I
There was once a province with a secret treasure.
In the bedrock beneath the land on which humans lived, a substance far too powerful to mention in public was concentrated.
The locals knew little of this material. When they traipsed through the forests and slogged through the marshes, looking for mushrooms and flowers to eat, the substance wasn’t on their minds. They didn’t know its name, they didn’t know what color it was, and they wouldn’t have recognized it if someone gave them a jar of it.
Secret treasures elsewhere in history are known to give up their secrets slowly, but surely, and this substance was no exception. In fact, in other parts of the world, this substance was understood to have incredible powers. It was only in this province that the treasure’s abundance, and power, was kept secret. The leaders of the province didn’t want anyone worrying about what might lurk beneath their feet. What would it do to property values?
It was a substance that could make people smarter and stronger.
II
Laney wasn’t thinking about any of this when she trekked through the woods to catch some butterflies for a school art project. She sauntered through the grass, not with a print-out of a journal article on the substance, and not with an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer, but with a knapsack containing a butterfly net and a paper box.
The first butterfly went well. It sat on a tree, Laney slowly laid the net around the bark, the butterfly landed on the net as she waved her arm and she dropped it neatly it into the box. The second one was a little harder; it was flying around a rock, looking for droplets of dew, and she had to chase it, bumping into small flowers with sharp thorns on their stems as she pounced from corner to corner. She did catch it, but at the cost of scratched ankles. Satisfied with two specimens, Laney walked home.
The next day, Laney was ten feet tall and ravenous. She awoke with a creak, having spilled out of bed onto the floor, and crawled out of her bedroom to the kitchen. Without looking down at her impossibly long arms, since that would be an admission it wasn’t a dream, she ate everything in the vegetable bin; moving on to the icebox, she drank everything inside. Still ravenous, but thinking more clearly now that she wasn’t parched, Laney attacked the pantry with gusto.
She poured every burlap bag of dried beans into the kitchen sink. She ran the tap, boiling hot, and watched as the beans unfurled their leaves, darkened, and inflated with water. A splash of vinegar, a quick drain and rinse, and they were ready; she began eating them with gusto.
At school that day, nobody even questioned that she towered over them, or that her knees sat above her classmates’ shoulders next to the desk. They didn’t question how she picked up the entire desk with just one hand, either.
Her teacher did question how she had finished her schoolwork so quickly, and did ask how she had written such convincing arguments. He accused her of having cheated; surely, a robotic system from the neighboring city had been secretly smuggled into her house and was doing her homework for her. When she laughed and responded, “of course not!” he swiped a red pen across her homework and phoned for the principal.
III
Years later, after moving on to a career in law, and having secured an Olympic medal in pole vaulting the past summer, Laney reconsidered the overnight growth spurt she’d experienced a few orbits prior. She’d been having recurring dreams of a perplexing nature.
Walking down a grassy road. It begins to pour. A carriage thunders towards her at impossible speed, the steeds blasting craters into the mud. Laney shouts at the cart. A torrential blast of mud hits her, and she opens her eyes, enraged, glimpsing the smirk of the driver leaning out the window. She looks down, finds herself spotless, and wakes up.
The day it happened, she didn’t know the why or how, but within a few weeks of the growth spurt she had figured the root cause. Dusty textbooks spoke of its effects and its vectors’ names. It existed, somewhere in her hometown, it had caused an overnight growth spurt of five feet, and it would have continued to inflate her height by a few percent per week for the rest of her life if nothing were done. When she had blinked, the exponential curve flashed beneath her eyelids — arcing up beyond the sky.
A special compound developed by doctors in a foreign city half a century ago could remove all traces of the agent, halting any resulting growth. Laney explained to her examiner, she was prescribed the antisubstance, and it worked. She would never return to her original height, but she wouldn’t continue to grow out of control. It happened; it concluded.
That afternoon, all those orbits later, Laney strode back home. Her family was eagerly expecting her, but she had something to do. She rummaged around in the closet, grabbed what she needed, and called the family to come join her.
They stepped together into that forest. Her knapsack, faded, the padding having disintegrated and the zipper metal rusted, hung from her shoulder like a tiny purse. Her childhood butterfly net hadn’t grown with her, and resembled more of a bubble blowing ring in her hands, so her brother (merely 7 feet tall) held it instead. He waved it around vigorously, but no butterflies were anywhere to be found.
They re-enacted the fateful day before she had grown. They walked by the entrance to the park, now decorated with flowery signs covered in warnings about leaving ceramic amphorae and other dangerous refuse in public areas. There were warning signs of bears, and of rattlesnakes, but Laney looked closely and found nothing warning of what she knew lay in those woods.
They watched for butterflies; they looked around at all the tree trunks lying on the forest floor until they found one marked with the tell-tale ring-shaped dent of a butterfly net. Laney traced her skips with a one-to-five ratio, and they found themselves at the rock where she had caught her second butterfly. Laney bent down, and squinted, and she knew immediately what she saw. She called over her family, pointing out where they could safely step, and signaled to her brother to finally unseal the specimen tube.
Her brother pulled out the tube and a pair of scissors. Laney took both, knelt down, watching that her knees were clear of the thorns, and snipped the thorns into the test tube. It wasn’t definitive, but it was a start.
Dearest Village Governor.
Our town has been in grave danger for years. Our children grow up short, unable to compete with the taller students from neighboring districts. Nobody knows why our students are short, but I believe I know.
In other districts, students are told about the thorn of the endangered thimble-rose in hushed tones, and they treat it with respect. They know that in the right doses, the substance secreted into the points of its thorns accelerates the progress of growth plates and augments intelligence. In those districts, every park with the rose has them marked, with signs, and fenced off so that nobody will accidentally step into a rosebush and receive a dangerous dose. Only those who haven’t received their yearly dose of the substance expose themselves to the rose’s thorn.
Here lies the quandary. In our district, nobody knows about the endangered thimble-rose at all. They confuse it for the wild rose; a musty-smelling, but harmless flower. They avoid its stalks entirely, out of fear of bleeding or infection from the thorns. They know that in other towns, a plant can be the cause of great growth and breathtaking intelligence, but they assume such a plant isn’t present in their humble niche.
Yet in our province, the very region where the very substance secreted by these thorns is most concentrated in the soil, not a single sign in our woodland or marsh reserves notes these local parameters. Our youths are developmentally limited, compared to their neighbors who receive the thorn’s treatment, and our rank in the National Progress Measurement only falls.
At once, visitors to our wildlands from other regions may be unknowingly pricking themselves with our rose’s thorns, thinking them the ordinary national standard Rose, and may be frustrated by the ensuing rapid and unexpected growth of their bone plates.
Highly Regarded Village Governor, I entreat that you might add some signage to our gardens and recreational areas, noting the presence of the Endangered Thimble-Rose, and its benefits to human health and noting that in our particular area, the substance secreted by its thorns is especially potent.
Sine paenitentia;
your Loyal Subject Laney
IV
Laney’s brother capped the test tube and dropped it into his portable icebox. Tomorrow, he reminded himself, he would drop it at the chemist’s, and he and someone in the neighboring province would receive the results of its analysis.
Even if Laney’s signs, which he doubted would do much, were never erected, within a few days, he reasoned, a small number in a book of statistics would eventually tick upwards because of him.
By just a tick.