It was a warm spring afternoon, the kind that comes between a crisp morning and a cool evening: perfect weather for gardening. Claire directed her thoughts toward fresh vegetables, salads, stir-fries, steamed and sauteed greenery. She laid out the seed packets on the kitchen table in front of her, taking in their colorful array -- pea pods, soybeans, bibb lettuce, zucchini, carrots, radishes, parsley, spinach, acorn squash, bell peppers in three colors. Her climate was too chilly for the pea pods and too warm for the acorn squash but she wanted to try them anyway; for the rest she had ideal conditions.

She opened the back door and went out onto the porch, looked at the rectangle of bare soil she'd cleared over the past two weeks, moving rocks, pulling up weeds, mixing fresh topsoil from the garden store with the natural clay and rocky ground. It was ready to plant. The door to the shed stuck, and inside it was too dark to see because her eyes had already adapted to the bright sunshine in the time it had taken her to walk from house to shed. She had to feel around for the tools. There was that one sharp digging tool, what was it called? Claire couldn't remember, and felt annoyed.

The sharpness of the tool, the darkness of the shed, and maybe also her annoyance reminded her of him -- she didn't want to think about him. One of the points of gardening was to not think about him. She tried to get her mind off that subject, but once that area of her mind had got started, it was hard to stop. Distraction worked best, she knew, so rather than continue in relatively futile attempts to control her own topic of thought directly, she tried a more roundabout method and got busier in her gardening. He was asleep, wouldn't wake up till it was dark. She had hours and hours left still.

Tools assembled, she closed the shed up again. She really wished she could remember the name of that tool. Every time she looked at it her thoughts went in that unwelcome direction. Unfortunately she couldn't just put it away, she needed it to dig. The spade was too large to make holes the proper size for the seeds. She could make the indentations with her hands, but sometimes the soil was too heavy, making it a better idea to use a tool; even through gloves her hands were a lot more sensitive than sharpened metal. To ward away the thoughts that came, Claire took a deep breath, smelling the fresh soil, the greenery around her, the warm spring air.

She wanted to feel alive. Gardening was good for that. The unreality of existence seeped into her over time, and planting seeds, being out in the air among life's potential and the full sensory array of her garden, brought reality back to her. Claire dug a hole for the carrot seeds, sprinkled them inside, covered them over lightly and marked the carrot row with a rock, using a bit of instant glue to attach the seed packet to the rock securely. That was a temporary marker, she had permanent ones inside with ceramic vegetables on them, but she had to find them, they had been put away last fall she didn't remember where.

On the end of the row there was a weed growing. It had grown there fast, not visible three days earlier when she'd finished turning the earth for her garden. Claire touched the flexible green leaves delicately. She would kill it; it was a weed. It was still a living thing, and beautiful in its own way. Reaching down to the base of the weed, Claire pulled it up by the roots in a single stroke. She knew she did it beautifully. Now she thought of him and didn't even quite mind. The roots looked vulnerable: they were meant to be hidden, underground, and she'd exposed them to sight, to air. She smiled cruelly and dropped the weed to the grass outside the garden plot, then stabbed it with the unnamed gardening tool till it was in many pieces. Small wounds filled a foot-long area of the grass, but they'd fade quickly. Claire's heart beat a little faster, until she took two deep breaths.

She got into a rhythm, making a hole in the damp soil, planting seeds, marking the row, opening a new seed packet, moving to the next. Blissfully, she managed not to think at all for hours. The time escaped her; she felt as though she were waking from an unremembered, but happy dream when she noticed she was on the last seed packet and the sun was low in the sky.

Claire looked directly at the setting sun. When it was nearly down, you could do that, she thought, look right at it; it was too bright the rest of the time. She remembered something from a book she'd read -- one he'd recommended. She didn't remember which book, but in one of them, the characters were watching a sunset, and just as it set in its final moments, it flashed green. She finished the row and watched the sun go down. He'd be waking up when it was gone. Gardening finished, a minute or less remained till night's beginning, a sliver of red, red sun above darkening horizon, pink streaks throughout the sky. It was beautiful, but it had nothing soothing in it for Claire. She watched for the green flash. The last red disappeared, and no green, just fading pink and spreading blue to blackness.

She smiled to herself as she put her tools away in the shed. She closed the shed, but hadn't put quite all of them away. Claire held the tool whose name she'd forgotten in her hand as she crossed the yard in the darkening twilight to the house. She could ask him its name. She fingered the sharp edge in anticipation.