Bloom

It was a …

… brown paper envelope.

A brown paper envelope, ladies and gentlemen.

Disappointed yet also completely mystified, I brushed the earth off it, revealing some curly writing on one side which said: THE SURPRISING SEEDS. The words were scrawled in faded, old-fashioned green ink.

Underneath that was the sentence SELF-SEEDING BE THESE SEEDS.

I turned the packet over, hoping to find more explanation, or at least something a bit more exciting, but there was nothing.

No instructions.

No use-by date.

No picture.

No hashtag.

Not even a barcode, for crying out loud.

I shook it with frustration. Something rattled inside.

I shook it again. It rattled again. Yikes.

There was no way I was going to open that. Who knew what might come scuttling out? Instead, I held it up to the late-afternoon sky. The light shining through the flimsy paper revealed about thirty small black things inside.

These things had small, round black bodies, out of which grew four thin black stalks. They weren’t moving – they looked as if they’d dried up a long time ago. But they were spooky. Even their not moving was kind of frightening.

Here’s a list of the things they looked like:

1. Small, petrified jellyfish.

2. Aliens with no faces and four legs.

3. Dried-up severed heads, with mad hair.

I stared at them again. They seemed to be waiting for me to do something. But what, exactly?

My cheeks burned. Mixed in with my fluttery sense of revulsion was a feeling of being tricked. It was like discovering that something I thought would be exciting wasn’t, after all. Our Year Three class trip to the Little Sterilis dishcloth factory, for instance. (Take it from me: not the adrenaline-fuelled ride it sounds. And a very limited range of gifts in the gift shop, if you know what I mean.)

I crumpled the packet up in my hand, scooped up Mr Grittysnit’s letter, stomped back inside and locked the back door firmly.

Because – and pay attention, folks, for here is an important life lesson at no extra charge – if you want to protect yourself from a mysterious dark magic against which you are totally defenceless, then bringing it into your home and locking the door, thereby locking yourself in with it, is definitely the right way to go about it.

Like I said, on the house.

(#ulink_584e4b68-645d-5c10-8d87-9ac81a750494)

MUM HAD THE best job in the world. She spent her days gazing at mountains of cheese, lakes of tomato sauce and a gazillion giant tubes of spicy pepperoni meat coming down from the factory ceiling like blessings from the pizza gods. Mum made pizzas at Chillz, our town’s frozen-pizza factory.

Well, if you wanted to split hairs, the machines made the pizzas; Mum looked after the machines that made the pizzas. She kept them clean, dealt with any tech glitches and shut the factory down if they got contaminated. She wasn’t a pizza chef as such, more of a machine looker-after.

Or so she kept telling me. To me, Mum made pizzas. Plus she got to wear these awesome pizza-themed overalls, covered in red and green splodges to make her look like a slice from the bestselling product in the Cheap Chillz range. (The Pepperoni and Green Pepper Spice Explosion!, only 79p. Yes, that’s for an entire pizza. I know.) I loved those overalls; I loved even more the wedge-shaped badge pinned to their front pocket which said:

As if all that wasn’t amazing enough, she also got first dibs on the pizza rejects from the conveyor belts. These were the pizzas that either had too much topping or not enough, or that weren’t a perfect circular shape, or were one millimetre out of the required Chillz regulation thickness of 2.1 centimetres.

Most of the rejects were pulped at the end of each day, but Mum would take as many home as she could fit into the car boot because I loved them. They were cheesy. They were spicy. They came with unidentified slices of other stuff, which could have been mushrooms, but nobody knew, and that was part of their magic. And they were all for me. Because Mum, weirdly, never touched them.

*

Once inside, I threw the packet of Surprising Seeds on the table, got a Reject Special out of the freezer and tried to understand what had just happened out on the patio. Would I have to call the police and report an earthquake? Would Mum have felt it in the factory? Would the pizzas be affected? How could that packet have glowed, deep down in the ground? And what level of trouble was the broken patio going to land me in when Mum saw it?

It was too much. I decided to slip into a harmless little daydream just to calm down. In it, we were stepping off a plane in Portugal. Mum was beaming as she turned to look at me. And those dark bags under her eyes had gone.

I smiled back blissfully.

‘Where’s the pool, love?’ she asked as a breeze smelling faintly of coconuts ruffled our hair. I could hear her so clearly, we could have been there. ‘How was school, love?’

Er – what?

My daydream faded, replaced by the sight of a short plump woman with bleached blonde hair. Her tortoiseshell glasses were perched on the end of her nose, and she was rocking her pizza-themed overalls, as usual, although she wasn’t smiling quite as widely as she had been in the daydream.

‘How was your day?’ she asked, her hands cupping my cheeks.

I tried not to prise her icy fingers off my skin. (Her skin was always freezing – that’s what you get when you work in sub-zero temperatures! Talk about a cool mum, right?)

I hesitated. Where can I even start? ‘I think we’ve just had an earthquake.’

The tap gave a sad drip.

‘What?’

‘I was outside in the backyard, and … everything went super loud. I heard a chainsaw – it was a pigeon – and … Did your pizzas rise okay? I was worried …’

Mum raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’ she said gently.

I took a deep breath. It seemed a mad dream now; the details were already fading, and it was hard to tell the difference between what had really happened and the misshapen remains of my jittery imagination.

‘The patio shook.’

‘It shook?’

‘And then the patio broke.’

‘It broke?’

‘And then I found something.’