Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile

February 2025

Instructions For Planting

Lucienne Cummings

Find the right site

With each sodden step, I pine for a time before: before the builders evicted every last rabbit; before I was priced out of my home town; before I lost myself like a rat in this unfamiliar maze of orange brick new-builds. My mental map of childhood is fragmentary at best and the fragments fit nowhere until I step into a tiny grassy clearing between the new and old houses and the familiar terracotta chimney pots come into view. 

Prepare the seeds

I slot a single white carnation into a knot-hole in the fence where his hazel hedge once grew. The scent brings back scraps of him—pointing out a foraging wren between the seedlings, asking Do you want grease on your bread, kid? and spreading butter on our toast. Remembering his papery brown hands, my edges blur into the rain.

Remove any weeds and large stones

The only trees left in this area now are spindly, cultivated lollipops in pots, No good for nesting kid! As I trudge back to the bus stop the windows of a dozen new kitchen-diners painted in cornfield or lark scowl at me, their flimsy gutters soaking the already flooded ground. Flocks of black SUVs and stylish garden offices pull at their moorings, creaking and chattering, and threatening to spill their comforts into the deluge.

 Scatter the seeds

Stop! he whispers in my ear, pulling at the back of my coat with an invisible hand. Two long ears and a white bobtail sit on the path in front of me. I freeze in the rabbit’s headlights, and for one brilliant second I forget that I’m soaking, I forget I’m not six, and I forget that he’s gone. I turn to ask him something, and the rabbit runs—back the way I’ve come. I follow her.

‘Re:Growth’ - original artwork by Jude Potts

Mark the place

The doe stops in the clearing, and starts to dig. A good gardener goes deep, he says as I copy her, scrabbling with cupped hands, throwing earth and grass north, east, south, and west until I’ve made a depression, then a hollow, then a nest. I plant myself at the mouth of my burrow. The doe and I crouch together, and wait.

 Water and watch

The rain feels permanent. 

My rabbit is joined by another rabbit. 

Two rabbits become four, then sixteen, then a colony. 

I plant onions, potatoes, and leeks, in drills which the rabbits dig up daily. 

We hide when humans come near, avoiding the thrusting snouts of their whining dogs, who follow our territorial signposts like a trail of treats. 

Sometimes I see him by the garden tap, filling his ancient, dented watering can, kicking soil off his brown leather boots. Be patient, he reminds me. Nothing good happens quick.

Thin out the seedlings

Foxes haunt us nightly: sometimes they catch an older rabbit unawares, sometimes they slink into the estate for scraps, sometimes they’re hungry all night. As grey fur grows thick on my arms and legs, the rain lightens. Crows clatter and spiral down from the tattered sky to pick at bones, and insects clean away any remaining death. Finches collect the insects for their new chicks, their calls collecting in hollows and stumps, flashing blue and red in passing. It’s all circular kid, he reminds me, as I watch the sun rise and set and the dry ground crack open.

Harvest

One autumn, the rains return and the SUVs migrate to drier places for good, their owners muttering about black mould and asthma. I walk to the bloated river at the edge of town and stuff my pockets with cones and acorns which I bury in the shells of the abandoned houses. Squirrels stalk me home and when the trees outgrow their grey-tiled hats and orange-brick sleeves, we climb up high together. We lord it over the retreating town, screeching and chasing and waving our tails in defiance.


It’s all right kid, he whispers as a branch rocks me to sleep. Everything’s all right.

About the author

Lucienne Cummings

Lucienne Cummings writes prose fiction and comedy in north-east England. She’s been published in National Flash Fiction Day’s FlashFlood and Write-In, and Mslexia’s anthology Best Women's Short Fiction 2023, as well as shortlisted by Mslexia, Fractured Literary, and The Propelling Pencil. Her comedy sketches and one-liners have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Scotland, and BBC One Scotland.