My Brain Has a Secret Garden

How it begins

Leila Ash dreamed of a garden with a locked gate and woke with soil beneath her fingernails.

The rehabilitation room was spotless. Her hands had not left the bed. A monitor displayed stable integration, while somewhere behind her eyes a small tree shook rain from leaves shaped like unfamiliar letters.

Oscar Venn came on his morning round carrying a plant instead of a tablet. He was the clinic's rehabilitation botanist, a title Leila had considered a funding mistake until the neural graft began flowering in her sleep.

'What grew last night?' he asked.

'A gate.'

'Open or closed?'

'It had my name on the outside.'

He set the plant beside her bed. Its leaves turned toward her. On the monitor, a new branch appeared in the integration model.

Leila had worked as a translator before the accident. She remembered words as rooms connected by doors, meaning carried carefully between places that could not become identical. Now strangers' memories grew inside those rooms. A child's kitchen. A storm at sea. A woman's certainty that she had hidden something under a stone.

The clinic called them scaffold residues. Temporary. Nonpersonal. Safe to prune.

Oscar looked at the small tree on the screen. 'Can you tell whose memories they are?'

'Can you?'

He did not answer quickly enough.

Beyond the glass wall, a company observer spoke into a headset. Leila saw her name on a document headed MATURE TISSUE HARVEST. The garden inside her went suddenly still.

Oscar followed her gaze.

'That was not the agreed schedule,' he said.

'That is not the important part of the heading.'

In her mind, someone knocked from the other side of the gate. Not a memory of knocking. A patient request happening now.

Leila laid her hands flat on the sheet, keeping the impossible soil where she could see it.

'Before anything is pruned,' she said, 'I want to know who else is growing here.'