Found Fiction Issue 1: Julia's Garden

FOUND FICTION

Found Fiction is a collection of quick stories about a single object that has been found on the streets of New York. We only give ourselves 15 minutes to write, ensuring unfiltered creativity and tons of awkward mistakes.

VOL. 1| JULIA’S GARDEN

BROUGHT TO YOU BY SYLVAIN LABS

THE STIMULUS

MERIDETH: An obsession with a chef.

Turned into a shrine.

Abandoned out of shame.

From a green thumb deficit.

Dying foliage remains.

But, the love for Julia lives on.

JOEY: I found her at an interesting point in my life.

I’d come to the conclusion that i’d become stale. This could be read as being some great personal insight based on long hours of introspection and personal evaluation, but it wasn’t anything half as profound as that. I’d got dumped. She told me I was stale. I just happened to be honest enough to agree.

That following weekend I traveled home from my great, great aunt Matilda’s 95th birthday extravaganza. Needless to say, there isn’t anything too extravagant about an nonagenarians birthday party. There were gushy sweets of all kinds— pudding, custard, jello, of innumerable varieties. But I was left with time to go back and do an inventory of my life.

Induced by dram after dram of Glenlevit I realized what I had to do when I stumbled across my fifth grade geography project on Peru. Machu Picchu. The Andes. I always wanted to go, and always found a reason not to.

Within a week I was climbing up a mountainside in the Andes with a pack of mules ridden half by white spirit questers like myself and half by plump Incan descendants a full head shorter than me.

I’m not sure what I thought I’d find, but I spent a lot of time looking for it. I’d run off on side journeys when we’d make camp, hoping that it would be there. I’d come upon a vista, and there it would be enlightenment. Instead I found Julia.

:YEO On the last day sitting on a hillside hoping for a clue, a guinea pig pup came over and started nibbling at my saltines i’d laid out to snack on. I’m not sure what convinced me that she was the sign I’d been looking for, the sign I needed to care for something other than myself. But I’m fairly certain it was altitude sickness.

For the next two years I carried that guinea pig with me almost everywhere. Bars. Friends homes. I even had a pouch that I snuck her in to work with. At some point I built a sort of playground for here in front of the Brownstone I lived in at the time. I did this purely because I found a sign at the flea market with her name on it. I asked if she was interested. She fluffed her whiskers. I took it as a yes. She’d run around nibbling at grass and green ground covers while I’d sit and drink beers with friends on spring and summer evenings.

Last year Julia died. The craziest part is that I think that she did, somehow, bring perspective to my life. At least I tell myself this when I try to reason out the fact that I carried a south american rodent around with me for two years. I left her garden out front. It reminds me of her, and that being stale is term to describe bread. I’m just a man of my ways, and sometimes those ways include illegally smuggling sidekicks over international borders.

XAHRA: Ben and Julia had been house hunting for almost a year, and they were starting to lose their patience. Everything was always too small or too expensive or too something else. The most important thing to Julia was to have space outside to garden. On a Sunday morning they decided to go to one last open house. If this wasn’t the one, they were going to wait until Spring to look again.

Ben and Julia toured the house and then walked down into the basement. Dark and damp and empty except for something shining in the corner. They pushed and cringed their way through the dust-coated cobwebs and knelt down for a closer look. Ben laughed when he picked up the little abandoned sign that read “Welcome Julia’s Garden”. “The sign must be a sign”, he said.

A few weeks later they moved into their new home. They happily unpacked their things as Julia daydreamed about all of the beautiful flowers that she would grow in her garden, but her daydreams quickly turned to nightmares. That first night Julia woke up screaming from a nightmare. Ben tried to console by telling her that it was just a dream and it was over, but every night…

BEN: Bath Time Horsies I’m at the hardware store because I want to build a garden in the little square around the tree outside of my overpriced apartment in the West Village and I need a fence to keep the critters and homeless men out. When I tell the man at the hardware store what I need he looked at me and said, “These fences are for the horse corral.” I was like, “Are you crazy? These are small fences, one foot high if you’re lucky AND made of plastic. Are you talking about miniature horses? Toy horses? Some magical fairy horses I don’t know about? No horse would fit inside this fence. Horses are majestic creatures, strong, wild and independent. This fence would not work for horses.”

He looked at me, real serious, locked my eyes and said, “I’m talking about little horsies. They’re my friends. And I use these fences to corral them for playtime. Sometimes we play in the bathtub.”

This didn’t make any sense to me and the way he talked about the bathtub was super unsettling, so I quickly changed the subject to plants. “I want some plants for my garden, too. Something carnivorous.”

And you know what he said to me? He said, “My little horsies love shrubs. I think you should get these shrubs. Your garden will be lovely with the shrubs. Then I could bring my little horsies over to your garden and corral them in the fence and they can neigh and gallop in your shrubs. Then I can use your bathtub to play with my horsies in the water. How does that sound?”

ALEXANDRE: Julia's unkempt garden needed a trim. The white picket fence around this grubby patch of city green reminded me of losing my virginity. Julie, smelling of the street, only vaguely put together, enticing pedestrians into her folded soil. I stop and stare at this ratchet patch unlicensed by the city's Parks & Rec. department, reminded of that 15 year old girl, welcoming a 15 year old boy with effort passing as graceful naivety into a moist tussle of soiled sheets. I throw my cigarette into the lot. I remember she smelled of cigarettes too, and so did I after.

GRETCHEN: The Split-end Life This is my home and I'm Julia. Well the Julia is my mom, but she doesn't live here. I don't talk to her much…not since she pulled me apart and ripped me to pieces four years ago. She was walking her dog and was angry I suppose.

I hate that I'm so short, but I can't do much about it. I could have grown to be millions of inches long!! …but i was stunted at one and a half. Why couldn't she just take her anger out at the dog? I'm a split end, by the way. It really sucks… I get peed on by dogs, coughed on by birds, and I can't go anywhere.

Because I'm dead.

I'm thinking of adding a description to the entrance title, if Mr. Ratticus can find me a pen sometime soon. I don't know how to use one, and I don't know if I can hold one, but I'm sure it's not hard.

"Julia's Garden: more like swamp of DOG SLOBBER!" It has a nice ring to it, right?

KRYSTAL: Julia's Garden is where smokers go to take their last drag before switching to an e-cig. The holy land of last butts. It's a democratic garden--welcoming the lipstick-smudged butts, the still-damp-with-saliva butts, the coffee-and-smoke butts, the smoke-when-I-drink butts and the shit-there-goes-my-ex butts, all scattered about like little tombs of DNA. Julia's Garden is small and unremarkable. Just a simple white picket fence-former symbol of that elusive American Dream--to guard over the mini relics of a life a less socially and publicly acceptable. A humble place for smokers to pay their respects to the thousands of self-appointed silences, the easy-won knowledge gleaned from hundreds of smoke-break gossips, and the dozens of victorious escapes from tedious cocktail conversations.

One last stop before a twinge for grown and dried tobacco turns to explanations of propylene glycol, and trusty lighters are supplanted by USB-chargeable battery packs.

"I'm going to Julia's," I explained, after the door already swung shut.

I guess this is growing up.

401 LAFAYETTE STREET 6TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10003 646.308.1611 hello@sylvainlabs.com SylvainLabs.com Facebook Twitter