The Rooftop Garden


 
 
 
 The Rooftop Garden
 
 
 The Rooftop Garden
 Menaka Raman-Wilms
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © Menaka Raman-Wilms, 2022
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 all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
 
 
 
 Nightwood Editions
 P.O. Box 1779
 Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0
 Canada
 www.nightwoodeditions.com
 cover design: Angela Yen
 typography: Carleton Wilson
 
 
 
 
 
 Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
 This book has been produced on paper certified by the FSC.
 Printed and bound in Canada.
 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
 Title: The rooftop garden / Menaka Raman-Wilms.
 Names: Raman-Wilms, Menaka, author.
 Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220261776 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220261784 | ISBN 9780889714380 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889714397 (EPUB)
 Classification: LCC PS8635.A4614 R66 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
 
 
 They play the game where they are the last people on earth. They are in a forest, and it is almost dark, and they have to find shelter and make dinner. Nabila crushes flower petals with a stick. The smell is warm and sick-sweet and makes her sneeze. 
 Matthew is in charge of shelter, but he just squats behind the rose bush and pushes dirt around with his finger. 
 Nabila is still trying to figure out what has happened. Either there was an earthquake and entire cities have fallen into the cracks, or the North Pole melted and the oceans have flooded the world. They must be on one of the few islands left. Nabila adds some dried leaves to the flower petals and they crumble and almost turn into powder. 
 She hears a noise above them and drops her stick spoon. “Plane!” she calls over to Matthew, and he makes room for her to huddle next to him behind the rose bush. There’s a bit of an overhang, and though they have to be careful not to touch the branches, the rose bush keeps them secret from the skies.
 They have to hide from planes that pass above them. That’s one of the rules. 
 When the coast is clear, Nabila goes back to making dinner. “Bring me some mud,” she tells Matthew, so he spits twice into a handful of dirt and mashes it up, then places it next to her petals and leaves. When she mixes in the mud it becomes a brown paste, sticky like syrup, and it stirs like the dough of something her father would bake. 
 They listen to the familiar noises from the city below: groaning sea monsters, shifting earth plates, underwater dragons coming up to surface. 
 Dinner will be ready soon. 
 
 
 Matthew had disappeared. It had been three months now since she’d last seen him, the day he showed up unannounced at her lab wearing a sweater that was too small so that his wrists stuck out the ends of the sleeves. He’d sat down on a stool on the other side of the bench and stared at a jar filled with immobilized krill. “I’m supposed to leave the country,” he’d said to her, and at first she couldn’t quite figure out why he was telling her. It was only afterwards, after he’d stood up and walked out of the room, that she felt she maybe could have said more. 
 Once he’d left, she’d seen that he’d left a crumpled gum wrapper on the stool. It must have fallen out of his pocket, and she left it there, glanced at it all afternoon whenever she passed. It had been strange to see Matthew again. And she’d never expected he’d come to the university. 
 Nabila was measuring how kelp grew in different water temperatures. She had seven canisters of clear glass lined up, the water inside kept at steady rates by heating and cooling systems, pipes pushing tiny bubbles of air through. The water in each canister was set to a different temperature, each one getting progressively warmer than the one beside it. That afternoon she’d started as usual with the first one, documenting the length of each plant, the colour, and making her way down the line. She did this every other day, noting any changes, noting anything out of the ordinary. 
 That day, she remembered thinking that gum wrapper was the thing out of the ordinary. Every time she passed the stool she felt compelled to look at it, to picture Matthew sitting there, his hands in his lap, his head swivelling around at the sound of the thermometer beeping or bubbles rushing. “What should I do?” he’d said a few times, and she hadn’t understood why he’d come to her with this question, why he’d insisted on sitting there in the middle of her research project. Even now, when Nabila thought back to it, she remembered how out of place Matthew had been, how strange it was to see him in her world at the university. How he’d wanted an instant answer in a room designed for things taking time. 
 Now she was walking along a street with foreign graffiti on the walls of foreign buildings. It was a Monday, which meant it was a day she was supposed to be measuring her kelp. She was supposed to be in her lab surrounded by tanks of water. Instead, there would be an eager undergrad stepping in, and though Nabila had shown the undergrad everything in detail, she was still worried that her absence would create inconsistency. She’d never left in the middle of an experiment before. It made her feel negligent, but she knew she didn’t really