Heirloom Seeds

by Jade Wallace

We moved into the rented lower half of the 
house in spring. In the mornings, the walls 
were dappled with the silhouettes of the scant 
white carnations in the window box. It had 
been a slow few years for the garden,
hardly humming with bumblebees, and
the plants were all struggling to make it 
through the seasons. But for the moment,
the flowers’ fresh damp scent still spilled in the 
kitchen window, so unlike the closed, moist 
smell of the basement apartment we used to have. 
We’d gotten lucky. Steady jobs took us out of
that gathering place for centipedes, who held 
regular council in the cabinets, that drop point 
for spiders who hid their secrets in crevices 
under the floorboards, that dingy kingdom 
where mould ruled us all in tyrannical silence. 
Leaving was a kind of bitter triumph, because 
it meant that someone else was moving in. 

One afternoon, two weeks into our new lease,
I was cleaning out the back of the freezer and 
pulled out a plastic bag with six tiny flax seeds.
When I looked closer, the seeds had legs—
the bag was a crypt for bugs, half a dozen of 
them, perhaps kept by a former tenant who 
wanted them identifiably whole. 
That night when you got home, I led you
to the kitchen table to show you the corpses.
You put your face close to the counter 
and shrieked. The bugs were moving.
They were slowly wriggling their 
half-thawed limbs back to mobility. 
Bedbugs bite, you breathed, remembering 
the nursery rhyme your grandmother used 
to sing, the nightmare you inherited.
We took our find into the backyard and 
burned it, plastic bag and all,  in a bonfire so 
big that the neighbours came out to watch. 
We let the flames blaze on, long after 
the bugs had turned to ash, in a 
superstitious effort to ward off 
shadows from the past, always 
trailing too close behind us. 

Jade Wallace's poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in This Magazine, Canadian Literature, Studies in Social Justice, and elsewhere. They are the reviews editor for CAROUSEL, an organizing member of Draft Reading Series, and the co-founder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity whose most recent chapbooks are A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020) and A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky Press, 2020). <jadewallace.ca>