Green Toes

by Avery Flinders

  Laura couldn't really take the credit for it. After her brunch with Tash two weeks ago, she'd come straight home, put her hiking boots back on, and stomped up and down every inch of her tiny garden. By late afternoon, her failed tomato plants were green and trailing over the ground. It was a matter of days before she was cycling out to buy some stakes to lash them to.

  She wasn't ready to explain the magic boots, though, and the only thing she could think to say was, "Do you want to come around and see the potatoes?"

  Terri laughed and disappeared for a moment, only hir shock of black hair visible above the wall. Ze popped around the wall in the driveway a moment later. Ze was shorter than Laura realised, and must have been up on hir toes and standing on a brick or something to see over the front fence. Ze was plump, wearing an open plaid shirt over a grey singlet, along with a denim skirt and sensible sandals. Hir hair was mostly shaved right off, save for a spiky shock of black that hung over hir eyes.

  "God, I love what you've done here," Terri said, appreciatively. "Look at this! It's such a tiny patch of dirt but you could feed the whole block on it."

  "I don't know about the whole block. Nothing's really ready to harvest yet, except the tomatoes. But you know what they're like, almost TOO productive."

  "Very fertile." Terri chuckled, petting a cluster of the cherry tomatoes against the wall. Then ze gestured towards the trellis that Terri had just set up against the fence. "Zucchini?"

  "Beans and peas, actually. I thought about zucchini, but..."

  "Too many? Jeez, you really could feed the whole block with a good zucchini plant, though."

  "I know, they just make too much! I wanted something green but I much prefer beans."

  "Super cool."

  Laura was just about done with her gardening for the day, as it happened, and just had to water everything down. She stepped out of the garden bed and immediately struggled with what to say to Terri next. Was she supposed to just brush hir off? If they were done talking about the garden, Terri would probably leave. Surely ze had somewhere else to be and didn't come down the street just to talk about tomatoes.

  "I'm just about done," she said, and went to hang her gardening gloves on the hook by her door. Which, thanks to the economy of space in a poky inner city flat, was only two paces away. When she turned back and saw Terri was making no motion to leave, she added, "Do you want some iced tea?"

  "I'm not in a hurry," Terri said with a smile.

  Laura had to find another chair so they could both sit outside her front door and see a slice of the garden around the corner, and then they sat with a whole jug of iced tea—Laura had topped it up quickly now that there were going to be two of them—and a packet of Tim Tams while they watched the early summer sun climb up the fence.

  She learned that Terri taught French at the TAFE College a few suburbs over, and confessed that she'd been thinking of taking a TAFE course or something.

  "Have you thought about going into gardening? You've obviously got a knack."

  Laura started, then looked down at her boots. It had never occurred to her to try and make money off their plant-growing properties. She could, of course. She could start a plant nursery, or a gardening and landscaping business, or... well, there were plenty of other opportunities. But without even telling Terri about their magic, that didn't seem like the thing to do. She hadn't moved to the city so she could have it easy.

  "I dunno. Most places seem to want a horticulture certificate before they'll hire you in gardens. I could do one, but it seems ridiculous when I was brought up on a farm."

  "Ah, right. And I'm guessing you didn't move from the farm to the city just to spend more time on your knees in the dirt."

  "Well, up to a point. Obviously I don't mind it too much. Coming here wasn't about my career, anyway."

  Terri nodded, thoughtfully, but didn't pry any further. It was hardly unusual for country kids to move to the city.

  "So, hey, what's it like teaching? What's the TAFE like?"

  "Ah, you know, it's a TAFE. Not the brightest bunch of students, or the most radical, but they're a good lot. And it's actually a good equal opportunity sort of place, despite the low activist count. Very queer friendly."

  Laura felt relieved. "Well, good. That's important."

  "More than you probably realise," Terri said, wryly. "I wouldn't have even started working there if they didn't have some good antidiscrimination in place. Though I'm lucky that I'm secure enough to be picky."

  "Is it hard being so..." Laura gestured helplessly at Terri's outfit. "I'm sorry, I don't know the right word."

  "For my gender? I mean, there are lots of words you could use. I think of myself as nonbinary most of the time."

  Laura frowned. "As in, not one of the two genders?"

  "Not one of the two main genders," Terri corrected her. "Basically, yeah. And I mean, it's not the easiest thing in the world most of the time, but work's actually pretty okay. The other staff members don't necessarily get it, but they have to at least be respectful."

  "And students?"

  Terri rolled hir eyes. "They ask the most offensive questions. Like, nothing that strangers don't ask too, the 'but what are you REALLY' or 'what were you born as' stuff. The good thing is that with students, I'm there to teach them. They don't usually ask me the stupid gender questions until I've been teaching them for a few weeks. By then they already know I'm smart and helpful and can tell them what they need to know ninety percent of the time, so when I tell them this is just how I am, and how to address me and so on, they listen."

  They kept talking for a few more minutes, until it was getting close to the middle of the day. Terri stood up and got ready to go, pleading lesson plans to write, which was a relief; meeting hir had been great but Laura was just a little uncomfortable at the thought of inviting hir for lunch as well as tea. More importantly, she wasn't sure she would want to be friends with someone who just wouldn't leave, and there was no doubt she wanted to be Terri's friend.

  "You should come round to my place some time," Terri said, scribbling an address on the back of Laura's gas bill. "Bring some tomatoes around, I'll trade you for some homemade bread."

  It wasn't as though Laura didn't know how to flirt. She'd done plenty of flirting. Ryan wasn't the only boyfriend she'd had back home. It wasn't as if she'd been bad at it since she'd come to Melbourne either, really, just struggled to find common ground. She was pretty sure she knew what an invitation to visit Terri's house was supposed to mean. But she was lonely, and despite all the hanging around bars and meeting cute girls, she wanted a friend more than anything else. Here was someone who really seemed to like her company, and finally, someone she had something in common with. She didn't want to screw it up.

  That was what she told herself later, anyway, when she'd already bundled Terri off with a bag of fresh tomatoes and a precious few leaves off the fledgling basil plants. She could worry about what to do about meeting someone who was interested in her later. She had an address and a phone number, and all the time in the world. Once Terri had said goodbye and headed off down the road, she did feel a bit sorry, though. She had a whole long Sunday afternoon stretching in front of her, as usual, and in some ways she did wish that morning tea could have lasted all day.

  *~*~*

  Terri's house was a red-brick standalone just a few blocks away from Laura's street. She paused for a moment at the front gate, clutching her basket of vegetables. It was just the kind of cute spot that she longed to live in, . A good sized, one-story house with plenty of garden out the front and, by the look of it, out the back. The front yard was a bit straggly; the plants by the front wall were looking particularly limp.

  Not what you're here for, she reminded herself, and stepped up onto the small front porch and verandah to knock on the door.

  She was greeted by an excited woman wearing a Portal T-shirt and straight, black and pink hair that curled around her ears at the ends. "Hi! You must be Laura!"

  "I wa
s going to get the door, I thought you were plugged in!" came Terri's voice from inside.

  "I just finished a raid," the woman said, as she ushered Laura inside and into the living room. "I'm Beatrice, but please, please just call me Bea. And this is Todd."

  Laura took in the living room for a moment before she looked at its other occupant. There was a good sized, comfortable couch, two armchairs that didn't match, and a whole wall covered in bookshelves. Sitting on the couch was a young man with a beard and a cardigan on, despite the warm weather. There was an obvious explanation, though, as his hands were still working on another piece of knitwear as he looked up at the new visitor. Clearly a knitwear fan.

  Finally, Terri appeared from the kitchen, hir hair in disarray, grinning in delight. "Laura! You're here! Sorry, I'd hug you or something but..." Ze gestured at hir front, which was covered in flour. "I was making bread. Come in though! Let's have some tea."

  "I should put this down somewhere too." Laura lifted up her basket of vegetables and Terri's eyes lit up even more.

  "Yes, yes, come in, come in!" Terri waved for her to follow.

  Laura walked past the big dining table, charmingly draped in gingham, and hauled her basket onto the kitchen bench. Bea had trailed behind them, and Laura followed her lead, pulling up a stool on the far side of the kitchen bench. Todd stayed put but yelled, "Can I have some tea too?" as soon as they were out of sight. Terri rolled hir eyes and didn't answer, but filled up the kettle to the top before ze put it on.

  "I'll tea him up," Bea said, with a wink. "I wanna head back to my room and get in another mission before lunch, anyway."

  "Gaming?" Laura guessed.

  "Yeah, she's an addict."

  "It's social!"

  "I know. It's pretty fun, actually. She wears a headset and goes in chat and everything, so sometimes Todd and I are just sitting around and we'll hear Bea barking orders about shooting things from the other room."

  Terri had put Laura's basket for produce aside for the moment and was tipping a huge mound of dough out of a bowl and onto the floured bench. Ze rolled it around in the flour for a moment then plunged straight in, hir brown hands instantly engulfed in pillowy masses of dough.

  "Told you I'd trade you some bread," ze said, conversationally. Laura had seen people make bread occasionally, she made it herself sometimes, but she'd never seen one person try to knead such an intimidating mass of dough before.

  "What's in it?"

  "Bit of everything, really. Stacks of white flour with some wholemeal and rye. That's why it's kind of beige."

  Terri paused as a bunch of hair fell in hir eyes and ze tried to blow it away. Laura was very, very tempted to reach over and tuck it back for hir, but something warned her not to. Not yet, but maybe soon, and she felt full of warmth at the simplicity of it. All the messing around at bars feeling like a fish out of water, and when she met someone she liked it seemed easy.

  Terri finally rubbed hir face against hir shoulder to get the hair out of hir eyes, but no sooner had ze sorted that out than the kettle clicked off.

  "Don't worry, I'll make the tea," Bea said, laughing at the hopeless expression on Terri's face. "You just worry about escaping from dough hell over there."

  "It'll come good," Terri grunted. After a few minutes, it really had. The massive pile of dough didn't get any smaller, but what seemed like a hopeless, sticky trap was transforming under Terri's hands. As ze kept kneading, chucking an extra bit of flour on every now and again, it went from a formless mass to one with shape, stopped sticking to everything and became a tight ball. In a few minutes, Terri was cutting it down into smaller pieces and kneading one of them again. Ze dropped it onto a tray and quickly kneaded the other too.

  "You're supposed to leave them to rise again after you knead them, but half the time I can't be bothered. If it gets much hotter, the yeast will be out of control anyway, so I'm just going to split them up and bake them now. One loaf for lunch, the other for you to take home. I told you," ze said, before Laura could protest, "I want to trade you something for the vegetables."

  Terri's hands looked mostly clean by now, but ze turned to the sink to wash the last of the starch off hir hands. Then ze slashed the tops of the loaves with a knife and popped them in the oven just as Bea was getting out cups for the tea. Terri hopped onto one of the stools next to Laura and eagerly reached for the basket.

  "How do you have your tea?" Bea asked.

  "Just black."

  Bea fiddled around with the cups of tea while Terri cooed over the vegetables, slid two cups over to them and took the other two in her hands. "I'll take Todd's on my way back to the raiding station. See you guys for lunch."

  Laura took a sip of her tea, hot and bitter, and smiled. She was so used to tea she always put up with a hot tea at least a few times a day, even in summer, and it was nice her new friends liked the same thing. She just sat there enjoying it for a few moments before she turned her attention to Terri. Ze was still cooing over the vegetables; now that ze'd inspected a few of the tomatoes, ze was piling them up on the bench.

  "Do they pass muster?"

  "They look spectacular," Terri said, and gave another happy cry as ze found the box of cherry tomatoes underneath.

  "Oh yeah, I put them in something else so they wouldn't get squashed under the big ones."

  "Can I eat one?"

  "They're yours now, you can do whatever you want."

  Terri popped one of the tiny red tomatoes in hir mouth and hummed happily. "They're sweet! Do you want one?"

  Ze held out another tomato in hir hand. Laura picked it up with her fingers, but thought about Terri's fingers pushing it into her mouth, tasting Terri's fingertips along with the sweet and sour of the fruit. The thought tasted as good as the tomato did when it burst on her tongue.

  "And you brought eggplant, too?" Terri said, delving into the basked again.

  "Yeah, but I didn't grow those. Got them at the market. I love them, but they're way too difficult for me to grow in that one little plot. I thought they'd go well with the tomatoes for lunch, though, like we could grill or roast it or make a sauce with pasta or something."

  "Or something." Terri smiled. "I have a few ideas."

  First, they took their teacups and went to sit in the living room with Todd while he was knitting. He was aghast to hear that Laura never watched hospital dramas and set about updating her on the state of affairs in his Grey's Anatomy marathon. His hands never stopped knitting while he spoke.

  "I used to date a nurse. People who work in hospitals don't tend to like watching the fictional version," she said, apologetically.

  Laura stayed when Terri went to check on the bread. She claimed to be fascinated by the show but was more intrigued by the hypnotic work of Todd's fingers looping wool together over and over. Terri soon called her around the corner into the kitchen, though, to inspect the two long, crackling loaves ze'd made.

  "What about my work, is it up to scratch?"

  "Are they done?" Laura leaned over the tray and realised she could still hear the crackling of water in the dough exploding into steam.

  Terri picked one up with a hand covered in a tea towel, tossed it a few times as the heat burned through the cloth and then tapped the browned bottom of the loaf. "Sounds done to me. They sound different when they're done." Ze tapped it again for Laura's benefit, but Laura just shrugged.

  "I'll take your word for it. I don't know what else bread would sound like."

  "So you never baked on your parents' farm?"

  "Not really. I know there's this romantic idea of farmers as living off the land and doing everything from scratch, but when you've spent all day bent over in a field you mostly just want someone else to do the baking, even if it means you have to drive for twenty minutes to find a supermarket."

  Terri laughed. "Okay, I'm guilty of that. Living on a vegetable farm sounds magical to me, but it's probably a job like any other."

  "Living in the northern suburbs seemed magi
cal and cool to me before I moved here," Laura admitted. "Then it turned out it wasn't that much fun when I was really bad at making friends."

  "Hey, we're here to fix that," Terri said, and gently punched her shoulder. "You want to help me make lunch, or do you want to go back and watch soaps with Todd?"

  Not just making friends, Laura thought, while she and Terri sat side by side at the bench and started scoring tomatoes. Friends would be good though. Friends were what she needed, and friends would be enough today. But when the back of her hand kept brushing against Terri's, she didn't make any attempt to stop.

  It was a pleasant afternoon's work, overall. They cooked the tomatoes down into a simple sauce, chopped the eggplant into cubes, salted and fried them, and then mixed the whole thing in with basil and some pasta they'd cooked up right at the end. It didn't need anything but some pepper for dressing, and Terri's housemates were appreciative.

  "This is the best ever," Bea kept saying, over and over. "I mean, I wish we grew tomatoes this good. I can't believe I don't even miss having cheese on it."

  "And the eggplant is great too," said Todd, through a mouthful of food. "You guys are both wizards."

  "I bought the eggplants at the market," Laura repeated for the housemates. "I haven't even planted any at home. I don't think I have the space, and anyway, they're a bit hard to grow at home."

  "A great gardener like you, though, I bet you could pull it off."

  That was when Laura decided she had to tell hir. She and Terri had plenty in common, but if Terri admired her so much for her gardening skills, Laura was going to feel like a fraud unless she told hir eventually.

  *~*~*

  Laura waited a week. She hung around Terri's house until dinner that Sunday night and walked home through the long summer twilight, feeling more alive than she had in a long time. She was going home to her small empty flat with nobody else to share it with, but tonight that didn't matter. She had friends, and a crush, and finally she could see a place where maybe she could fit. And she had a loaf of bread in her basket to take with her, so she could spend the rest of the week in between eating the work of Terri's own hands. The world was all hers if she could take it.