“That’s… That’s so nice of you.” The black-haired girl said. She gripped the handle with both hands and pressed the spade’s flat surface to her chest. To Hugh she appeared to be afraid that he would go back on his words and steal it away from her. “I’m sorry I was mean to you before, about you not returning. I could’ve waited a bit longer for you to return.”
“All’s well that ends well.” Hugh said, touched by her apology. Not many people apologize anymore, nor mean it when they do. “I’m here. You’re here. And you finally got the spade. So, what’s next?”
She burst out laughing, humor returning to her.
“What’s next you ask? What do you think is next when one has a spade in hand?” She extended her arm upwards and pointed the spade to the sky, looking like the true incarnation of the soil knight. “We dig!”
She scuttled back to her previous spot in the flowerbed and stabbed the spade into the soil. She proceeded to make her holes, thrusting, lifting, and placing soil. The spade became an extension of her hand as she fell into an efficient and mechanical rhythm of soil removal. Hugh stood there and watched, seeing a shine of innocent happiness across the girl’s face.
Hugh stood there for a few minutes more, admiring her dedication to digging, when she slowly came to a stop and looked up at him. The joy in her face had not waned but had become mixed with concern.
She placed the spade upon her lap, not minding the soil on her clothes.
“I’m sorry. I just got so wrapped up in the spade, and with digging, that I ignored you.” She looked around at the holes that she had made. “Would you like to help me dig? There are plenty of more holes to make.”
“Sure, why not?” Hugh crossed into the flowerbed and sat down next to the girl.
“Wait one second!” The girl pipped up. “Aren’t you afraid to get your clothes dirty?”
“They’re just clothes, no worries at all.” Hugh gave a dismissive shrug. He wasn’t going to bring up that he had already been in flowerbed. “If they get dirty then I’ll wash them. But, what should I dig with? My hands?”
“While not the best digging tool,” the black-haired girl tossed the spoon to Hugh, “it gets the job done.”
Hugh started to dig, and similar to his first time in the flowerbed, he fell into a trance.
His shoveling hand moved independently of thought as it worked overtime to scoop and carve out holes with the impractically long spoon that was ill suited to digging. While the black-haired girl could form a hole with a single scoop or two, Hugh required five or more scoops to dig his own. Not only was the spoon’s head much smaller than the spade’s blade, but the head’s curvature caused a fraction of the soil that Hugh drew from the ground to sprinkle back into the hole. Instead of deterring and frustrating Hugh, these spoon-based limitations narrowed his focus and concentration.
“Hey, snap out of it.” The girl roused him with a playful, but sharp, poke from the shade. “I see that you’re keen on digging, but it’s time for something grander!” She tossed a small packet to him. “Now, get to planting!”
Hugh opened the packet that contained a copious number of seeds. “So, how many should I plant?”
“All of them!” The girl shouted with glee and tore open a packet of her own.
They filled each hole with seeds and buried each seed with soil. Feeling like a bird scanning a landscape littered with foothills, Hugh looked down at the myriad of mounds that would one day germinate life. He had never done any sort of planting before in his life, having only seen his grandmother toiling away in her own garden. Hugh didn’t know which types of plants these seeds would produce, nor when, but the act of planting made him feel closer to her through the satisfaction that he imagined that she had felt while gardening.
The girl jabbed the spade into the ground, craned her neck to the sky and let out an exaggerated yawn.
“Oh boy! I’m feeling exhausted after that.” She said and looked over at Hugh. “Are you hungry at all? I have some snacks in my bag that I could share”
Hugh peered over at her bag. It was one of those overly tiny bags that barely spanned two hand widths.
“I haven’t eaten since this morning,” Hugh said, indeed quite hungry, “but I doubt that you have enough snacks in that bag for the two of us.”
The girl grabbed her bag and dropped it onto the soil in front of her.
“Neither of us will starve today,” she said, “I got enough for the both of us.”
With that said she unclasped the bag and retrieved the contents within. She wasn’t exaggerating when she said that she had enough for both of them. She had enough to feed all the people sitting on the benches, the dozen or so finches hopping around at their feet, and the pigeons plodding around in circles.
Out of the bag came two bottles of water, two apples, two packets of cashews, two halves of a sandwich in their own air sealed containers, and two sets of cookies wrapped in cellophane paper. Hugh looked on in amazement at how she was able to unpack all that food from her tiny, seemingly useless, novelty bag.
There must have been some curse on that bag, where it would swallow her whole if she didn’t fill its bottomless belly.
“Can you tell me, how in the world were you able to pack all that stuff into such a tiny bag?” Hugh asked and accepted his share of water, apples, nuts, cookies, and sandwich halves. “And why do you have so much food in the first place?”
“What do you mean?” The girl gave him a confused look and popped off the sandwich container’s lid.
“Well, your bag is awfully small. Too small indeed for all that food,” Hugh said, struggling to open his sandwich container, “and if I had to make a guess, you wouldn’t be able to eat all that food on your own. I know that I couldn’t.”
“You are quite the pessimist, aren’t you? Just because the task seems difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible.” She took the container away from Hugh and swiftly popped it open with her thumbs. She handed the container back to Hugh and dove into her sandwich. “I wanted to pack the bag, and so I did it. As for the food, my pessimistic friend… I packed so much, well, because…” She trailed off and averted her eyes to the sandwich half in her hands that was now a sandwich eighth after a single one of her bites. “Um, it’s hard to say, honestly. I had a feeling we would meet again, that you would bring the spade. That you wouldn’t….” She trailed off again, eyes looking down to nowhere in particular.
“That I wouldn’t what?” Hugh asked.
“That you would disappoint me.” The black-haired finished off her sandwich, palmed an apple and chomped on it vigorously.
It was Hugh’s turn to wear a confused expression. “Why would I disappoint you?”
“Look. I said enough.” The girl aimed for a strict tone, but her mouthful of apple and accompanying munching worked against her. “If you want to keep your food then I recommend you drop the issue.”
“Honestly, I don't want to give up these cookies.” Hugh replied.
The black-haired dropped the apple core into the plastic container and unknotted the bag of cashews.
“Not a single word more and you can keep the cookies.” The black-haired girl said. “Deal?”
He didn't want to test his luck by responding with a ‘yes,’ because caution told him that she would have taken his verbal agreement as a breach of her conditions and thus grounds for confiscating his cookies.
To retain his bounty of food, Hugh pledged himself to their deal with a simple nod.
The black-haired girl chuckled and quickly covered her mouth with both hands. Hugh's dedication to cookies amused her and she didn't want to shatter the serious atmosphere with her laughs. The very act of trying to calm herself only incited even more laughter to the point where she could no longer contain it. Her hands fell to her sides and she permitted her laughter to ring out loudly and freely.
