A few days before the rains, the first weed appeared in Cybil’s yard. It was a small thing, really – an innocuous purple bud turned to suck in the sun – but it stood out against the artificial green that Cybil had installed. She came to town from the city looking for something quaint and peaceful or at least that’s what she told us. It was a little hard to believe, given she was all pantsuits and modern sculpture, cellphones and pagers beeping twenty-four hours a day. She ordered more takeout from The Shed (the only restaurant in town) than Clarence Albert, who had ordered every day since his wife disappeared in the last reaping. We had to give Cybil some credit though – she tried for quaint in her own way. When she moved into the Baker’s old house, she painted the shutters Country Yellow and bought a mailbox in the shape of a birdhouse. The mailbox was from some high-end chain and came in the mail itself, but we knew she meant well. It was on her way to The Shed that Cybil spotted that first purple bud. She examined it closely, bent down and put her nose to it, the dry bitterness of the pollen slipping into her inhale. Wrinkles grew over the bridge of her nose. She wrapped her fingers around its stem and pulled gently. Roots and dirt freed for moments between earth and yard waste.

            When Cybil first called about the corner house, the local realtor, Peggie, told her it was unavailable. This is customary – everyone who lives here was born here – so they know how the rules work. But when people stopped having kids a few years ago, after the reaping took nearly a dozen children in one night, the town didn’t really consider how that would affect the real estate market. Turns out, not well was the answer. Peggie tried to stay as current as possible. She watched a lot of HGTV and read every issue of Better Homes & Gardens, but it’s one thing to watch a house on a screen and another to feel its bones cage you in. More and more houses were empty, and the town was beginning to worry about pests and rotting wood. When Peggie told everyone she had received another call about the Baker place, this time from Cybil herself, it seemed like there was no choice to be had, like it was time for a test run.

            The town believed in chances, lots of chances, and Cybil seemed like a good one. She was smart and stable and wanted to bring AstroTurf for the lawn. The town didn’t believe in AstroTurf, but Cybil was new and inexperienced, and an exception was necessary. The town also didn’t believe in sidewalk gum, meshed-in house-eaves to keep the bats out, broken filaments, out of season apples, and locked mailboxes. It did believe in The Shed’s Sunday special, seasonal carnivals, and morning dew.

            It was three days before the purple bud was back in Cybil’s lawn, but she didn’t seem to notice right away. It was only when the April rains arrived – strong enough to turn gutters into waterfalls, to overwhelm the storm drains and flood the streets to rivers – that we first saw her in the window watching the purple bud. The rains were strong, we admit, stronger than we were used to, but Cybil needed precision desperately (mail ordered biggest to smallest, cans and bottles upright in the recycle on pick-up day) and we were both surprised and relieved when the rains were enough to stop her.

            When the rain finally stopped pouring, the town was under inches of mud. Hills leveled, garages flooded, and in some places, it seemed as though trees had stood up, walked a few feet, and replanted themselves. The town didn’t believe in sandbags or diversions, but we all felt bad for the couple whose house nearly split in two when the earth slid away from their foundation. The sunshine yellow paint of their siding crackled and shed like snake scales over their lawn. Cybil’s yard had broken into strips that scattered all over the neighborhood. One of the AstroTurf slabs lined up quite nicely with the sidewalk and there was talk of leaving it there for a while – a welcome patch of green against the white cement. The town believed in cement, but only in moderation. Hundreds of weeds took up residence in the spaces the AstroTurf left behind. Green stems with yellow buds, jagged leaves with stems full of thorns, tall tufts of white and small dots of purple, twisted red vines that turned green the deeper they grew into the earth – a racket of color filled her would-be lawn with noise and tangles and general disorder.

            By the time we rose on the first dry day, Cybil was already in her yard. The sun had barely escaped the tree line. The ground was still wet with dawn. We didn’t even have time to explain. The town didn’t believe in explanations. It believed in lessons, preferably taught by parents. But we thought Cybil deserved to know that the weeds would just keep coming. That the more she tore, the more they would multiply, like exponents: slow at first, but then a tide, strong enough to knock you over or pull you down.

            She was on hands and knees alongside a blue bucket filled to toppling with earth and greens. She wore muck to her elbows and kneepads she took from the toybox on the neighbor’s front porch. She ripped without fear, dirt flying from the earth and speckling her cheeks. Most of us were too entranced to interrupt – our eyes glued to her hands as they tore at the soil. She pulled out fistfuls of earth, patches of grass that had begun to grow. We weren’t really sure if she knew the difference between weeds and flowers. All we knew was that she seemed to want the yard empty and it had been a long time since we had seen barren earth.

            After a while Curtis Arlo tried to interrupt her, offered a quiet probably shouldn’t do that to the wind. She might have heard him, though it seems unlikely. Cybil was polite, if not reserved, but didn’t seem in the habit of ignoring us completely. By evening the yard was vacant and the rich, dark soil lightened in the warm air.

            In the morning, when gloam gave way to crisp blue, Curtis Arlo wrote Sloppy Joe’s and home fries on the specials board at The Shed. A local boy pulled on his dusty kneepads and skated down the block towards school. His tennis shoes were tied to his backpack and gave a hollow knock each time he pushed off the pavement. Clarence Albert woke up and took his morning vitamins from the blue plastic square on his nightstand.

            Cybil’s yard was filled with weeds again, and though they were nearly twice as tall, it wasn’t the weeds that surprised us. It was Cybil, who seemed to have walked out for the morning paper and started pulling without wasting a minute. On her hands and knees again, her terrycloth blue robe mixed with dew-damp earth. She had no gloves or kneepads or bucket. Now, she ripped at the earth with bare hands, shoved her fingers into the soil until her cuticles split. She worked for half the day before anyone tried to talk to her. She mumbled to herself and we caught fragments on the wind: “my house” and “presentable” and “hours and hours” and “mine” and “do it myself” rushed through our ear canals. She threw loose weeds and pebbles and mud towards the sidewalk.

            When the afternoon sun turned particularly warm and Cybil’s cheeks were struck with pink, Maude Wallace finally went to see her. Everyone figured Maude was the right choice – she was a teacher and had this strange way of speaking with kindness and command at once. Also, she had lost her boy to the weeds years ago, and we figured she would be able to reason with Cybil logically, but when she approached, Cybil didn’t seem to know she was there. Maude told her it was best to leave the weeds be. Said that they would just keep growing. She crouched down and peered behind the greasy curtain of Cybil’s hair. She told Cybil that plants are opinionated and stubborn and persistent and that it would be better for everyone if she let the yard grow.

            The next morning, we heard from Officer Henry that Cybil had stayed out until each and every weed was pulled, until the day descended into crepuscule and nearly into night. He had watched her anxiously, wiped sweat from the brim of his hat while he replayed the last disappearance in his mind. The last reaping had been all children – they were the only ones left who believed they could escape it. They thought they were fast and strong and invincible. The morning after was filled with guttural sobs that Officer Henry said he would never forget.

            Now, he told us he considered begging or bribing Cybil. Said he almost pulled a few weeds to get her inside a little faster. In the end, he couldn’t bring himself to make a fist around the weeds, to put an end to the possibility of their inflorescence.

            It began a pattern, and though the town believes in the power of patterns – the reliability of ocean into cloud, wave into break, seed into flower – this was not a pattern we wanted to continue. Cybil’s days seemed an endless loop of defoliation. The only thing that changed now was who came to watch, to whisper sense into Cybil’s ears, to beg her to go into her home at night, to keep herself from the weeds.

            After a week, the weeds grew like fire, like an infection with no antidote. They were bigger than we had seen before, competing with our waists in height. Her fingers were a collage of broken skin cells, dirt, and blood and we knew it was only a matter of time until she stayed out too late.

            Officer Henry grew more ragged by the day and after a week some of us shut our business doors or left our jobs to join him for night watch. We slept in shifts in the backseat of his patrol car. Cybil stayed out later and later, as the weeds grew taller and taller, and he couldn’t be solely responsible for such recklessness.

            The sidewalks grew cluttered with dead and shriveled weeds and the garbage collectors had stopped going to work in favor of watching. Trash went uncollected and the growing spring heat fostered a stench that rivaled that of rotten eggs or freshly grown skunk cabbage. We had never seen the weeds grow this tall, this wide, this pointed and thorned. The flowers bloomed inward now, as though caging Cybil in like bones around a heart. We had never seen someone fight the weeds so hard, had never seen someone rip living things from the earth with such fervor. Even grieving parents understood that the town believed in resilience, return, and resurgence.

            Another week went by and the crowd of watchers grew. Postal workers stopped delivering mail and it overflowed from its great blue boxes. Most shops stayed closed during business hours. Teachers left their classrooms and were replaced by substitutes who left soon after. The roots stretched out over the pavement now – they were thick and hardy. More likes vines or television cables than root systems.

            We never knew which day would be Cybil’s last. One of the local boys, too young to understand the gravity of her spectacle, started a lemonade stand next door. By the end of his first day, he had made enough for a razor scooter – a red one – that came with matching red elbow pads and a helmet. The weeds had grown so tall now, it was impossible to see Cybil if she was crouching or kneeling and we waited desperately for the moments in which she stood, in which she confirmed her continuation.

            As the weeks went by, we began to see if we could get to the house before Cybil appeared outside. We took shifts – who would arrive before the birds began to chirp and who would stay until the bats crept from their crevices. We dragged milk crates from the school cafeterias for people to stand on. The weeds had grown so tall Cybil was most visible when she stood on her porch first thing each day. Some of the hardiest weeds had stems as thick as tree trunks now. Foot-long nettles grew like sewing needles from the sides of plants. Roots wove through the dirt in a tangled mess that resembled rope before it’s woven. Atop tall green shoots, small white flowers grew in clusters so large they could keep you dry in a rainstorm if you stood under them. The number of car crashes in town grew and grew until Officer Henry closed the streets in the surrounding area. Kids were home from school and without parents to supervise them, they took to flying kites on blustery days or playing kickball in the empty intersections. More lemonade stands popped up, followed by hot chocolate stations and bake sales. The baked goods were often doughy, but the desperate growls of stomachs weren’t discerning enough to care. The weeds at the edge of the yard had grown prickly, their thorn-tipped leaves stretching out over the sidewalk. Caution tape seemed imminent. 

            It must have been a Monday when Cybil didn’t appear on the porch at dawn. The chaffinch nest in the tree next door was clanging with noise when the first light pushed the stars from the sky. The morning shift arrived and, though most of the group’s purpled-eyes were fixed on Cybil’s porch, a few noticed the commotion above. Leaves broke from branches and a screeching snapped through the air. A raccoon clamored down the tree trunk, a weeping egg in its mouth, yolk smeared across its fur. We turned back to Cybil’s porch, climbed atop our milk crates and step ladders, arched our feet until we tottered on our toes, and waited for the front door to open, for the greenery to shuffle to life.

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Hannah Newman is a founding Editor-in-Chief of Sweet Tree Review and a poetry editor for the Bellingham Review. She holds an MFA from Western Washington University. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about women, ghosts, and joy. When she isn't writing, you can find her indulging in expensive cheese, old books, and too many cups of coffee. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Entropy, Yemassee Journal, and The Mantle.

ART
Tied to Culture
ZiZi Shalabi, BFA
Class of 2020
Texas Woman's University
Denton, TX