Tale 1 - The Garden of Falling Names
The gardener plants a bloom for everyone she has ever loved.
Not for memory. For keeping.
The rose is Mother, and the lavender row is the boy who taught her to swim, and the moonflowers are her father, who left before she could hold a grudge properly. Every name she ever carried goes into the soil, and the soil takes it gladly, and the garden is the most beautiful thing in the valley.
Strangers walk the path. They weep. They say it must be a comfort, keeping them all alive like this. She agrees. The blooms never argue, never age, never leave.
The falling starts on a Tuesday.
A single petal from Mother’s rose, lying on the path like a dropped coin. She picks it up, presses it between the pages of a book she never opens. Thinks nothing of it. The next week the whole rose bows its head, and when she touches it, the name behind it goes quiet inside her. Not forgotten. Worse. Remembered the way you remember a word you no longer use. She knows she loved her mother. She cannot feel it anymore.
So she plants faster.
Every new person who comes near her, every hand that touches hers, becomes a seed. It is not cruelty. It is arithmetic. The only way she knows to keep someone is to put them in the ground before they can leave. And they do thrive. The garden is the envy of the valley. The blooms are radiant, untroubled, perfect.
The valley does not know what the soil is made of. That is the trick of it.
One evening a stranger stops at the gate, a girl with dirt under her nails, and asks whether the gardener is ever lonely, surrounded by so much beauty.
The gardener looks at the rows of silent blossoms. Mother. The swimmer. The one who broke her heart, blooming brighter than all the rest, because she loved him hardest.
“No,” she says. “The garden is full.”
That night, alone, she kneels in the dark and plants a new seed.
The name she whispers is her own.
