Chapter 1
Warming himself in the confidently rising sun in a clear blue sky, Ghost could not help but admire the budding leaves on the ancient oak tree.
“Ah, isn’t it great to be alive?” he asked them, his sense of bliss only slightly diminished by the sardonic voice in the back of his head saying, “Hah.”
Putting his hands on his hips, he turned around to fully breathe in the circular garden filled with life.
“Breathe? Really?” the voice asked, but again, he barely registered it. The freshness of the sprouting grass tickled his feet as he took a few steps toward the glimmering pond and tried to see if any of the fish had awakened yet. They hadn’t, but the sight of two dragonflies chasing each other dampened any disappointment.
He smiled to himself and pondered whom he could get flirty with on this bright spring day. “It’s been a while,” he said to no one in particular.
“No kidding,” the voice answered, making his spine tingle with discomfort. Something was wrong.
---
Rabbit looked up, ears pointing, nose sniffing, eyes darting.
Something’s up...Something’s here...Something that shouldn’t be.
Realizing the threat was not immediate, he relaxed his ears a little and looked around the garden he called home for more information. The ancient oak tree waved its regular hellos to the world, as did the purple wisteria embracing the cottage. The willow tree danced its usual Narcissus dance by the pond, and the ever-abundant wildflowers seemed as untamed and free-spirited as always. Hopeful, he hopped over to the friendly ferns. But they, too, had no more to share than their usual contented green.
Rabbit sighed and bounced over to the pond. “Hey, you home?” he asked.
Frog popped his head out of his watery nook close to the budding lotus flowers. “Yeah, what’s up?”
“Listen, I think something isn’t right. This weird thing appeared, see. It’s like the wall, but...but round and flat. Have you heard anything?”
Frog reluctantly looked around. Rabbit followed his gaze to see the leaves leafing, the grass grassing, and all their faun- like friends going about their dawn-to-day business as usual. A stork flew over, and Frog crawled halfway back into his hiding place.
“No. I haven’t. Why? Should we be scared?” he asked, sounding scared.
Rabbit considered the question. He wasn’t sure if anything scary was going on. It was just...that something wasn’t quite right. He could tell his friend wasn’t going to come back out of his hole, so he said goodbye for now. Who else? Cat!
As it was just about that time, Rabbit looked up and saw Cat sitting on top of the wall. Pompously. The rising morning sun behind him, his fiery orange fur lit up as if it were the mane of the lion he wished he was.
The wall was what the animals called the curved concrete division that separated their much-loved paradisiacal garden from whatever was on the other side. Except for the untrust‐ worthy descriptions they had heard from the cat and the birds, most of the animals did not have a clue as to what lay beyond it. But as the wall itself struck them with so much awe and respectful fear, they undoubtedly believed that the other side was a cold, barren wasteland devoid of life and joy.
“Cat?” Rabbit asked, bending his neck backward as much as he could. “Cat, do you maybe know what’s going on in the garden this morning?”
“Who’s talking to me?” Cat scoured the ground. “Ah, it’s you. What are you talking about?”
“Well...see...there’s this strange circle of stone that just appeared from out of nowhere. You must be able to see it from up there—it’s right there in the flowers near the terrace.”
Rabbit watched Cat lazily stretch his neck for the whole distance of half a whisker but quickly stepped back when Cat jumped off the wall onto a branch of one of the three white birch trees and then onto the ground in a surprisingly graceful manner .
“Let’s go check it out,” Cat said and started walking. Rabbit, happy that Cat had taken charge, hopped right along after him.
“It’s stone, all right. Exactly the same kind as the wall is made of,” Cat said, pawing at it. Rabbit took a closer look too, sniffed it, walked around it, and concluded the same. It even felt the same to him. Not just in the material sense. Not just in the way he could feel with his paws, but in the same way the wall gave him the heebie-jeebies. Like something ominous and horrible was about to happen just because he was close to it.
“How do you think it got here?” Rabbit asked.
Cat sat back and stared at Rabbit. Then he got quiet, sat up a little straighter, and positioned his ears. And he thought as hard as his brain allowed him to. But not one single answer came to him. Not one idea popped up as a reason that this terribly unpleasant circle would suddenly have appeared.
He thought about the human and her often peculiar ways. Bringing home odd pieces of old furniture that she would make beautiful again. Spontaneously painting the house another color. Nursing tiny plants to life. But he didn’t think this was her doing. She had been in all night. He knew because he had lain at her feet as she had watched the little screen with the lights for the entire evening and then had gone straight to bed afterward. The same thing she had been doing almost every evening for a long time now.
But just as Cat was thinking of an excuse to avoid coming up with any answers, two black birds landed right in front of their paws.
“Kaaw kaaw,” they said, instantly irritating the cat. “Kaaw kaaw, here too. Here too. Oddness. Death on this side. Life on the other. So odd. So, so odd.”
“What are you talking about?” Cat asked.
“Kaaw, death has come to life. Can’t you see? Can’t you feel? Can’t you feel the humans?” they asked, and then they took immediate flight, cackling at the ignorance of the two furry creatures they had just confused.
Shocked, Cat quickly turned his head toward the house to see if he could catch a glimpse of her. Is something wrong? Is she upset? If she’s upset, I need to go to her. But as he saw her through the kitchen window, going through the same routine she went through most mornings, he decided he had no more interest and could instead take that nap he so longed for. He therefore walked toward his favorite stool, now caught in a ray of morning sun, jumped up, walked several circles around himself, and lay down in the perfect position, leaving an utterly befuddled Rabbit behind.
---
It’s sad, Leora thought, how we bring these joyous living things into our houses all just to witness their slow decay. Though she was none‐ theless still grateful for the obviously well-intended birthday gift.
She picked up the dead petals from the table around the vase and wondered if the arrangement was ready for the trash. Her phone rang and awakened her from her early morning existential floral pondering.
“No, I haven’t a clue what he did,” she said, though stories from the recent past allowed her to make an educated guess. With the phone squeezed between neck and ear and her friend Dana ranting about her boss on the other end, she walked into the kitchen. She threw the petals in the trash and went over to the counter to pour the water that had just come to a boil into a big thermos. “Aha,” she mumbled.
While she was adding the bag of herbal tea and screwing the cap back on, her eye fell on something odd in the garden. Leaving the thermos behind, she opened the kitchen door, stepped onto the terrace, and walked past the sleeping cat to a spot a little farther over. “Yes...of course you should,” she said to her friend as she carefully knelt among the flowers, not noticing the little bunny observing her from behind the oleander .
“Hold on,” she said when Dana appeared to be done spewing. “There’s something weird in my garden.”
“What is it?”
“Well...it seems to be a perfectly circular slab of concrete. About three feet in diameter. Completely set, as if it’s been here forever.”
“What? Are you sure you’re seeing it right? Haven’t you just spilled paint or something? You know you’re not very careful with things like that...” Her friend knew her well.
“No, I swear,” she said and looked around for clues. But besides some peculiarly curious black birds staring at her from the oak tree, she didn’t find any. She did find, however, that she didn’t want to be close to the slab any longer than neces‐ sary, so she stood up and went back inside.
“Leor? Are you still there?”
She hadn’t realized she had gone quiet. “Yeah, I’m still here, sorry. It’s so weird. It’s right in the middle of a patch of flowers and greens. I haven’t even been close to this spot in weeks.” She stared at it in continued disbelief through her kitchen window. “And...I don’t know, it’s like...like something has awakened. No...I might be saying that wrong. Something feels different. Not in a bad way, but in a tingly type of way. Like waking up out of a long coma. Or something. Ah, what‐ ever...Never mind...for now at least,” she said as she walked back into the living room and decidedly picked up the vase of nearly dead flowers.
“I’m feeling it, but I can’t really explain it. It’s like trying to explain the taste of chocolate to someone who’s never had chocolate or something.” She stood still, vase in hand, and sighed. “Sometimes, I wish I could write songs or poetry to fully express what I’m feeling. D’you know what I mean?”
“I really do,” Dana answered as Leora chucked the flowers in the bin. No death in my house, she thought and walked upstairs to take a shower.
As Xander sipped his carefully constructed cup of coffee and blankly stared over the bamboo deck, something caught his eye. A patch of unruly flowers. Wait, what?
Looking around the rest of the enclosure, he saw nothing else as carefree and wild as this circular bunch. There were flowers in his garden—plenty of them—but all as part of a tree or shrub and therefore all fairly the same color and shape. Because that’s how he had planned and coordinated it. How?
As he had woken up only moments ago and, obviously, not finished his coffee yet and could, therefore, be mistaken, he decided to take a closer look. So he put his cup down on the kitchen bar, grabbed his glasses, slid the big glass doors open, and walked toward the curiously colorful wilderness.
Walking over the deck and onto the large stepping stones surrounded by deep green and thick moss, he crossed the ten yards to get to the perfectly round patch of wild nature. Yesterday, an expensive and exquisite red Japanese dwarf maple had stood in the middle of the area, surrounded by more of the thick green moss. He was sure of it.
Am I?
The maple had been one of the final touches of the land‐ scape, and one of his favorites at that. At this very moment, though, it had wholly disappeared or, at best, transformed into the collection of wildflowers.
He could distinguish poppies and cornflowers as they sported some of his favorite colors. A tall and pleasantly symmetrical yellow flower stuck its head up from the thicket and was surrounded by siblings still asleep in their buds. A long green stem covered in the tiniest leaves and a whole host of small pink flowers swayed beside a mysterious-looking bunch of darker green. This cluster had thicker stems topped by little white flowers that looked surprisingly mischievous for little white flowers. To make the sight even more spectacular, the wildflowers were entirely caught in a ray of sunlight and abuzz with bees and butterflies and whatnot.
All in all, he had to admit, it was an exceptionally beau‐ tiful little patch of wilderness.
But why is it here? Where did the maple go? Looking around, he couldn’t see anything else out of the ordinary. Confused and amazed, he knelt next to it.
A prank? But it had been years since he had hung out with the friends who might have pulled off something like this. His eye fell on the massive wall, and he thought about the neighbor living on the other side of the enormous concrete monstrosity. From the glimpses he had seen, most of her garden looked exactly like this little patch.
Would she have? He figured radical flower-bombing did seem to befit her. “Still doesn’t explain the tree disappearing, though,” he mumbled.
As looking at the wall pained him, and as he was automat‐ ically drawn to the flowers, he turned back to them. Wow, they really are stunning. They also looked like they had been there for a while now. Freshly planted flowers would look different. Apprehensively nestling their roots in the black earth to absorb all the necessary nutrients. Barely starting to feel secure enough to stick their heads out, let alone their green bodies. But the spectacle in front of him had some serious swag and sported a sexy, settled confidence that he felt almost jealous of. No, this was not an overnight prank.
Scouring his mind for other options, he came upon some‐ thing unlikely. Could it be...? No, that’s absurd...Could it be that nature was slowly taking back the planet? Perhaps the earth was revolting in the most restrained yet spectacular way.
Much better than the usual disasters, he thought. Much more elegant. Maybe every garden had a spontaneous patch of flowers in it that morning. Maybe it’s not just me.
He ran back to the house to check the newsfeed on his phone. If this were a global phenomenon, surely there would be mention of it. There wasn’t. Not on any of the major news sites. Not on his Facebook timeline. No pictures on Instagram. Not even a hint of it on Twitter. Apparently, it was just him. Disappointed, he walked back.
Sitting back down, he toyed with any other explanations he could think of, but each one was as improbable as the next. A religious miracle? Nah, impossible, he thought and was thrown into immediate doubt as all the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood up straight. “Am I having a stroke?” He squeezed his hands into fists to test this particular hypothesis and immediately rejected it. Did I just imagine the maple being there?
He thought back to the hot and sweaty Saturday he had dug the hole for the tree. He remembered how he had been annoyed with himself for underestimating the time it would take...the bleeding blister the spade had given him on the inside of his thumb...how exasperated he had been to find out he was out of Band-Aids...the quick walk to the supermarket to get them. He could still feel the hardened piece of skin on his thumb as further proof. The tree had been heavy too. It had taken his shoulders and back weeks to recover from the awkward turning and supporting he’d had to do. He also remembered the worries he’d had the first months after the tree was planted, whether it would take or not. How happy he was to see the formation of new branches and the budding of fresh leaves that next spring. How he had smiled when he found out a squirrel had made the tree its home. And how entertaining the birds were that would rest on its branches. He remembered. He wasn’t losing his mind.
He turned his head when he heard a ruckus and saw two loud black birds taking flight and disappearing over the wall. Turning back, he was surprised by a sudden and uncommon swell of emotion. As a lack of strength in his legs made getting up and walking away an impossible option, he let the unex‐ pected tide roll ahead in the hopes it would simply go away. It didn’t. It did, however, awaken old tucked-away voices and thoughts that now spoke to him, sounding eerily similar to all his ex-girlfriends: “Is this really the man you want to be, Xander? Is this really you living up to your highest potential?”
He jumped up. “Hey, come on. Calm down a bit, will you?” he said, not sure whether he was talking to the voices or to himself. Not even sure if there was much of a difference anyway. But he was nonetheless unable to push back on the lonely void filled with self-judgment washing over him.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked. But neither the flowers nor the butterflies dancing among them gave him any answers.
---
A little while after Leora had gone back inside, Rabbit, recovered from being close to the stone, was nibbling on a bit of grass when the man approached him. He froze mid-chew.
“Morning,” Ghost said and gave him a two-fingered salute. “It’s really rather lovely out, isn’t it?”
Rabbit remained unable to do much more than stare, eyes wide, ears down.
Of course, he had seen the man before. He had always been there. But not like this. Never like this. Usually, it was as if the man wasn’t really there. Usually, he would only aimlessly float around. Not once had Rabbit seen him interact with any of the animals in the garden. Not once had any of the animals ever even wanted to. It was, therefore, all the more surprising that today, the day of the stone circle’s appearance, the man was not only walking with his feet actu‐ ally touching the ground, but that he was doing so in a very purposeful manner.
To his own surprise, Rabbit’s curiosity spoke louder than his fears. He therefore smiled an uncertain smile.
“Sure...I...I guess it’s a lovely morning,” Rabbit said. “You’ll have to forgive my hesitation,” he continued, displaying the kind of self-awareness one rarely finds in rabbits. “It’s just that there’ve been some strange develop‐ ments in the garden that I’m a bit confused about. Do you... perhaps...know a little more...?”
---
“Strange developments, you say? Of what kind?” Ghost asked the polite rabbit while trying to keep his cool. Something’s wrong.
“Well, there’s this little round bit of concrete, see. It wasn’t there yesterday, and today it is. It’s right over there,” the bunny said and pointed his long ears in the direction of the stone.
Ghost followed the ears’ direction and was indeed amazed to see a circle of cement where there hadn’t been one before. Despite his apprehension, his inquisitive nature took over, and he took the four steps necessary to stand directly over the area of attention. Kneeling down and studying the circle carefully, he couldn’t see anything but ordinary concrete. However, he did feel something emanate from it.
Concrete doesn’t usually feel alive, does it? he thought, hovering his hands above it while admitting his knowledge of construc‐ tion materials was rather limited. He looked up. No, the sun isn’t warm enough yet, either.
“It’s as if it radiates right through you, isn’t it?” he asked his fuzzy consort. Rabbit cocked his head and twitched his nose in apparent concurrence.
“It’s not very pleasant though, huh?”
The rabbit shook his head.
As both man and bunny stared at the circular mystery in
front of them, Ghost suddenly became hyperaware of the racing of his heart and the elevation of the hairs on the back of his neck. Something’s really wrong.
“So...” the rabbit asked in an uncertain voice, “what do you think this means?”
Turning his head toward the innocently blinking bunny, Ghost could do no more than blink back, his mind blank.
Where did it all go? Where did I go? Never before had he been without words. Never without thoughts. He distinctly remem‐ bered happily sharing and discussing them with others. Over cups of coffee. At parties, glamorous or otherwise. During long pre- and postcoital conversations with the many interestingly bohemian and often excitingly clever men and women who came to visit him in his comfortable house. But it was as if these memories were no more than scenes from a movie he had seen a lifetime ago. And he remembered barely more than that. Almost all he had ever known was gone, it seemed. Odd.
“It’s not the knowing that matters,” the faraway voice told him. “It’s the feeling.”
“What? What the hell does that mean?” he asked it out loud.
“Uh, I don’t know, sir,” he heard a considerate voice say from down below.
“Oh, sorry, little guy,” he said. “I was talking to...um... myself, I guess...” The rabbit looked at him. “I...uh, I honestly don’t know what this means either.”
