Jane Hanna's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Jane Hanna knelt on the schoolhouse roof with a paper cup of soil in one hand and no idea what to plant. She was thirty-nine, a custodian in a black uniform now smudged with dust, her brown hair falling loose from its bun. The rooftop had been a garden once. Now it was cracked pots, dry beds, and a few stubborn weeds. She wanted it back. Not for the students. For the small bright bugs she used to watch up here on lunch breaks, before the beds went brown and the insects stopped coming. The problem was simple and awful. Evening was seven hours away. If she planted the wrong things, nothing would come. She had a flat of seedlings from the hardware store: marigolds, mint, something with purple spikes. The tags told her sun and water. None of them told her what the bugs actually wanted. She sat back on her heels and pushed her glasses up. Below, the schoolhouse was all painted trim and window boxes, cheerful as a cake. The roof was the opposite. She had guessed once already this week and wasted a whole tray on lavender. Not one visitor. She went downstairs to think. The hallway smelled like floor wax. She rolled her cart to the cafeteria and started on the bins. The first bin was the classroom bin, full of crumpled worksheets, snapped pencils, sticky notes, a few plastic figurines a kid had given up on. She lifted the bag. Clean. Nothing moved. The second bin was the lunch bin. She tipped it and a soft heap tumbled out onto the tile: apple cores, banana peels, a split pear, grape stems, half a strawberry. The ants were already there. Dozens of them. Tiny, round, shiny brown bodies moving in a careful line from the baseboard to the fruit. She crouched close. They ignored the paper bin entirely. They wanted the sweet. Jane sat on the floor and watched them for a full minute. Sweet. Not leaves. Not lavender. Sugar and fruit and nectar. She left the mess and went back to the hardware store on her lunch break. She returned the lavender. She bought what she could afford: alyssum, borage, a small strawberry start, two pots of flowering thyme. Sweet-smelling, sweet-flowering, close to the ground. On the roof she planted fast, hands in the dirt, uniform ruined. She watered. She waited. At six-forty, sitting cross-legged by the strawberry pot, she saw the first ant come up the drainpipe. Then a second. Then a bright pink flick of movement on the borage leaf, a jumping spider no bigger than a pea, staring at her with huge dark eyes. Another landed beside it. Jane laughed once, quiet, and pressed her dirty hand to her mouth. The garden had answered. But four pots would not feed a rooftop. She needed the whole bed replanted by tomorrow, and she had spent her last twenty dollars.