TRANSCRIPT - Episode 160: Generous Things

September 8th, 2021

Kristen Zaza

[Eerie theme music plays]

Good evening, my friends.

It was a bit of a strange week

A rough week, I should admit.

But that's all right.

I'm still trapped here. I'm still trapped here and facing down an insurmountable foe in that monster in the mist that I cannot see but I can sense. I am tired of talking about how afraid I am of it. And getting tired of being afraid at all, really. It is...tedious. And besides, the more afraid I am, the more I've made this little lighthouse home of mine more and more comfortable. I've built quite the tower for myself, haven't I? only this one is to protect me, not to contain me.

Actually, that raises a good point. I said before that I am trapped. That is not quite true. It's just that I didn't think to build a boat first, to get off this island only the size of my little home. I didn't think to build a boat because there are so many ghosts who need my help here that I knew I ought to stay awhile and help guide them. And besides, a lighthouse could do that even after I've left, couldn't it? So when I found pieces of driftwood, leaves, gifts from the lake, I turned them into a fortress rather than an escape. We all do what we think is right most of the time, don't we?

But because I am afraid of that fiend, I turned to my Tarot cards to ask them:

"Where should I turn for help?"

Do you know what I drew?

A most fascinating and lovely card.

The Queen of Pentacles.

It is her season, you know. She is of the earth. Of the harvest. Of things that grow.

She is extremely powerful, because you see she has the strength to take good care not only of herself and her home, but others she loves, too. She takes care of herself and others because she has a knack for creating and providing. Not only is she strong enough to attract gifts abundantly, but she has the tenacity and skill to create them too. So her generosity, her confidence, her independence and her love are...shining and gold, always.

This is not what I feel like.

I wish I felt like that. But I do not feel like that.

Not alone here, in the cold, in this ramshackle place, with that foe staring me down.

But

who is to say what she feels?

We are speaking of what she does. what she cares for. How she loves.

Maybe I can be her. Maybe I am her. Part of me.

Ready to accept whatever drifts my way from the lake

Ready to help whoever rows towards my island

Ready to greet the enemy with conviction and dignity.

It is not time for me to leave the lighthouse yet.

It is not time for me to face the creature yet.

(Do not be disappointed if it turns out to be nothing. My fear is probably bigger than it anyway, I suspect.)

But it is time for a story about the Queen of Pentacles

And a very healthy Garden.

A while ago, some time ago, who knows how long ago, there was a gardener.

I should clarify:

There was a man who loved to garden.

He had been many other things throughout his lifetime, as well. He had been a student, a soldier, a friend, a cook, a writer, a singer, lots of things, other things we'll get to shortly, but lots of other things. And I don't need to tell you which of those things made him money in order to define him more specifically.

Because the thing that he loved doing most in the entire world was gardening.

[A simple theme on piano plays]

From the green days of his boyhood, to the wintry sunset of his old age,  nothing made him feel more calm, more at home, more blissfully happy, then spending afternoon after afternoon after afternoon

Feeling into the earth with his hands

Smelling the scent of growth and life

Avoiding stepping on the little worms

Or frightening the magnificent butterflies.

He grew flowers, mostly. A few little trees, sometimes herbs or vegetables, but mostly things he wanted to keep growing. Because it was the caring, the nurturing, the feeding, the watering, that he enjoyed the most. Not the consuming (though that always brought an enjoyable amount of satisfaction, too).  His backyard garden to his little house outside of the city was a very impressive one, but not nearly as impressive as his hanging potted plants indoors, his enormous flower pots that he peppered every window with so it could get the right amount of sun, the little succulents that sat on every table in the place. Every little flower, every little rosebush, everything he put inside, he put in a pot of earth so it could keep growing. It would not do to cut his flowers, oh, no, no, they must be growing.

He spoke to them, as every good gardener knows they must. Just little chatter, little "Oh, you look lovely today"s, or "Are we a little thirsty? I'm sorry, my dear"s, that sort of thing. And anyone who visited his home marveled at how glorious the flowers looked, how decadent the shade of green their leaves were, how positively beaming they were. Happy Flowers. Grateful Blooms. Joyous Plants.

Now, a gentle and happy man he was, but he was not perfect. His past had its spots. Its negative moments. Its dark periods. As the seasons of most of our lives will have, he had stormy weather here and there, but nothing that dragged him down. And I won't tell you what it is he did, or what his vices were, because that is personal, but I will simply say that he was a good person who got caught up in bad schemes. But he never hurt anyone. Though he had lost his moral compass once or twice, he was grateful in his peaceful years now that he had never lost it for so long to have hurt anyone. Rest easy in the knowledge of that, my friends. It is more important that he knew he was a good person, regardless of his circumstances, his past mistakes, his misplaced trust in quite the wrong people. He had the remarkable ability to put it behind him and move on.

But sometimes that is not enough.

Sometimes

Someone from the past comes back

Demanding their due.

Someone who would hurt someone else.

Someone who would hurt someone else to have their debt repaid.

And if the debt could not be repaid...

I am being deliberately vague in the telling of this, because it was a terrible thing that happened to our Gardener. Our gardener who thought he'd put his desperate past to bed.

But at least the Terrible Thing happened to him in his Garden.

Where he died, smelling the dirt and hearing the birds and seeing the butterflies

Though the pain was awful

And the sound of clamorous, hungry hands rifling through his belongings inside was a little distracting.

The last thing he heard before his heart stopped

Was them yelling, inside, realizing he had nothing but the garden.

He smiled to himself.

And died.

The End.

No, of course it's not, I'm just joking. I just wanted to lighten the mood. Forgive me.

What happens with an empty house?

What happens when its owner is nowhere to be found?

What happens when his bills continue to go unpaid?

Someone comes by to investigate.

It took years for someone to finally come by this place, because it was so far from any city, and so small and unassuming, and admittedly his bills were so little anyway, his absence was barely noticed by anyone.

It took ten years, to be precise.

And it was only because the city had been growing and growing ever outward, and property was becoming more and more valuable, and someone clever and a little greedy spotted the little house out there in the middle of nowhere, and thought that it might be a smart place to buy. Whoever lived in the shabby thing would surely sell it for a handsome fee.

That Someone came by to investigate.

A business man.

A young man with a keen eye for investment.

A shrewd and wealthy gentleman with a shining pocketwatch in one hand and a checkbook in another, as he stood on the front porch and knocked three times at the door.

No one answered, but the door slowly inched its way open.

"Hello?" The Businessman asked, narrowing his eyes at the dust and the darkness within.

He sneezed, for the air was thick with spores and he was unaccustomed to them.

He reached for a lightswitch,  his hand groping at the wall blindly. He found one, but it did nothing - the man who lived here hadn't paid his bills in ten years or more, anyway, so there was no electricity to be found.

Luckily, he had a lighter with him. He flicked his thumb across its wheel, and shut the door behind him.

He saw now why the place was so dark, even in the afternoon sunlight.

There were plants everywhere.

Hanging from the ceiling, overgrown and thriving, climbing down the walls in heavy, lazy vines.

Flowers that had erupted out of their pots and bloomed around them.

Trees standing in pots that grew up toward the ceiling and curved to fit each corner.

It was like a jungle in here.

Even the succulents on the coffee table had grown and spawned other little ones, who spawned other little ones

Grandparent plants, proud and old and very happy.

The air was moist, too, moist as the leaves on each plant, each flower, each tree were moist. Full of juice. Full of life.

"Hello?"  The businessman called out, again. Growing uneasy. He was not used to plants like this in a city like his. But how could he be?

He wandered through what he thought was the front sitting room - hard to tell, with the overgrowth - to what seemed to be a kitchen.

He heard a strange drip-drip-drip coming from the sink, and he saw that the old fashioned hand pump faucet was dripping into a bucket that had been left there. The bucket was not full.

Someone had used the sink not long ago.

Someone had been caring for these plants.

Someone who could be talked into selling this house.

But also

Someone who did not need lights or electricity

Or heat in the winter

Or...

Ah, nevermind.

There were all sorts of strange people in this world who would do anything to save a buck.

Or to make one, thought our businessman.

And he kept nosing about.

He made his way from room-to-room - there weren't that many of them - and he found nothing unusual except for the plants.

Strange, you may think, because we know what happened in this house. It's true, cabinet doors had been flung ajar, plates tossed to the ground. Glasses smashed against windows. Silverware drawers thrown open, their contents emptied to the ground. Yes, that all happened, ten years ago, and yes, no living person had entered this place since then. True, true, all of that, true. But remember two things: First, our Businessman did not know any of that. And second: Someone had been watering the plants, hadn't they?

Not only watering them

But speaking to them

Because you see, when you speak to plants in a gentle manner, in a kind manner, they respond.

They like it.

They can sense the difference in vibration between a loving voice and a hateful voice, don't you know?

It's quite remarkable.

The Businessman found himself in the little study, a single desk with messy, disorganized paperwork and very, very, very old bills, very very old photos and remembrances, a calendar from ten years ago with absolutely nothing marked on it anyway. Unusually, though, police documents speaking of a criminal record. Worse than that, threatening letters . Several of them, increasingly violent in message. Other than that, though, a boring little study, if it weren't for the ten pots on the table, no bigger than shotglasses, whose flowers again had bloomed so large and so brightly that they spilled over into one another

Into dirt that had been scattered across the wood

Because, I suppose they no longer had need for those little pots

Is such a thing possible?

For lilies, roses, and lilacs to just grow from dirt

Messily strewn across an old oak desk?

The Businessman was shocked to see it

Something was not adding up, here...

A house is not a garden

A house is...

Well, no.

This house was for him to buy

And tear down

And remake something

Much more lucrative

Than a garden.

[A voice, whispering from afar:]

"Hello."

"Hello?" The man asked, turning around, startled. His lighter went out, and everything was dark.

"Hello there," the voice said again.

"Who's there?" The businessman asked again, unsure of where the sound was coming from.

"I've let you go hungry, haven't I, little one? I can fix that..."

The business man wandered out of the study, very carefully, looking around to find the source of the voice.

But he couldn't see anything.

"There you are, my little friend. There, there, there..."

His hands were shaking too violently for him to work the lighter, but there were streams of setting sunlight hitting just the right angles in the little house.

In the hallway, he saw a potted plant

Its leaves were moving of its own volition, this way and that

Its vines were being jostled ever so gently

And it seemed that the bucket in the sink was hovering, floating, just above it

Pouring water into the soil.

"My my my, I won't forget you again, forgive me my sweet."

The Businessman stared in shock

As this lone bucket seemed to make its way across the house

[The sound of reverberating low humming begins to fade in, the melody from earlier]

Room-to-room, humming to itself, speaking softly to the plants, each one at a time.

I'm imagining this, he thought to himself. He was a logical man, an educated man. A calculating young man. This isn't possible. I've been breathing these spores too long. I am not seeing this.

"Oh, there, there, my friends, hello, I am glad to see you too. You are looking well, aren't you? Oh, what handsome petals this one has, lovely, lovely, lovely..."

The Businessman stumbled his way to the kitchen, where he saw now that the sun had set finally. He had to get out of this house. He needed fresh air, he was hearing things, he was seeing things...where was the door to the backyard? How could he get to the garden?

He forced his fingers to work, trying the lighter several times, and when it finally worked, he whirled around, holding it up, brandishing it like a weapon

And one of the vines hanging from the ceiling, quite accidentally, caught on fire.

Panicked, the young businessman thought only of keeping the house from burning down

So he grabbed the pot and pulled it down from its hook in the ceiling

He dashed it to the ground

He stepped on the leaves, smothering the flame.

Everything was dark again, and the whispering had stopped.

[A roar, ghostly and surrounding and horrible]

Until a face from the darkness rushed at him

A face that was furious, angry, vengeful

Bloodied

Bloodless

Eyes white and wide and horrible

Mouth open and full of blood

And grass

And dirt

And he screamed in the face of the intruder

Pushing him to the ground.

Everything went black.

When next our businessman woke up, he was outside, in the garden.

The air was crisp and cool

And the first thing he saw above him were trees, leaves blowing gently in the wind, and through those branches he saw bright stars

And he couldn't remember where he was or that he had been so frightened

Until he felt something

Something cool and hard, like metal

Then something even colder

It was water, being poured into his mouth

By a bucket

He rose with a start and cried out, scrambling backwards

When his hands, in the grass, searching for something, anything to grab, locked onto something else cool and hard

But not metal.

He looked behind him and saw

Shining white in the dark, green grass

A skull

A skeleton

Bones broken and scattered and picked clean

Flowers growing through the eye sockets

A toad hiding in the mouth

Grasshoppers leaping from rib-to-rib.

He stared at it, his mouth agape,  his eyes full of tears, no longer a businessman but now just a young boy who regretted ever setting foot in this terrible, terrible place.

"I am very sorry," a gentle voice whispered, and the young man turned around quickly to see an old man sitting on the ground, cross-legged. Eyes still white, mouth still bloody, face still bloodless, but no longer angry.  "I reacted very poorly. I just love my plants."

The young man couldn't find any words to say.

He couldn't bring himself to ask about the plants.

He couldn't bring himself to ask what had happened to him.

He couldn't bring himself to ask about the house.

So the old man just nodded.

"It's all right," he said, and smiled. "You're not the first visitor to be frightened away. But I didn't mean for you to get hurt."

They sat in silence for some time.

Then, the young man looked at the skeleton, its hands still crossed over its chest in the garden.

"If I buried you, would that set you free?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Is that your unfinished business? If I just buried you in your garden, or maybe...if I called an exorcist, perhaps? Or is it justice for your murder, you're seeking?"

The old gardener smiled, because he could see that the young man was just trying to help. "No thank you, I'm fine," he replied.

"But...you can't just stay like this...You can't be happy here like this..."

"Why?"

"Not that I believe in any of this, but isn't that why ghosts stay on earth? Because they are unhappy? Isn't that why you frighten others away from here?"

The old man shrugged. "I'm just looking after the plants." He sighed, and looked at the garden.

[Music again - this time piano, distant guitar, and humming all together]

The garden was an immense sanctuary now. If it had been a cozy little backyard once, now it was spreading, sprawling, out and out and out into what was once barren plains behind it, encroaching on the dirt roads that led to the cement roads that branched off eventually into highways.

The trees, the shrubs, all of it, were loved so well that they were growing, expanding, comfortable to take space, so well loved that they were proud and strong and thriving.

Spilling through the windows of the house, too. Climbing over the brick exterior, the tiled rooftop.

They were not growing inside the house, or outside the house - rather, the house was a part of the growth.

The young businessman only noticed that now.

"That house there, it's just like me, you see." the old man said, nodding his head in its direction. "It was built from nothing, once,  and it was alive once, and then something terrible happened to it, once. But now, just like me, it's simply just...a part of all this."

"A part of what?" The younger man asked, desperate to understand.

"This!" the old man said, gesturing at all of it. The growth, the life, the thriving. Of things green and fresh, but also of the insects that ate those things. The birds that pecked at his ribcage. The flowers in his eyes. The plants inside the house, eating up the bricks and the pipes and the furniture one day at a time. The drip-drip-drip of the water in the sink but also the steadily falling rain.

Our Gardener, this old man who was not perfect but was good - he was the Queen of Pentacles.

Because the Queen of Pentacles gives, not because she has to, not because she is forced to, not because she needs something in return

But because she sees that there is giving that needs to be done.

And in that simple task she finds herself surrounded by gifts, too.

Well, there it is, my friends.

I am growing tired, and I don't have much more to say.

I don't have much more fear in me for the thing out there at all, now.

I wonder if it's even real.

I wonder if maybe it's just a trick of the light.

Maybe in the morning, when I wake up

Things will look a bit different.

Less frightening.

What am I talking about?

I'm the one with the green taking over my skin

The little sprouts on my  joints, my temples, my feet

The bloody teeth, the muddy fingernails.

I forgot that, didn't I?

What a coincidence.

I will have more for your next week my friends, when I'm not quite so sleepy

I will sleep more now that I am less afraid.

Don't you worry about that.

I hope you rest well too, regardless of anything you might be afraid of.

Let that fear come help you when you wake.

For now,

Goodnight, my friends.

[Eerie theme music]

(Host speaks as Kristen:)

Hello everyone, and thank you so much for listening to Episode 160 of On a Dark, Cold Night. This is Kristen Zaza, the one who writes, performs, records, composes, edits, etc, everything you hear here. Thank you so much for all the birthday wishes last week, it made me feel so very loved and welcome, and I'm so grateful for that. I hope you're doing well, out there in Virgo Season, taking the steps you need to take to care for yourself the way that only you know how to do so well.

I would like to first thank everyone who supports the show via Patreon - your monthly support as always is so appreciated, now more than ever, thank you so much. If you're interested in supporting the show, I'm just going to take a moment and tell you about the different perks you can receive through patreon.com. If you donate $1 or more a month, you can receive access to my ever-growing soundtrack which I update on a weekly basis. And if you donate $5 or more a month, you get that soundtrack perk, but also access to a monthly Tarot-reading video I do for the Full Moon (and also all past tarot readings too). Just to let you know those are in US dollars (took me a little time as a Canadian to figure that out, laugh-out-loud). You can learn more about supporting the show that way by visiting patreon.com/darkcoldnight. If you'd rather donate one time only without any of those perks, you can do so through Ko-fi.com by buying one or more metaphorical coffees for me - head on over to ko-fi.com/darkcoldnight to learn more. And we also have t-shirts and hoodies for the podcast available through bonfire.com/on-a-dark-cold-night.

I'm sending thanks out tonight to someone who left us a 5 star review on iTunes - many thanks to ~thelonleygamer for your very very kind words about my work. I really appreciate you taking the time to share them. If you'd like to help the show out in a similar way, I'd love if you also left a review on iTunes - or wherever else you like to review podcasts, though itunes is where I'll be more sure to see it and shout you out, which I want to do! You can also follow me on social media - I'm on Twitter @ADarkColdNight, instagram at darkcoldnightpodcast, my Facebook and YouTube channels, just called On a Dark, Cold Night. Speaking of YouTube, I uploaded a video with lyrics last week with one of my songs - Beware, from Episode 149 - and I'm excited to work on a few more of these song videos. If you have any requests or thoughts about which one I should do next, Tweet at me, I'd love to hear your thoughts. As I said in a bashful tweet about the song, I'm hoping to record clearer versions of these one day - but for now, I'm just getting them out there the best way I know how.

Thank you for listening my friends. I was a little late this week with the show so I also want to say thank you for your patience. My tardiness is in no way a reflection on the energy and the joy that  speaking to you this way every week brings me. 

Sweet dreams, everyone.  Put aside your fear, or any situation that's giving you stress, for just a little bit, so that you can get the rest you need to face them tomorrow. Advice for me as well as you. Take care my dears.

[Eerie theme music]

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