The dawn rose in the sky, the petals unveiling the dew of the stars. The gardener got up that day to drink his daily cup of coffee, and set aside time to plant in the master's garden. He requested a few dozen blue roses and a few dozen bleeding hearts. The bleeding hearts was a flower that he couldn't afford; rare and the gardener was only given the bare minimum wage, as the master never trusted anyone else besides his family with the money. The gardener's eyes were red and looked to be lacerated with unrestful sleep and his body tingled and burned every time he touched his godforsaken soil. He was the only one who wasn't a part of the man's family. The master claimed he hated him, yet carried a zealous lust for him too. When he hungered for him, the gardener left his beloved garden to his bed, and never returned the rest of the night.
The master's teeth were broken and blackened in several spaces, his hair was often unkempt and he often acted childishly towards the gardener, saying that he had no business knowing what he truly did everyday. He assumed he was a writer (all writers were crackpots, the gardener thought), but he could possibly be just a cocaine pin. He often heard rumors he smoked weed and brought over many friends he said he truly hated, yet the sad and monkey-shaped man couldn't bear to be alone in his home. The gardener sipped his turpentine coffee as he added too much sugar and cream and possibly dirt from the flowers and soil that he drank anyways in his miserable mouth (marked with cuts and broken teeth. From where? He wasn't sure. Maybe he was related to the master after all, damn him.), his fingers tinged with dirt and his forehead moist with sweat. The sun lurched onward towards the dawn-stricken sky. He listened to the cars and trucks pass by the Station Square highway, even hearing the chattering of other animal workers coming here to work in the tomato fields that Station Square was so proud of. His master was forced to turn up his nose to the immigrant workers coming for only a second chance, but the gardener understood what it was like, his dark skin the appetite of both his hate and his random affection. He came from Mystic Ruins himself, seeing the city as another way he could live a good life. The gardener somewhat lived in relative luxury, but the master was often hateful and disgusted by him bringing his dirty clothes to the bathroom yet never said anything about the women he picked up from the streets (polygamous, he assumed). He tried to live the city life that the master told him he could have. Loved gardening, but he also loved being free more, he could've took some of the money from the master's bank account and run with all the money he could take, until he found out the master only lived on his parents constantly giving him thousands and millions of dollars. He was nothing but a delinquent, but the gardener was forced to respect him. He respected anybody he had to work with just to get by.
Not even his rich parents could afford the bleeding hearts. They could buy a dozen, but the gardener used most of his savings to buy one. The glass, crystal-like flower that was supposed to bloom in the wake of heartache and sorrow. He had much heartache, but he never showed it. Heartaches often left him sick, and it was what eventually killed his mother, when they couldn't afford a single slab of rib eye steak to celebrate his going to college. His mother was very sensitive, and there were only those who were so sensitive and loving did the bleeding heart truly thrived in dirt and soil like this. It could grow as quickly as a few minutes, but very few reports have confirmed that.
The gardener laid himself in the soil and began to work. Soil got into his mouth, but he loved the taste of dirt. He planted and tended to the other flowers, the poppies, buttercups, lilacs and the strawberries that his master claimed to love and even a small patch for blueberries and watermelons. There were a few for carrots and green beans, on the protest that he told the master should eat some vegetables and not so much sugar. He never ate them.
The gardener touched the soil with his gloved hands, sniffing the wet rain from last night. It was the smell he loved the most. The rain came in violet shards to him, planting stems in the windows. The rainy days watered his plants and he didn't had to go to the garden, however he had to deal with but the master's antics, with his mediocre watercolor paintings of nudes that he tried to tell him he could take more life drawing classes, to which the master claimed he couldn't do any better and he had no right criticizing him.
Dawn broke open, and it was soon the afternoon. The gardener was tired, yet he felt relaxed. The bleeding heart and blue roses were about to be planted.
He sniffed something strange across the yard, as if one of the animal Mobian's had lain down to die and decay in the baking sun. It happened often with the cat Mobian's, thinking his garden was a good place to lay their sorrows in. Throwing whatever he could to fetch the cats out, even with his good boots he bought with his hard-earned money, he told the cats to go away and to die somewhere else, but as he got closer to the smell of decay, the quiet sound of a heart still and no longer beating, the scent of tears, and the space around him felt composed, serene, as if a ghost had been laid to rest in purgatory. The sight of a blue hedgehog lying so calmly in the grisly sun, his eyes shut and his mouth partially open and his palms wide, he thought the hedgehog looked as if he was crucified. An animal Mobian who would be able to know his religion.
As he stared at this creature, perfectly preserved, no scars or gashes on his body, no rotting meat or organs, he surmised he died only minutes ago and his body began smelling. What killed him? He didn't know much about this blue hedgehog. While he only had a few classes in Forensics back when he took college (back when he didn't know he would be a somewhat lowly gardener), he thought he died of a sudden heart attack. He must've run so fast or he was so stressed out and so anxious and scared that his heart suddenly gave out. There residue of tears in his eyes. Possible depression? His heart cared so much that it leaped out of his body and tore him apart? Something had happened, and he wasn't sure on which of his theories was correct. The gardener sighed as he looked at his body, ready to be taken away by the master's own God, and sympathetic towards him, the old man feeling pity for the hedgehog that looked to be so young and so renewed with vigor that he was soon taken away by Death's beastly hands…
Should he report the body? The Mobian could've had a name, a home, maybe even many friends who cared for him. The police thought of immigrants like him as nothing but crooks. Another Ruins guy that murdered a Station Square resident? I'm sorry sir, but we're going to have to give you the jail treatment, the institution treatment, as you've been living with a man who's so batshit that you're possibly a little bit batshit too. We can't trust you mulattos. Did you get your green card before you murdered that hedgehog? Piece of garbage.
His mother was already given the same treatment, before she died of her heart being consumed with sorrow. He didn't want the same to happen to him.
The body remained unreported as he cradled him in his arms like a newborn infant, whether the hedgehog had many friends, was loved all over, or was even a national hero in this city. The gardener shoveled the dirt out of the patch he planned for the blue roses and the bleeding heart.
The blue hedgehog lied in his arms, calmly, the smell of death not overwhelming him. Maybe a heart was still beating very faintly. Maybe he was dying very slowly by each minute. Make him rest. It was all he could do. Make him receive a proper burial. Whether he was loved or lost, all creatures great and small deserved a proper funeral. This creature might be very great, or very small, yet he still had love in his heart for him. He could've loved him, back when he was alive.
He clenched his fists until they were red, his red eyes produced more tears than he shed on a normal day, and the white coffee remained half drunk; sweat drenched his work shirt and his back, he felt the heat burning his bones, the sun glaring in his eyes as he tried to take breaks, eat and drink some sugar to manage his hypoglycemic symptoms, and he set the hedgehog down in the soil, the gardener imagining him softly breathing underneath the blanket of soil. He wanted to tuck him in to sleep forever. Let the stars love him. Let the angels kiss him on the nose for mercy and to forgive him of his sins.
He wasn't sure of what religion the hedgehog believed in. The master's Bible was pulled out, and the gardener said a few choice passages he could recite like a parrot when he was a child, when the missionaries drilled it into his impressionable head. Now he couldn't read the Bible well. His vision got poorer every year, and the tiny text was a torture. So then he recited the passages of Chaos, the passages he was properly born with, and told the blue hedgehog to have a safe journey in the afterlife, in the universes beyond.
The blue hedgehog's body suffocated in the rising hill of dirt, as the gardener laid his soil-dirtied hands on the fresh patch of soil and planted the blue roses, and the one bleeding heart, in the center of the dirt.
The gardener felt tired, but he also felt sad.
Maybe it was true. Love was a powerful and mysterious thing. That love stretched on towards the galaxies and the universes where he was a spirit. He wished he knew him back when he was alive. The poor little creature. The poor little bastard. Tears dropped to the soil, where the blue roses sank their teeth into the dirt, and the bleeding heart stuck out a piece of blown glass as it drained all of his love and heartbreak.
"Shit! Are you finally done with that damn gardening?"
It was that voice that grated on him, the master's. Was the master sick again? Time to fetch him soup and fruits from the garden, and as much as he wished to say no, he knew he was also paid to be his own personal slave, just like the other personal slaves he had. Make him swallow the blueberries whole and let the blood of the strawberries stain his teeth.
"Yes, I'm just about done."
"Good. Fetch me some blueberries and I'll talk of your next paycheck. You better hurry."
Thank God it was Friday.
He pulled the last few weeds that dangled around the garden, and the gardener gazed at how quickly the bleeding heart grew, to a glass-like vine that bled a continuous river throughout the garden, and how prettily did that vine look, and how prettily did that blood shine…