The Hedge

Rob Hanshaw

For K.

It is my job to trim this hedge. It is one in a formation of many hedges. Each hedge is under the charge of a single gardener.

To my left and right are long, rectangular hedges that stretch out to the horizon, each sectioned off with a thoroughfare that runs north to south. The gardeners and their charges get smaller and smaller, until they vanish entirely. Behind me there is one hedge very near to my own, and more that stretch out in the same pattern to its left and right. From the air it must look like a field of hyphens.

If I were to walk the few feet into the thoroughfare and head north, I would come to the main office. If I were to head south, I would come to the main office after many years.

The hedge grows. It is a living, inhuman thing. It grows and when it grows out of its man-imposed boundaries, I am there with the clippers. Snap, and the offending growth falls away like chaff.

The foremen make their rounds between the hedges. Pacing, inspecting. They stop to peer at a certain part of the hedge, or kneel near one end to ensure the mathematical straightness that is required. Or else they fake it beautifully. Then they rise or turn, a nod of the head, some movement in the eyebrows, and plod away.

This field of endeavor is thick with camaraderie. We sometimes pause in our work to inspect each other's hedges. Just to step away from your hedge for the moment, hands to the small of the back, clippers still and expectant in your left. A little competition is good for everyone. The foremen encourage it.

But my hedge is growing faster than those of my colleagues. I first noticed out of the corner of my eye: one offending branch peeked out from the wall-like surface of the hedge. I thought I'd been delinquent in my work, but as I watched I saw that branch push itself out from the hedge before nuzzling the ground. Resistance met, the force of the growth forced the branch to bow, and finally to snap. I was aghast. Many more branches began to follow the first right before my eyes.

Now I try to trim faster to compensate, but the faster I trim the faster the hedge grows, and the more brazen and inept is the trimming. I begin to sweat, which has never happened to me before. A foreman approaches.

Uh, is there a problem? he asks.

Yes, I reply. And the problem is that my hedge is growing faster than anyone else's. I kept clipping feverishly as we conversed.

He put on a somber face at hearing that, and turning his rotund form first left, slowly, then right, examined the hedges on either side of my hedge. When he turned back to me he had his head lowered and both hands folded across his clipboard.

Okay, look…your hedge is growing exactly the same as everyone else's. You're just going to have to pick up the pace.

Shake of that bowling-ball head of his, looking very reasonable. Leaning in a bit now, eyes saying Meet me halfway, friend.

Are we going to have a problem here?

I could barely afford the glance I gave him. My vision was filled with hedge, branches sprouting and growing inches in seconds, leaves bursting. Branches like a man's arms reaching for my throat. The metallic slide and snap of the clippers filled my ears. Sweat dripped into my eyes, which had never happened before.

The foreman sighed heavily. Okay, he said, and began shuffling up the thoroughfare toward the manager's office.

-	-	-

Branches sweep up toward the sun like brown and green waves. I know that soon gravity will lay hold of them and they will crest. The wave will crest. Then the wave will come creaking down in a moan of exhausted and failing boughs and engulf me. I tried to keep the quickest shoots in my peripheral by focusing on a point within the hedge. I tried to see the dense nebula of the hedge's core, to see the workings of this fantastic growth, but for all the waving and drifting branches around me within the hedge was a perfect stillness, as though all the heads of this hydra grew from a void.

Someone approaches from the direction of the manager's office. I have not ceased clipping since this morning, hours in the past.

It is Remy, one of the assistant managers. He steps out from beside the hedge and says to me,

H. How are we doing?

Lovely, lovely, I say.

Smiling. The foreman said we have an issue at this hedge. And of course if the foreman said that, I think to myself, it must be true! Foremen are the oracles of labor.

It is only that my hedge, I say, my hedge, obviously, is growing much faster than all the others.

Obviously?

I put my bewildered eyes on him. Look! See how it grows? How the branches threaten to climb like a wave?

Remy looks at my hedge for a long time. He advances several paces into the thoroughfare and turns to look at the eastern line of segmented hedges, hedges ad infinitum, before walking up to me. Into my profusely sweating back, wildly contracting muscles, almost flailing arms he says

How have you been feeling, H?

I whimper in reply, sweat starting to stream into my eyes again. I cannot spare a forearm to wipe it away.

How are things at home?

My breath comes in ragged gasps. Clippers swoop and snap as if of their own will. Now I notice a branch, one branch in particular, which seems to grow like a cast spear straight for the assistant manager to my left. I thank all the gods I am able to name.

The branch is putting out leafy shoots every second, and every second it advances like a stark brown finger at Remy's head.

When he realized I was not going to answer him, he put a finger to his lips and brought his brows low, the look of sympathy and concern he'd learned at the assistants' school. He puts his hands behind his back and walks past me, toward the line of perfect hedges to my right to meditate. The branch continues to grow but seems to slow a bit, perhaps as disappointed as I at being deprived of its target. I will not cut it. Fuck it. Let the bastard trip on his way to condemn me to my superiors.

Remy has come to his decision and does an about face, hands still behind his back, and gives me a warm grin as he makes for the path. He deftly sidesteps the hedge, and says over his shoulder

Woops…you may want to take care of that one, H. Could poke someone's eye out.

I whimper.

-	-	-

The other gardeners had seen the assistant manager at my hedge. Or smelled him there. Several were now leaving their own utterly static hedges and congregating to gawk at me and whisper. How I hated them. I glanced out of the corner of my eye to see them clustered in the thoroughfare, arms folded across chests and still clippers in one hand, shaking their heads and chuckling at my ineptitude. I'd stopped sweating and saw that my arms were turning a stark red. My vision narrowed. The head lolls and the mouth will hold no moisture.

Carlos and Joseph, assistant managers both, step into my field of view from the direction of the office. They don't bother to speak to me. After surveying the hedge they give each other a long look, brows raised in delight. So it's true what Remy said! We have here a gardener who by his laziness has let his hedge grow out of control. Joseph stares mouth-agape at my hedge while Carlos looks at me, raised his shoulders and spreads his arms out to show me his palms. He grins and fake-chuckles.

Uhhhhh, heh huh huh…

They give each other another long look, and having a last chuckle at my expense begin to walk back toward the office. Jauntily. Pleased by the situation. Within every assistant manager is a sadist. The more often you can lay hands on one of the lower classes to offer as sacrifice, the less likely is the axe to hover above your own neck.

As they stalked off (at such a brisk pace!) I heard them utter a word. The word was Director.

So that's that. I dropped my clippers and tried to hold still, though my breath could not come fast enough. I sat, finally, heavily on the ground and gazed up at the alien hedge, its growth producing such movement that I began to suspect it of sentience. Had I just seen a flash of eyes somewhere in the void?

-	-	-

The muscles in my arms and shoulders rippled with spasms. The sky grew darker. I looked up at my hedge for the last time. It continued to grow at a fearsome rate. Some branches swayed in the new wind (which had come on suddenly) and shot out in mid-sway so that they resembled bullwhips uncoiling through the air. The hedge's top branches had an unearthly movement in them, weaving unknown glyphs in the sky across a wisp of very dark cloud, the leaves seeming to twist and writhe, giving the hedge itself the look of a being in rapture. But my attention was held by that odd thatch of branches that curved straight up toward the sun, after some exclusive nectar as it advanced toward where I sat. It held me in its shadow. It began to nod from its own weight.

Even bound to the reverie of the hedge, I noticed immediately when my colleagues ceased their chittering over my bad fortune. Looking over at them I saw redoubled diligence at their own respective hedges and all traces of laughter gone. The first tremor reverberated through the ground. The hedge-wave creaked.

The tremors grew louder, and soon I heard the first of the sycophants' conversations (glad-handing, brown-nosing). The hedge and all the earth around it vibrated. My clippers, set to my right side, jumped on the ground at intervals like oil in a pan. The sky darkened inexplicably, turned a sort of sulfurous black.

I held my hands in my lap, palms up, looking toward the thoroughfare. I saw Remy approach just as he had earlier. He smiled at me, a smile full of quiet sympathy. He turned when he saw me and walked backwards a few paces, indicating to the huge procession that followed him that it approached its destination. I half-expected him to introduce me with a wave of his arm. But then, all of these goddamn people knew exactly who I was. The thunderous steps drew nearer.

Remy took his place facing me on the far side of the thoroughfare. Carlos and Joseph fell in beside him, followed by myriad other assistant managers, deputies, clerks, forming a line so that I could not see the hedges beyond them any longer. They formed their own little hedge.

The Secretary, blond and tanned, made her entrance and walked the wall of bureaucracy, inspecting, or so it seemed. She stopped halfway and looked at me with unmitigated scorn for several seconds before scribbling something in her tiny day planner. Little black spots began to appear in my vision. The Secretary swung herself north and bunched her face up impossibly in a broad grin at someone just out of view. Two more enormous tremors shook the ground and there he was.

The Director was a tall man. He wore a bowler. The Director holds us all in the palm of his hand. He had kind, fatherly eyes, and he smiled at me then, bringing his tiny mustache up under his nose and forming a delta of creases in the skin next to each eye. The smile said: You're fired.

There was a loud groan like an old galleon capsizing. I glanced up at my hedge in time to see the wave finally crest and fall upon me, obliterating my vision and my troubles.

-	-	-

Damn shame, said the Director. Damn shame.
Oh yes, sir, definitely. A shame, said the wall.
Yes, sir.
Very good, sir.
Harumph, harumph.

The compensation clerk knelt next to the branch-covered body. The hedge had stopped growing and lay still. Heart attack, sir. Not work-related.
No causal relationship.
No survivor benefits.
He used to be such a good employee.
He was getting on in years.
Yep, just couldn't keep up.
He let the hedge rule him, rather than ruling the hedge.
Well said.
Oh yes.
Some just aren't cut out for it. Pun intended haw haw.
Stop that.
Sorry.
We expect the best from our personnel.
Only the finest.
Harumph.

The light was almost totally gone as quitting time approached. Blue sky again dominated the black cloud cover. The Director, led by the Secretary (already writing the job announcement in her mind: the successful applicant will have a BS in Horticulture and ten years experience…), lumbered back toward the main office with his entourage. In the twilight, a dark pool of thick liquid formed temporarily around the corpse before seeping into the earth. To a passerby, it appeared that the wild and brambly hedge had stretched out a hand and gently pressed the life out of employee H.