The Secret Gardener slept.

The Garden pulled.

He stirred.

He felt it in his blood, the tug of his Garden Blue.

He bloomed.

The Garden from afar, tugging so hard, cooed.

He vined.

His lover true, reached across voids unviewed.

He sloughed his pod.

His lover had been true, rising above Dust to grace his view.

Emerge he must, emerge he did.

She floated below, his fecund pool, as he flew.

Uncoiling, he spread.

And so he fruited, content, smiling upon his Garden Blue.

The vessel that confined his body was open to the view of Home. This was a place of mind healing. Toward this end, the pale metal bulk of the walls, and the white linens of the bed were not thought to comprise a sufficient desire to thrive. The wonderworking hands of the Celestials had thus arranged for a view of that which could not be seen by the homeward eye. For, a panel of glass this large, through which to peer longingly at a life lost and hoped for again, could not be sustained against the remorseless stardust. Neither could the body have, standing before such a transparent panel, survived the radiance that is the unfiltered spark of life.

The Celestials had wanted him to see Home, wanted him to stand above his Garden Blue. He saw the heavy blue swirl of the ocean deep, beneath the wisp of the clouds so light. Against the white-striped blue, stood the first garden, rising sharp red beneath the angular land of sand, cracking open like a nut along the smoldering rift at its heart.

He was drawn like a plant toward the sun and stepped closer to the magic reflection provided by the Celestials for his home-loving eyes—eyes not big enough, not keen-seeing enough, to see any more than a cloud-obscured outline of his Garden True, where the clay-skin man and night-skin man had once teemed and now dwindled so few. His eyes watered, and enlarged, shedding superseded windows as he improved his being to fit the circumstance.

“Oh, Dust,

Above my Garden Blue,

I do spy.

“Oh, sky,

We see through—

So slippery, so sly.

“Trust they must—

Seek We true…

Why after why, after why?

“Oh my,

We be thirsty, you—

A drinky-drink plant above We Garden Blue.”

His Celestial caretakers had been alerted to the fact that their previously comatose subject was actively speaking, and had slipped his inadequate restraints. Behind him, in the containment array, he had left his husk; the shell that had once been the outward image of an innocent boy sweeping a wooden floor with a straw broom in wooden shoes, a boy who had been the shell to his nut, the boy who remained still—weeping deep down inside—as his feeding parts emerged from his freshly bloomed form, to drink of the gape-mouthed ones who stopped moving their feet when he turned to them with a smile to greet.

He could feel the filament that shuttered his eyes even as he thrilled to the expansion of his mouth, glittering in the perpetual night, here on Dust—betraying his lust.

He was the plant which must turn to face the sun and felt so very glad, that they were too startled to run.