course, he knows, or suspects strongly, that the dreams never truly ceased. I’ll acknowledge as much, stopping short of detailing how they’ve changed. How I’ve changed in the days that followed my sleepwalking into the cold on the winter solstice. Where before I’d felt chilled, afraid of the specters that ringed the garden in my dreams, I know now there was never any reason to fear them. Not really. For I was and have always been one of them. One with them on this journey through the seasons. Each night, when I dream, they impart knowledge. About the earth. The passing of time. The sacred rites. It is only now that I truly know how to listen.

After the incident in the snow, I stopped taking my birth control. While the nights remain cold, I cozy up to my husband in bed. Come spring, I know his seed will take. Before even the next solstice arrives, it will be undeniable. One day, its fruit will toil in the earth alongside us, the circle unbroken. It has been shown to me, among other things.

There’s life outside the garden. That’s what my husband always says. As though I needed reminding. I roll my eyes, flash a knowing smile, rest a hand upon my belly, humming a familiar melody.

All life is connected to what came before, to what has yet to come. The green leaf of yesterday turns to rot today to become the humus the next plant needs to grow new leaves afresh. Bug eats leaf. Bird eats bug. Bird, rabbit and deer pilfer the crops, coyote and fox devour them in turn. The earth consumes all, everything and everyone, in time, only for each to be reborn anew.

Again and again and again.

A gardener knows these things—knows when to plant and when to prune and when to let fields remain fallow—and many others besides. When to give to the soil, and when to hold back. When to bleed for it. When and what to sacrifice. A good gardener, steward of the earth that she is, accepts and loves and applies the knowledge for her own purposes, in turn, as the cycle of life and death and rebirth spins ever onward.

There’s life outside the garden, my husband says.

I know, silly, I tell him. I know.