A Stone Gardner

Marvin’s wife died several months ago, a couple days before his birthday.

The exact number, he wasn’t sure. Time had lost its shape. The days bled into one another, like a dish of watercolor left out in the rain. From the moment she fell ill, his life became a smear of boiled linens and bitter herbs. Her body, once strong and sinewy, withered until she resembled a corpse. He heard her coughing fits that rattled her thin frame from across the house whenever he was late to administer her medication.

When the fever claimed her, the silence that followed was not peaceful. It was charged with the hollow hush of his neighbors. They brought food and flowers; yellow and cheery, but they were his wife’s friends, not his, and they danced around his grief without quite meeting his gaze.

He took time off work. At first, he told himself it was a brief leave. A few days a week. Then a couple mornings he simply stayed home, and no one came knocking. No email arrived demanding he return to the office. Whether out of mercy or discomfort, he never knew. When worn plainly, grief had a way of pushing people away.

There was no adequate word for it. Nothing large enough to represent the weight pressed against his ribs. And since then, he’d waded through life as though submerged in ash, each breath gritty and his thoughts too heavy.

After she was buried, his whole body remained encased with stone. It covered his body in a dark gray film, and pulled his skin taut. Sometimes a week would pass with Marvin in one position; standing beside the bed where she died or sitting on the balcony overlooking the meadow behind their house.

Marvin did not care. Visitors stopped coming by, his family thought time would heal his wounds and refrained from demanding his attention. The moments he turned to stone and became a statue were brief reprieves from the choking loss.

Even if he was selfish for wanting it, he was relieved.

Meals were seldom more than dry bread and whatever he remembered to take from the cupboard or a can of soup and some crackers. The grocery market overwhelmed Marvin: the noise, the people, the colors that seemed too loud against the dull buzz in his head. He stopped going. Eventually, he passed more time as stone than flesh. The shift came so often that he scarcely noticed its onset. Hunger and thirst were distant things, faint ideas that reached him only when he surfaced briefly into his body. Even then, the ache of living was brief. A stray thought of her and the weight returned and he became still once more.

One day, Marvin was back in their room. The bedroom remained almost exactly as it had been the day she died. Not out of reverence, but more because he could not bring himself to enter it with purpose. The door stayed half-shut, and he passed it often without glancing in. On the day he did, it was with the caution of a man favoring a wound. The blankets were still rumpled on her side, as if she might return to them. A faint impression of her body remained in the mattress, the hollow where she had curled into herself those last few days. Her shawl, the pale one with the worn edges, lay folded on the footboard. Marvin had no recollection of folding it. It simply ended up there, as things do in the last days, and none of his visitors had dared move it since.

Dust had begun to settle. The air in the room felt thinner, as if her breath had never quite left it and the walls were still waiting to hear her voice again. Marvin drifted to the window, knocking into the bed frame. His arm stung but the physical awareness was a welcome distraction.

The shutters were closed. She had liked them open, but the winter had crept in after her passing and he had shut them one morning without thinking. Even on the milder days, Marvin did not open them. He could not remember why.

As he turned to stone again, Marvin considered the view of the meadow from a different angle. There were garden beds blanketed in snow. A greenhouse with fractured panes. Upturned bird feeds and a fountain with frozen water pooling in the center. Stone crawled over his face, and this time Marvin thought about the state of his wife’s garden.

It had suffered in her absence, growing wild while she lay bedridden. It became worse in the weeks after, when he could barely dress himself, let alone tend to creeping root or vine. Brambles knotted themselves over her lilies. The rosemary had blackened. Moss curled thick over stone and step. The wind carried rot beneath its teeth from unpicked tomatoes and berries. Then winter descended and Marvin let himself forget how readily he neglected his wife’s passions now that she wasn’t alive. But he looked now.

It had once been her joy—small and plain as it was. She had known each plant by name, whispering to them as she worked, her voice threading softly through the stems and leaves. In summer, she sang. Not always in tune, but always with feeling. The labor left her pale and breathless, her slight frame bowed by effort, yet there had always been satisfaction in the weariness. A lightness, even, that lingered in her smile long after the sun had set.

Marvin could not bear to say her name.

But he would take up her spade.

When Marvin broke out of the stone, the snow had begun to thaw. Water drained from the gutters and the outside world sounded distinctly wet. He had no proper boots. His old pair had cracked at the sole from disuse, so he bought new ones—stiff, heavy things that pinched his ankles. He bought gloves as well. The first pair he tried were hers, soft with age and flecked with dried soil. He had barely slipped one over his hand when the memory of her fingers in them—the way she would clap the dirt off her palms or press her knuckles into the small of her back after bending too long—overtook him. Stone bloomed across his forearm before he could draw breath.

That would not do.

If he meant to reclaim the garden, he would need to guard himself. He would need tools that did not remember her touch.

Marvin began with the edges.

He cleared the path first, prying loose the paving stones that had sunken under frost and moss. Ice cracked beneath his boots, and the wet chill crept up through his soles no matter how new they were. He worked steadily, breath clouding in the morning air, sleeves damp past the wrist. The spade’s handle felt foreign in his grip—lighter than he expected for a tool made of steel and wood.

By midday, an ache settled into his shoulders and spine. The sort that asked nothing but grit and time. It was almost refreshing in its normalcy.

Marvin kept his eyes low, his focus sharp. If a birdsong reminded him of her humming, he shook it off. If a clump of forget-me-nots pushed up early through the slush, he turned his back until he tamped down the emotions they brought.

He worked, and the work kept the stone at bay.

Near the rosemary, he found the trowel she had favored, half-buried under a drift of frost-burned leaves. The wooden handle was worn smooth where her fingers had gripped it. For a moment he only stared. Then he reached down and brushed the dirt away.

He set it aside, as a marker that his wife had been there.

At the far end of the garden stood the greenhouse—tilted slightly from an old frost heave, its frame silvered with rust, its glass dulled by months of snow and blown soil. A few panes had fractured under the weight of winter’s first storm. One had shattered entirely, leaving a jagged gap in the roof that let in cold and crows alike. He hadn’t set foot inside it since autumn.

Before, Marvin’s wife had coaxed tomatoes from it in November and basil that survived until frost clawed at the door. She would kneel on folded blankets with her sleeves rolled, her lips pressed tight in concentration.

Now the air inside smelled of mold. A clay pot lay broken by the door, its shards pointed like teeth and scattered across the stone threshold. Dead vines clung to the beams, brittle and gray, and when Marvin touched one, it crumbled in his hand.

He left the door open to air the greenhouse out.

The next day, he returned with boards, nails, and a few new panes wrapped in burlap. His fingers were stiff from the cold, and he nicked his palm on the first nail he set, but he did not stop. He climbed the old step-ladder and measured each broken window with careful precision, the way she used to mark fabric for mending.

A crow settled on the beam just outside and watched him work.

“You’ll have to find another roost,” Marvin informed.

The bird tilted its head, black eyes unblinking. He ignored it. The bird ruffled its feathers and flapped off again, finding another perch.

For the window panes, he used a mix of salvaged and new glass. One or two spare panes had been stored in the shed—leftovers from a repair she had planned the spring before she fell ill. They were dusty, scratched, but intact. The rest, he bought secondhand from a local scrap yard, carefully selecting the clearest ones he could find.

To fit them, he chiseled out the old putty with a dull blade and replaced what he could with homemade window glazing—linseed oil and whiting stirred together in a glass jar, the recipe still pinned to the shed door in her handwriting. He had to heat it over the stove, just like she did. It wasn’t perfect. It crumbled a little around the corners. But it held.

Where glass was too expensive or the panes too oddly shaped to replace, he used clear plastic sheeting tacked over the gaps—tensioned with care, sealed with old weatherstripping. A temporary fix, yes, but one good enough to keep out the rain and coax a bit of warmth inside.

The result was uneven, slightly mismatched, but functional.

By dusk, the worst of the gaps were patched. Light filtered through the repaired roof, pale and softened, catching on the fine dust he had stirred from the floor. He stood inside, surrounded by the smell of damp earth.

Marvin did not seize up that day. Not even when he looked at her old watering can, still hanging from its hook by the door. His arm tingled in the telltale sign of stone, before it formed up to his elbow. But it did not cripple him entirely, he simply favored his right side and retired for the evening.

The next morning, Marvin turned his attention onto the fountain.

It stood in the middle of the back garden, where it had been meant to anchor the view from the kitchen window. A shallow basin, wide and weathered, perched atop a crumbling pedestal of carved stone. Ice had gripped its center and refused to melt, even as the days warmed. The fountain hadn’t been drained properly before winter came—one of the many things left undone in those final weeks.

He brought out a kettle and poured boiling water over the rim, watching the ice crack in fine webs. He chipped carefully at the edges with a trowel, clearing the surface inch by inch. Sludge had gathered at the bottom: sodden leaves and old algae. He rolled up his sleeves and scooped it out by hand until it was clear.

The metal piping, once painted black, had rusted to orange. He soaked the joints in vinegar, scrubbed with a wire brush until his knuckles ached, then checked the small pump. It sputtered weakly when he tested it indoors after dismantling it from the fountain to check its integrity, but it worked. That was enough. He reinstalled it and refilled the basin with buckets drawn from the kitchen sink, each trip measured and slow. The weight of the water settled like breath into the stone. By the time he stepped back to look at it, the sun had dropped low enough to gild the ice melting along the rim.

Inside, he peeled off his gloves and set them to dry on the radiator. The house smelled of soap, metal, and old dust. He hadn’t eaten since the morning, but the kettle still held some heat, and he drank the last of the water lukewarm. Feeling the pangs of hunger for the first time in weeks, Marvin opened the fridge in a show of optimism which quickly soured upon discovering that it was empty.

Marvin hesitated.

He wanted fresh fruit, red meat, and bread that was still warm. His mouth filled with saliva at the thought. For the first time since his wife died, he went back to the grocery market.

Spring crept through the meadow. The ground lost its crust of frost and turned pliable beneath Marvin’s boots. He stepped more carefully now, feeling the give of mud underfoot instead of the crackle of ice.

The garden took shape. Where once vines and brittle stalks had curled in on themselves, he cleared and coaxed them back to order. He pruned what he could salvage and pulled what had succumbed, making neat piles at the far end of the yard for compost. His wife’s trellises still stood—one leaning precariously—so he righted them and hammered their bases deeper into the softened earth.

Birdsong returned. At first it was sparse, but soon it nested closer. The bird feeder he hung from its stand swung lightly in the breeze, spilling seeds across the mossy patch beneath. Squirrels came first, jittery and possessive, then chipmunks who darted in and out with their cheeks full. Cardinals brightened the branches like embers. Even a few doves settled on the fence rail, soft and unworried.

It was on one of those mornings—cool, wind-laced, but bright—that Marvin decided to plant something.

The beds were cleared, the soil raked fine. His knees creaked when he knelt, and his gloves still didn’t fit quite right, but the dirt was dark and fragrant in a way that stirred something familiar. He visited the nursery in town with a list in hand—tulips, pansies, primrose.

Some weren’t in season. Others, he knew, would struggle this early. But he bought them anyway. Her favorites, several trays of fragile blue forget-me-nots, their petals like bits of sky caught in the green.

The stone came again, as he knew it would.

It started in his chest—just under the sternum—an ache like pressure beneath the ribs. He doubled over and breathed deeply. It spread outward, encasing his torso in a slow, choking grip. But his arms remained in his control. So did his legs.

Marvin learned to move with it.

His balance shifted. He leaned forward more to compensate, walked with shorter steps. The stone dulled sensation, but not completely—he could still feel the warmth of the sun on his neck, the grit of dirt beneath his nails. And so he did what he could. Slowly. Deliberately. As if he were carrying something precious at all times.

To pass the time he was encased, he read in the garden.

The chair scraped unevenly against the flagstones when he dragged it out, and he set his coffee on the flat stone where a potted lavender used to sit. The breeze teased at the pages. When the wind blew too strong, he simply laid the book flat and watched the tall grass sway.

The flowers brightened week by week. Forget-me-nots bloomed early, their soft blue blooms spilling over the bed borders. When Marvin passed by them, he did not touch them. He barely looked at them. But he kept their soil damp and clear of weeds. He drank his coffee beside them. He talked to the flowers and the animals who grew familiar with his presence; about his day and his thoughts.

He returned to work, unannounced and without ceremony toward the end of spring. The office looked smaller than he remembered, the walls closer, as though they'd drawn inward in his absence. No one asked where he’d been. A few of his coworkers clapped him on the back. He nodded, said little, and sat at his old desk, which still bore a picture of his wife.

Later, he made his rounds through the neighborhood. Not all in one afternoon—just a house or two at a time. He stood awkwardly on porches and offered his thanks for the cards, the casseroles, the quiet kindnesses that had arrived when he couldn’t bring himself to speak. Most people didn’t invite him in. They stood in the doorway and gave him that soft, unsure look.

He understood why.

Some days were harder than others. The stone still came, unpredictable as the weather. Sometimes it seized his leg, and he walked stiffly, half-dragging it behind him. Other times it coiled up his side, making it difficult to sit straight or turn his head fully.

He did not expect joy in the shape it had once come. He no longer waited for the return of ease, or for the ache to lift cleanly from his ribs. That kind of living, full and bright and weightless, belonged to a time before.

His life had reshaped itself, and there was no returning to what had been. The garden, too, had changed under his care. It didn’t mirror the way his wife had kept it, not exactly, but it bloomed just the same. And he knew, somehow, she would have loved it still. After all, it was his hands that kept it growing now.

And Marvin remained.