Raymond Brunell // The Peace Gardens // Fiction
The Peace Gardens
The rosemary sounds like static when it’s angry—seventeen years of Margaret Chen’s voice, sharp with accusations about ungrateful children and wasted piano lessons. I planted it beside the sage three days ago—sage that hums with the same woman’s whispered apologies to empty rooms. Now, the two are making a new sound, something that aches in my teeth, like biting into ice cream.
I am the head gardener here. My days are spent deadheading roses, but my real work is with memory—the kind that grows in soil, clings to roots, and hums beneath the surface. Most people laugh when I say plants remember. Margaret’s children don’t. They visit every week, never together.
David arrives first—Wednesdays at 10:17, with the battered watering can. He kneels beside the rosemary, palm pressed to the earth. The plant’s leaves shiver with static. “Why won’t you call? Your sister misses—” He pulls back, startled, as if a faint vibration passed from stem to skin.
He’s always so close to letting himself hear.
Sarah’s car pulls up—brakes squeal, bassline thrums. She strides straight to the sage, not glancing at her brother. The sage’s hum sharpens, wind through wheat, sharper than before. Their hands move in a mirror, checking soil, deadheading—gestures learned at their mother’s knee.
David breaks the silence, voice low, raw. “Do you ever wish she’d just said something real?”
Sarah’s answer is almost a whisper. “I wish she’d let us. I wish you would.”
For a beat, the garden is brittle. Then the harmonics shift. My teeth ache. A tingling pressure sweeps up through my boots, as if the ground itself is singing. A faint rustle brushes my ear—a breath of wind or something more—a whispered note of lavender, barely audible but unmistakable.
Memory surges: David hears his childhood piano through Sarah’s recollection; Sarah feels the glow of her science fair win as seen by her brother. I catch a scrap too—Margaret, humming softly as she planted, her regret and love tangled in the dirt.
The sage whispers, “I never meant for you to compete. You were both extraordinary.”
The rosemary, gentler now: “The fighting wasn’t about you. It was my fear that love wouldn’t be enough.”
Sarah’s hands shake. “She told the plants things she couldn’t say to us,” she says, voice breaking.
David kneels beside her, soil smearing his jeans. “She was proud of you. She saved every article.”
Sarah’s voice cracks. “She played your music every week. She missed you.”
They look at the plants, not each other, listening to the voice that had been trapped between silences. Basil ripples with laughter. Lavender hums an off-key lullaby.
The air settles. Margaret’s love, no longer tangled in regret, spreads through the roots, enough for both. Brother and sister sit in the soil that holds her authentic voice, patient and constant.
I pack my tools and linger, feeling the garden’s hush settle in my chest, a gentle ache of memory and hope. Some conversations are meant for family alone. The plants will remember, and so, I think, will I.
Raymond Brunell writes literary speculative fiction where sound shapes reality and neurodivergent perception reveals what others overlook. His work blends near-future technology with magical realism, centering characters whose sensory differences become keys to unlocking hidden truths about consciousness, control, and authentic human connection. Prioritizing audio over visual imagery, Brunell builds immersive worlds where acoustic anomalies fracture carefully constructed facades and the ability to hear frequencies others ignore becomes both a gift and a burden. His stories probe how surveillance systems and optimization algorithms attempt to erase cognitive diversity—and how resistance begins with refusing to mask.
