Lawn Story
“Lawn’s getting a bit rough there, Steph!”
Steph was collecting her mail. A couple of bills, a flyer for a pizza joint, and a free booklet that promised Light and Fulfilment. Mr Crispin’s tone was friendly enough, but she wasn’t really looking for free yard critiques.
“Huh?” She let the metal flap of her mail box drop with a loud clang. She looked over at Mr Crispin, shielding her eyes from the setting sun with Light and Fulfilment.
“It’s just looking a little long. I can mow it for you if you like.” He was cleaning out his caravan. It was always parked there, a permanent structure of the street that everyone else had to negotiate.
Steph desperately wanted to avoid any conversation with the Crispins. “It’s fine. I have a mower. Thanks.” She scooted inside before her deepest feelings could be revealed. She’d just gotten home from work, and all she wanted to do was plough through a bag of chips and watch Money Wheel.
In the kitchen Henry meowed at her. He was parked in front of the fridge, starting at the door, waiting for it to open.
“It’s barely five-thirty, Hank. You can wait.” Steph dumped the bills on the counter, refusing to think about them. She scanned the pizza flyer, and stuck it to the fridge, briefly toying with Henry’s heart.
“Which cult are you?” she asked the booklet entitled Light and Fulfilment. Turning it over showed the logo of a group calling themselves The Rejuvenation Project. “Your rejuvenation starts here,” she told it, and squeezed it into the recycling bin.
She leaned against the counter and sighed. “Mr Crispin can do one, Hank. My lawn is none of his business.” Henry gave her a huffy look before returning his attention to the fridge. “Maybe when he finally finishes polishing his caravan, he’ll elope with it and leave Mrs Crispin behind for good, and we can forget the whole thing.”
There was a half-finished bag of hot dog flavoured chips left on the bench. Steph dug back into them. “Ugh. They don’t taste any better today. This flavour’s a pass, Hank.”
Henry whined.
“Geez, Hank, thirty minutes. You can wait. Or learn to cook.”
Friday provided another copy of Light and Fulfilment.
“This cult really needs to get their shit together,” Steph said aloud, only to realise a couple were walking a rather goofy labradoodle nearby. She smiled at them awkwardly, hoping they hadn’t heard. They smiled back and squinted at her front lawn. The woman said something disapproving to the man that Steph couldn’t hear.
Fine. It was the weekend, she’d cut it tomorrow. Unless Mr Crispin was watching. There would be no way in hell she’d do it if he was lurking about, lovingly attending to that caravan, so that he could be all smug about it. She went inside. Henry was staring at the fridge again. She smooshed the copy of Light and Fulfilment next to the previous copy, and took a fresh bag of chips out of the pantry. She’d found these ones at the Asian grocery. They were simply labelled “crab.”
“Okay, these ones are much better.” She grabbed another fistful of crab chips. “Yeah, I’d go these ones again, Hank.”
Henry couldn’t believe the effrontery.
Mr Crispin was nowhere to be seen. She’d checked twice. The first time when she took the little recycling bin and extruded its contents — including the two cult booklets — into the big recycling bin. The second time she pretended to check the mail on a Saturday. Incredibly, she found yet another copy of Fulfilment and Light. Is anyone else getting these things? She asked herself. Either way she was satisfied Mr Crispin wasn’t around, and there would be no I told you so, said or unsaid.
She dragged her lawn mower out from the garage. It was Leo’s, but he hadn’t come back for it, just like he hadn’t come back for his collection of 70s vinyl. So the mower was hers now, and the vinyl had been frisbied, one-by-one, into the local tip. The attendant hadn’t stopped her. He must’ve seen the look in her eye.
She parked the mower and assessed the battlefield. The grass was barely a few centimetres high. Mr Crispin’s was cropped at a military length like a number two buzz cutter. It was disciplined, but lifeless. There were no clovers, no budding daisies. Where were the ladybugs supposed to frolic? Where were the praying mantises supposed to prey? The more she looked at the lush, green carpet of her own lawn, the more it seemed less like mowing, and more like razing.
The mower wouldn’t start anyway. After about a dozen rips of the starter cord, it refused to come to life. At best it gurgled. She gave up, catching her breath leaning against the mower’s handlebar. She looked at her lawn. She liked it as-is: a green refuge in an increasingly sterile suburb of buzzcut lawns and inappropriately parked caravans. She then became resolved, like never before about anything in her life, that she would not cut that grass again. Mr Crispin can complain. He can defame her on the local Internet forums. He can plaster her mugshot on every telephone pole in the street, labelling her a menace to the neighbourhood. She didn’t care. Let it grow as high as the roof. The council would have to send the fire brigade to cut it down with their diamond-tipped buzz saws. No blade of her own would touch this grass again.
She had never felt so serene and assured, fulfilled and light.
Three weeks later there was a scandalous knocking at the door.
It was Mr Crispin.
Steph had been mentally marking off the days, waiting for his meltdown. Was this it? He certainly looked steamed.
“Yes?” she asked, as polite as a school kid who knows they’ve done something wrong, but naively thinks they’ve gotten away with it.
Mr Crispin tampered his steam into a simmer. “Are you going to do something about the lawn? It’s getting knee high!”
It certainly wasn’t, though Steph was cheering it on. “No,” she said, “I like it.”
Steph watched his eyelid twitch. The simmer was returning to a boil. “The Home Owners’ Association Handbook says that all lawns should be well-maintained!”
“Well, I think it maintains itself, without having to hack it to pieces every weekend. Think of it more like a grass-garden if you like.”
“But—” No, it was time to cut to the big guns.
“Also, the HOA book says no vehicles, for example caravans — and they explicitly give that example — should be kept out on the street.” Steph was fairly sure that was the case, only insane busybodies actually read the HOA’s rules.
His face flat-lined.
A direct hit.
Mutually Assured Busybodying.
Mr Crispin about-faced and grumbled his way back down the driveway.
Steph admired the rampant greenery a moment before she closed the door.
It was five-thirty and Henry wasn’t parked in front of the refrigerator trying to acquire the telekinesis to open the door. Steph found him at the front of the house, perched on the windowsill. His tail twitched as he performed a staccato chirp. It was a sound Steph had never heard him make before.
“What’s wrong with your programming, Hank?” Steph pulled back the curtain to see what was causing Henry’s malfunction.
The grass truly was knee high now, though Mr Crispin hadn’t been back to complain. Neither had she received any lectures from other neighbours, nor official warnings from the council. New plants had appeared that she didn’t recognise. She secretly hoped that some of them were poisonous. Finally she spotted what had caused a stir in Henry.
“Oh, wow.” Sitting on a rather sturdy reed of grass was a black frog, shot through on the sides with shocking pink splotches. “That’s one of those poison dart frogs, Hank. I’m sure of it.” Thankfully Henry was an indoor cat.
Steph took a picture of it and, after a quick internet search, sent it off to the National Amphibian Institute with the query: Yo. What is this guy?
Three of the nation’s top frog scientists descended on the lawn with waders and bright yellow gloves. They each had a clipboard and between them shared a fancy camera and a little metal ruler for scale. They must have snapped a hundred shots of the violently coloured little frog and his lush suburban habitat. The trio seemed very animated as Steph sipped her tea and watched from the window. Henry chittered at the little guy whenever it was in view.
Now one of the scientists became excited about a different section of the lawn. She called the others over and they began taking snaps and notes of whatever it was. Steph tapped on the window and one of the scientists waded over. She opened the window a crack.
“Another frog?”
“No! We’ve just found a Carnivorous Pseudo-dandelion. It was thought to be extinct!”
“Carnivorous? Will our frog be okay?”
“Yes, yes. The Carnivorous Pseudo-dandelion tends to only eat bees that come for its nectar. It snaps shut on them!” He mimed this with a slap of the rubber gloves.
“Then how does it pollinate?” Steph felt this was an excellent question, and gave her the feeling of being something of a peer of the scientists.
“Oh, it only eats some types of bee.” A discerning Carnivorous Pseudo-dandelion, then.
“So…?” Steph was out of questions after the pollinating one. Perhaps not such a peer to the scientists after all. But the scientist was struggling to contain an excitement that must’ve been deeply rooted in his childhood. The kind of excitement that makes a small boy see a documentary about the rainforests of the Amazon, and vow to become a frogologist.
“I… We think there might be more discoveries to be made here. This is all quite remarkable. With your permission, we’d like to set up a field site to study it. That might mean a lot of disruption for you, though.”
“And I wouldn’t be able to cut the grass?”
“Unfortunately, no…”
“Excellent. Set it up.” She closed the window on the scientist. She felt vindicated. She’d brought something beautiful and a little carnivorous to the world, and all Mr Crispin had done was polish his caravan.
“We’re here in the suburb of South Bankside today to witness the creation of the country’s first ‘Micro National Park’!”
Steph blinked under the lights. They’d been set up by the camera crew and were now slowly eating away at her retinas. They were all crowded onto her driveway, where an assistant had manoeuvred her by tugging on her sleeves, millimetre by millimetre, into the correct position according to some ideal scene only visible to the crew.
The scene was composed of herself on the left, Michayla in the middle, and then the local member for parliament, Jason Lisette, on the right. Behind them was the Micro National Park, swaying in the breeze. Steph wondered if the broadcast would pick up the chirping of the frogs or the buzzing of the newly discovered Crayon Wasp, that made its hive by extruding a brightly coloured waxy substance. The grass seemed to have become satisfied with its length and stopped growing at about Steph’s waist.
Michayla was from Channel 12 news and didn’t require a last name. She’d spent the last five minutes practising her smile, and touched everyone’s shoulder when she spoke to them, however briefly. The MP was a walking combover with a bolted on smile. Steph vaguely remembered throwing out a calendar with his face on it that had been squeezed into her mailbox. He’d come pre-packaged with a couple of lackeys. All three wore almost identical suits, only the ties varied in pattern a little. The lackeys both stood behind him, nodding along to everything he said.
Steph had no idea if the cameras were rolling yet, and desperately fought the urge to shield her eyes from the blinding lights, or just wander off and do something else entirely. Steph was about to turn to Michayla and ask when they were going to start, when the camera man began signalling three, two, one… And Michayla sprang into action.
“We are here at the home of Stephanie Padilla in South Bankside today, to witness the creation of the country’s first Micro National Park. Also with us is local MP Jason Lisette, who is in charge of the MNP initiative.”
“Thank you, Michayla. We’re extremely excited to announce the very first Micro National Park here in Bankside South! We hope it’s the first of many, and shows this government’s commitment to our natural environment.” The lackeys all nodded in agreement, like bobblehead toys on a dashboard.
Steph ducked as Michayla swept her hand over the grass. “Now this is your lawn, Steph. You must be excited about what’s happening here.”
Steph’s eyes buzzed in the searing light. “Yep,” she said.
Michayla waited a beat, under the false assumption that Steph might utter more than a syllable, before bravely marching on. “So tell us,” big smile, “how did this all happen?”
“Stopped mowing the grass.” Steph wondered if she was having some sort of anxiety attack. She urged her brain to manufacture something, anything, to expound on the topic. Her brain shrugged.
Again, Michayla of Channel 12 news had to pick up the slack. “Oh, wow! And why was that?”
Steph blinked. “Didn’t want to mow the lawn anymore.” That was it. That was all she had. Her heart sank as she thought about how many people were witnessing her brain crash live on TV.
Michayla gave up on her and turned back to the camera. “There have been thirteen endangered species discovered in this one plot of lawn!” The reporter rattled off a few more facts, but it all faded away as Steph’s mind gave up on her body and fled.
Clips of the broadcast went viral on the Internet. It was put to various movie soundtracks. There were club remixes. Steph’s panicked expression was superimposed on journeys through the comos and psychedelic descents into animated fractals. Every weird thing a celebrity or politician said had her dumbfounded face pasted after it in a two panel meme.
The only saving grace was that when the cameraman walks around the front of the property to give a tour of the grass, in the corner of the screen you can just catch a glimpse of a steaming Mr Crispin snap his venetian blinds shut.
Occasionally Steph tried to take Henry for a walk. She wasn’t sure what had inspired the idea, probably some clip she saw on social media which made the whole thing seem idyllic and whimsical. It certainly hadn’t been a desire of Henry. He refused to enjoy fresh air and nature, and when he wasn’t demanding appliances to feed him, was mostly wedged into couch cushions snoring and farting. So instead of a whimsical outdoor adventure, what always ensued was a farce where Steph would carry Henry around the neighbourhood. Then she’d plonk him into picturesque places for the socials, while Henry, instead of sniffing the flowers or chasing butterflies, mostly just sniffed himself.
She was lugging him home now, Henry seeming to get heavier as they went. Several homes in the neighbourhood were now growing out their own front lawns. Some had even told her she was their inspiration for it. Their was also a rumour online that the government was paying her $32,000 a month for her lawn to become a Micro National Park. Nonsense, of course, but the whole thing was taking on a life of its own. Even Leo had messaged her about it. She ignored him. He’d heard the payment rumour, no doubt.
As she passed one of these lawns-de-homage, she saw a man muttering at it, shaking his head. When he turned around he revealed himself to be Mr Crispin. His face scrunched up in anger when he saw her, like an old red potato, and he marched off in the direction of the shops.
Suddenly Steph felt bad for him. Perhaps pissing off Mr Crispin wasn’t the game that she’d felt it was. Things were changing around him, and that was probably scary for him. Maybe it was time to hash things out. She certainly wasn’t about to get the mower out, it was her lawn, she liked it as it was. Also, that would technically be illegal now under the Micro National Parks Act. At least she could explain to him why she liked it, and that it wasn’t just some personal slight against him.
She would have to work her way up to it, though. She wasn’t the quickest to let go of a juicy grudge.
Steph was woken by a racket out the front of her house. She heard the metal-against-metal of tools being loaded into vans and truck beds, along with some maniacal sniggering. By the time she turned on the front light and opened the door, the vehicles were screeching away down the road in either direction.
Dismay grew inside her. The grassland had been devastated. Stalks, leaves and flowers had been slashed and left to lie helpless on the uneven stubble below. The green waste spilled out onto the road and into the driveway. Bugs and lizards fled the scene of destruction. She heard the faint sound of poisonous frogs keening in distress.
Steph glared in the direction of the Crispins’ house. The caravan was shifting under the weight of someone shuffling around inside. The door had been left ajar. The front light from her house illuminated part of the caravan’s interior, and shone off the balding pate of Mr Crispin, as he tried to curl into a tight ball in the driver’s seat.
“You want everything to be neat and tidy?” she whispered in his direction. “Then I’ll fucking give you a perfect slate.”
“Yeah, it’s about seven by five metres… Uh huh… So how much do you reckon?” Steph closed her eyes at the quoted price. She thought about it for a moment and slammed the door on any lingering doubt. “Okay, I’m fine with that. When do you think?” She wrote down the details on a blank spot in the newspaper sitting on the coffee table. “Okay, thank you. See you then.” She hung up.
The paper was open to a double-page spread describing the sacking of disgraced minister Jason Lisette. There actually had been a sum of money meant to compensate property owners involved in the Micro National Parks Scheme, Steph had just never seen any of it. Later, MP Lisette had been photographed playing laser tag with models from the gameshow Money Wheel, at the same time that he was supposed to be opening a new community garden for at-risk teens. The scheme was cancelled, the money had to be paid back, but all the spilling of the nefarious details of the embezzlement hadn’t stopped people demanding that Steph pay back the money she was never given.
In the lower right of the double page spread was a paragraph dedicated to the razing of her front lawn by “unknown vandals.” She received a short message from Leo: “bummer dude.”
Meanwhile, she had to hire a trailer to take all the dead plant matter to the tip for disposal. It had taken less than a week to receive an official notice to clean up her front yard from the council. In truth she’d been in a kind of depression since the event. She missed the rustling of the wind through the long grass, and the chirping of the frogs. She missed the occasional person stopping to admire it on their walk, and the scientists who were always excited by every little detail and never waned in their enthusiasm for answering her dumb questions.
Now she had a new plan, and this one was even more born out of spite.
The front yard was scraped clean, poison frog corpses and all, by a small nimble frontend loader. It dumped everything into a giant metal dumpster without ceremony. Mr Crispin watched with an obnoxious smile while he sensually cleaned his caravan’s wheel-hubs. But he didn’t know what was coming next.
The smile dropped from his face when the cement truck rumbled up. Wooden scaffolding was staked around the edges so the concrete would keep its shape while it set. The cement glooped out of the truck, and Steph watched the panic in Mr Crispin’s eyes. He looked to her, pleadingly. She stared right back and coolly ate a bag of wasabi and ginger chips.
Wait til you see the final result, she thought.
Unfortunately he wasn’t there a week later when the polishers came. He had no real reason to, now that he’d been forced to move his caravan by an anonymous tip to the council. Who knew where it went? There certainly wasn’t room in their garage. The cement was now so smooth that the reflection dazzled your eyes. You could probably skate on it. Mr Crispin never tried to talk to her again. If she saw him outside, he’d just scurry back inside, shielding his eyes from the glare.
Was it a victory? Steph wasn’t sure. She’d rather have her grassland back.
“So I guess this is why you don’t need the mower anymore,” said Romy, admiring the reflective pool of concrete.
“Yep,” said Steph, pocketing the fifty bucks Romy had given her. She had listed the mower for sale online, and had ignored anyone who had tried to bargain or asked detailed questions about its horsepower or mileage or grass-cutting-quotient or whatever. It wasn’t until young Romy inquired about it, explaining that she and her friend had just moved to the city to go to university, only to discover they now had a lawn.
“Can I ask why?” Romy asked, as Steph helped her get the mower into the boot of her car.
“The concrete?”
“Yeah.”
“Spite,” said Steph, surprised at her own honesty. She dusted her hands on the back of her jeans.
“Oh. I guess that’s as good a reason as any.”
“Is it?”
“Well how’s it working out for you?” asked Romy as she climbed into the car.
“Well I now have a giant slab of polished concrete, and my neighbours stopped talking to me. So… okay, I guess?”
Romy laughed as she started the car. “You’re my hero,” she said and waved as she backed out onto the street. Steph felt a kindling of pride as Romy’s car drove away.
Now she turned to admire the Slab. It was so smooth and perfect, like a CGI thing plopped into a movie. Except, she could now see, on the far side was a small twig or piece of fibre that had fallen over it.
“Can’t have that.” She skated over to the debris, careful not to slip over. But as she scooted closer, she realised that it wasn’t a twig — it was a crack. “Fuck’s sake,” she said as she leaned over to inspect it. “How?”
She would have to call the cement guys and demand an explanation. At least, that’s what she thought until she saw what had caused the crack. A single blade of grass, now just poking its head through into the sunshine.
She smiled. Nature, too, could be spiteful.
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