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Controlling Your Weeds

By Rachael K. Jones

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I always mow it twice a week during peak season. Some might consider that excessive, but if you want to keep a lawn happy, you’ve got to put in the work. That starts with regular mowing. The ideal height is three inches in spring and two inches in fall, which protects against pest incursion and cuts down on the amount of watering needed. Now that’s a little longer than your average grass this far South, but here we grow something a little more unusual than your average Kentucky bluegrass or bermudagrass. A twice-a-week schedule helps me stay on top of my lawn’s needs. Plus it gives me an excuse to patrol the yard for weeds.

People have strong opinions on lawn mowers–gas versus electric, push versus riding. I’m of the opinion that any mower will work, as long as the grass gets cut. My granddaughter likes the riding mower at her elementary school, but gas mowers are loud. Hear that roar? Hush now and listen, Aiden. It’s distant now, but you can feel it in your jawbone, like an approaching bomber on a cloudy day.

Now we get to the important part: you’ve got to stay on top of weeds. They creep in from outside the yard, carried by wind and birds and those nasty little brats who think it’s funny to jump my fence when they lose a soccer ball. One of these days, they’re going to find more than just their soccer balls waiting for them in my yard, and then they’ll wish they’d learned the respect their parents neglected to teach them.

Hey now, Aiden. That kind of language is uncalled for. I’m not being unreasonable. A man has a right to defend his property. Especially from weeds.

The very worst weeds, the ones that will keep you up at night, spread underground from a neighbor’s yard, or from the public land easement between your house and the road. If you’re really unlucky, your property butts up against a bit of wilderness. A creek, say, or some untended woods. Then you’ve got weeds bashing against the property line like Genghis Khan’s barbarian hordes.

The hard truth is this: there will always be more weeds, which is why you can never stop fighting them. Take a long vacation, let down your guard for a few days, and the lawn you’ve worked so hard for will be overrun lickety-split.

The poisons? Herbicide is the technical term, but sure, call them poisons if you insist. Poisons, as you say, are essential to responsible lawn care, so yes, I apply them appropriately and according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Some herbicides can be sprayed on the whole lawn without harming the grass. A good broadcast spraying a couple times per season will knock out most weeds, if you remember to do it. I dilute the herbicide down with water, load it into a backpack sprayer, and suit up in disposable plastic coveralls so I don’t track it into the house where my granddaughter plays. I also do spot spraying between mows–crabgrass, mostly, but also white clover, and the telltale spade-shaped leaves of bindweed. It helps to imagine myself as an immigration agent patrolling the border fence for illegals.

You’ve got to be careful when spot-spraying, because a general herbicide can kill everything. If you’re not careful, you’ll burn out the grass too, and it can take months for it to recover afterwards. Reseeding takes time and proper fertilizing. If it comes to that, bone meal makes great fertilizer. Blood meal, too. They make it from slaughterhouse remnants, which makes it a cheap choice.

Personally, I find it more satisfying to rip weeds out by hand. As you can see, Aiden, I’ve accumulated a great collection of weed-pulling tools over the years. My rack in the garage is a cross between a medieval torture dungeon and a dentist, with long spiked forks and curling serpent-tongues designed to dig in deep and yank a plant out roots and all, leaving nothing behind that could regrow again.

And you do have to get the whole root, especially for plants like dandelions. Back when I was younger, I didn’t always bother to do the job properly on a dandelion, and two weeks later, that motherfucker would pop right back up where I’d left it, bigger than ever.

So you could say I’ve learned to kill my pity. You can’t let a weed’s appearance deceive you. Some are quite pretty before they go to seed. The kids at my granddaughter’s school used to make flower crowns from daisies and dandelions on the playground before I got out there with my backpack sprayer and stopped the infestation. Just because something starts out pretty doesn’t mean it won’t become a problem.

Which brings me to you, of course. You’re a young fellow, Aiden. You look pretty normal. At first I was thrilled when you bought the abandoned lot next door. Ever since Mike Durham died, the real estate agent has had such a tough time selling the place. They’re legally required to disclose when a violent death has occurred on the property, which kept a lot of nice people away. Like they’d fumigated the whole house with an insecticide that targeted decency.

But that didn’t keep you from buying it. You snapped it up at a discount and moved right in, brave soul.

And thank the Lord someone did! Five years of total neglect destroys a yard, not to mention the impact such an eyesore has on our neighborhood property values. The weeds have gotten so thick, you can’t take two steps on actual grass without tripping over thistles or kudzu. And you can imagine what that has meant for my yard.

The stuff coming over has been unbelievable. I might let my granddaughter play Rainbow Unicorn Fairies outside if it was just dandelions and crabgrass, but we’re talking poison ivy, brambles, nightshade, and other stuff I don’t want her touching. And without regular mowing, the grass got long enough for critters. Spiders at first, then snakes, then nasty ground wasps striped in yellow war paint that’ll sting if you even look at them funny, all slavering to get across the property line and ruin my perfect lawn.

I had high hopes you’d restore order. Mike Durham was a good guy. A great neighbor. Had a cute granddaughter who would cross the yard to play with mine. He kept a lawn so perfect that Jesus would have wept and called himself a sinner.

But you moved in, and you didn’t do a thing about the problem. At first I gave you time to get settled, figuring you had your work cut out for you, this being your first house and all. I could only imagine all the fixing you had to do. I know they ripped out the blood-stained carpet and scrubbed Mike’s brains off the living room wall, but a house shouldn’t sit empty for so long. It can develop problems.

We’re all neighborly around here, which means we’ve got a game plan for this sort of thing. We had this problem when Tyler White first moved in across the street, and we dealt with it in the same way. Raymond Johnston sent his teen son over to offer to mow the grass for ten dollars, and Frank left a few flyers for his lawn care company. I moved my Saturday morning lawn sessions to the afternoon, when Tyler was out in his driveway fixing up his muscle car. The timing, you see, gave me a window for some natural evangelism. I offered him some loaner tools and an old mower, and pretty soon he got with the program.

But you don’t seem to want things easy. Here you come prattling at me about lawn monoculture and ecological deserts, sounding like some kind of weed-loving brain-washed college dropout. What am I supposed to do with that? Plant a memorial garden in honor of the damn ragweed?

And I thought to myself, “The kid’s young. He doesn’t understand his responsibilities. I’ll have a talk with him.” See, your charts and graphs are beside the point. A lawn isn’t just about a lawn, or even about looking nice and fitting in. It’s about a neighborhood. A way of life. A lawn is about respecting yourself.

I get it, I really do. You’re freshly fallen from your mother’s milky bosom. You think being old enough to vote means doing whatever the hell you want, how you want it, and nobody can tell you otherwise. When we’re young, we don’t always realize how our actions are impacting others. All of that can be forgiven, if the destruction is small and easily reversible.

But you had to take it one step further. You had to flatten out all those moving boxes and lay them out to smother what was left of the good, green grass Mike worked so hard to cultivate. All for what? Organic white clover ground cover, my ass. It’s not a lawn. It’s an eyesore. It’s an infestation, and I won’t stand for it.

Which brings us back to Mike Durham.

Mike was there for me when I was young like you, new to home ownership and to the neighborhood. Like you, I didn’t want to learn from him. We all resist at first, when we’re young and wild and think we know everything, but with time and patience, Mike set me straight as the rosebed borders.

Like I said, the grass around here is special. It’s not what you’ll usually find in the suburbs of Atlanta. It’s way more ancient than the stuff from Home Depot, which only came from Africa or Asia, and has to be babied along to survive. No, this grass seed is drought-resistant, green in the heat of summer, frost-tolerant, and mostly it takes care of itself. It came from somewhere overseas, from one of those old British burial grounds with the stones around them. It’s an extraordinary plant. Intelligent, too. It blesses those that serve it, from those English manor-lords all the way to our doorstep.

You want wealth? Status? High property values? All you have to do is give it what it needs.

And it always tells you exactly what it needs from you.

Oh, don’t sob like that. You’re not a child anymore. Man up and face the truth, Aiden. The lawn is kind. It only asks for what it needs to help us all. And what it needs from you is such a small thing. A tiny piece of you. Useless, really. Heck, you’ll want to give it over, once you know how the lawn will bless you in return.

Here, look. I have the tool. I keep it on the rack with the others. That’s how essential it is to good lawn care, even if I don’t use it often. This is the pact, the thing you must give up if you want to be in control. Just a small and useless thing. It won’t even leave much of a scar. See, here’s mine. Mike had very steady hands, and I didn’t struggle much. I just tell people I had my appendix removed. I know it’s long and sharp, but we have to dig in deep to get the roots. You don’t want it to grow back again. If that were to happen, then we’d be right here again, having a very different conversation.

It can happen sometimes, though. Just look at Mike Durham. I guess whoever did his procedure back in the day didn’t dig deep enough, or else they hadn’t perfected it yet, because somehow that weed grew back and ruined that good man. Maybe it was the drought that did it, or maybe he’d overfertilized, or forgot to set the sprinklers during his two weeks off in August, but his lawn got sickly. The green was fading. I spotted patches of advance dandelion scouts just over the border. Suddenly he wasn’t out there on Saturdays with the rest of us, doing his piece to keep the neighborhood green and tidy. Instead, he watched the lawns from his screened-in porch, clutching his rifle in one hand and muttering under his breath.

When it got bad, I tried to go over and speak to him. I don’t like to meddle in another man’s business, and your lawn is your own precious property. I wasn’t intending any offense, but when I knocked, I found myself staring down that barrel of cold steel. Mike was always an excellent hunter. He stank something awful, like stale booze and a sewer line.

I asked him if he was all right, but he wouldn’t answer. I brought up the lawn and he just babbled on about “stepping on the eyes.” He said he had to keep it long because they could see better when it was short. I asked after his granddaughter, because I hadn’t seen her around so much lately, but he only looked at me like I was crazy and tried to push me out the doorway and slam it shut.

It’s a pity. A mind is like a lawn, too. You’ve got to cultivate it, root out thoughts that don’t belong, keep it clean and neat and matched with your neighbor’s so you’re fit for company. Sometimes a bad thought invades underground, out of the wild, or from an irresponsible neighbor. Sometimes that thought comes back again and again, until it’s flourishing, replacing the clean lawn with its own twisted little sprouts. If you let it get too bad, it’ll take over completely.

Well, I was upset, but I could see it was no use arguing any further with Mike just then. I probably would have let it be and brought it up at the neighbor council meeting the next week, but as I was heading back to my house, my granddaughter popped out the backdoor to play in the sandbox. Mike got one look at her and really lost his shit. Shrieking fit to wake the dead. “It’s not a girl! It’s not a girl!” But when that rifle swung around to aim for her, well.

It was time to remind Mike of his responsibilities.

See, sometimes there’s a real bad patch of weeds, bad enough that simple weeding won’t do the trick. At that point, you have to turn to the strong stuff. Problem is, the harshest herbicide doesn’t discriminate. It takes the weeds and grass too, and sometimes nothing wants to grow on the spot where you’ve used too much.

They never figured out who killed Mike Durham, but given his state of mind and the way he was waving around that rifle, people around here agree he offed himself, and that’s exactly what the police put down as his cause of death.

What, did I kill Mike Durham? Haven’t you been listening? I’m just the guy with the tools and the know-how, not some sort of crazed neighborhood vigilante.

It occurs to me you’ve never met my granddaughter. Shall I call her in now? She’s such a cute little thing, but she does have quite an appetite.

Blood and bone, Aiden. Blood and bone.

Do you hear the mowers, Aiden? They’re almost here. Their tanks are full, and the blades so sharp they can shave the baby hair from your soft little wrist. Now’s the time when you make your deal. Are you going to submit? Will you let us root out your weeds? Will you walk out of here a man and assume your proper place in this world? Or should I let in my sweet granddaughter and do things her way?

It’s time to take control.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod 940

September 27th 2024

Controlling Your Weeds by Rachael K Jones

Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart

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Hi everyone, welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast. I’m Alasdair, your host and this week’s story comes to us from Escape Artists alumni and newly minted Eugie award winner, Rachael K Jones! Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Portland, Oregon. Rachael is a Eugie Award Winner and a Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy finalist. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of venues worldwide, including Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and all four weekly Escape Artists podcasts. Follow her on Bluesky @RachaelKJones.bsky.social, or find her at www.RachaelKJones.com.

 

Now, get ready, because the truth is, all is well in the garden.

 

Or is it?

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Rachael always does the best work and this is no exception. Because at its core, this story is very simple: it’s one man explaining to another why he’s about to murder him. The direct, almost chirpy way this is communicated is where the story’s horror starts to come into focus. The murder is a certainty. The violence is a certainty. All we’re being given is context, delivered in a gentle, folksy way the same way you’d get directions from an older relative.

 

So the first thing we think is that this is a racial crime, and Rachael does nothing to rule that out. The discrimination becomes the next level of the horror as we see that race and class are both likely motives. Then there’s the NIMBY movement, what I thought was a UK term but was actually first coined in the US in a February 1979 newspaper article in Virginia‘s Daily Press. The term has come to refer to organisations who worsen racial segregation, maintain and deepen economic inequality and oppose affordable housing. All of which tallies with what we see here. As does the awful, off hand, cheerful contempt at the previous owner ending his life the way it’s implied he did.

 

It would be so easy to leave it there. It would be even easier to overegg the pudding. Rachael does neither, building this ziggurat of folksy bigotry and hatred and putting something ancient and hungry and malicious at the top of it. Every single crime we think these people have done, every single thing terrible thing we suspect they think is valid. But Rachael ties one last blood-drenched ribbon around the tree and provides us with patient, brutal context and, just off the page, something that looks like a little girl patiently waits to know if it’ll be fed or if it gets to eat.

 

But what I really love about this is that Rachael offers us knowledge without certainty. You can drop any number of lenses over the end of this story. Colonialism. The literal seed of evil in humanity being a lifeform we’re not equipped to perceive unless it’s already taken us. Hallucination. All of them work. All of them are here if you want them to be. But mercy isn’t. What a story. Brilliantly written, read and produced.

 

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Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

 

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

 

We’re back next week with Cheating Death by Henry Herz. Tanka Milojevic will be your narrator, Chelsea will be your producer and Kat will be your host.. Then as now it will be a production of the Escape Artists Foundation and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

PseudoPod will see you next week and leaves you with these words from someone I suspect the lead in this story would get on fa too well with:

 

‘You know what I say? I say one down, a couple hundred thousand to go. I don’t mean to get on my high horse, but I’m telling you, I do not like the deer. I’m sick of it; they’re taking over. They’re like rats. They’re destroying the ecosystem. I see a dead deer on the side of the road and I think, “That’s a start.”’

 

We’ll see you next week, folks. Until then, have fun!