Day 592

There was an old saying my father loved to tell when gardening.
One to rot, one to grow, one to vermin, one to crow.
He lived by that rule, always planting four times more than normal people did.

I once asked him what a vermin was, being four at the time I hadn't a clue.
He said it was the noises at night that creaked up and down the stairs.
Mum overheard and told him to shut up and quit scaring me.

Nothing more on vermin was said though I still wondered what one looked like.
I remember peering over the bannisters late at night trying to spot them running.
Now I'm not sure what I saw but it was nothing like the rodents that everyone else says are vermin.

It happened in the summer of 1975, when dad got too sick to do the garden.
Mum did it instead, planting nowhere near as much as him.
It was too expensive, she said, to keep buying so many seeds that never even made it to flower.

I repeated dad's rhyme but she said the only rot was in that bloody superstition.
She looked angry and afraid, it was the first time I'd ever heard her swear.
Later that week my routine stair-gazing finally paid off.

They weren't rodents, no, these were bigger than rats and stood on long arm-like limbs.
They were about the same size as me and I was five or so at the time so maybe 3 foot tall.
Their heads rolled around their shoulders like a toy train on a circle shaped track.

Constantly rotating and observing but only around them and thankfully never up.
As they trod loudly up the first few steps I could see that their skin was blue, deep blue and muddy.
One of them held the empty seed packet my mum had tossed into the bin.

I hid behind my door just before they got up the stairs, heard them tread into my parent's room.
Mum never made a sound - I had no idea what they'd done until morning.
Her eyes were wide open and unseeing, the seed packet had been placed in her hand.