J. D. Hudson was a particular sort of man. He wore small, black shoes with no laces but with important names stitched into discreet parts of their leather. His keyboard was bare of lint and his fingers bare of ink, for his keyboard was all he needed. He dressed with a tie whenever possible, and sometimes whenever it wasn’t. His first and middle names were mysteries to all but his closest family members, in whose presence he frowned when addressed so. He starched his collars. He wore collars.
And he lived in Toronto, where, to the satisfaction of his property values but the irritation of his soul, he owned a lawn. It was small and grassy and made rather timid by the masses of concrete about it.
He loathed it.
Oh, J. D. Hudson did his best, he did. He always did. He purchased fertilizers and pesticides (rigidly defined within legally permitted lines), he applied shears with dispassionate skill, he weeded mercilessly and without pity for the young and sprouted nor old and rooted.
And yet still the damned thing vexed him.
He watered. He trimmed. He sheared. He even, in a fit of near-madness, planted a small patch of flowers once. They bloomed, wilted, died, and were dutifully tidied away.
And yet still the damned thing wouldn’t stop growing.
The last straw came when he had to go away for a week. The trip was fine – on his favorite topic too: serious business – it was the return that filled him with horror and disgust. The fine weather of late spring had come and gone, bastard thing, and filled his lawn with vigor and delight to a scandalous degree. It had become feckless. It had become unruly. It had become overgrown.
J. D. Hudson looked at his lawn, and he looked at the clippers in his hands, and small well-used muscles in his lower jaw twitched in a most unseemly manner. This would not do. This would most patently not do. This was a Problem, and Problems required Solutions. In the name of tidiness.
J. D. Hudson was not a man who knew things about lawnmowers. But one of his brothers knew a man who did, and he recommended a company. An obscure one. A very obscure one that didn’t even own a website, and whose purchases must be conducted through mail-order.
J. D. Hudson frowned on such things. But J. D. Hudson did not frown on what was avowed to be top-notched product at rock-bottom prices, and so he committed his untrained, keyboard-reared fingers to the fumbling tool of the pen. His handwriting was unspeakable, his signature unpronounceable, but in the end, all was filled, all boxes were ticked, all stamps attached, and the lot of it consigned to the hands of the mailman, whom J. D. Hudson suspected of petty theft and inadequate devotion to his career.
A week festered by, during which J. D. Hudson’s lawn grew more riotous still, deterred not by his unbending glare. His fingers clenched, his teeth ground, he woke in the night arguing with himself and his daily zero point five cups of breakfast oatmeal (without sugar) lost its taste, which it had never possessed.
And then, gloriously, beautifully, divinely, came the mail. And came a parcel that was rather smaller than J. D. Hudson had expected. It had arrived mostly assembled, lacking only the attachment of the handle to the main body with a complicated series of ingenious bolts that hurt J. D. Hudson’s knuckles as he turned them in and made him say improper words in clipped, exact tones.
Assembled, it stood atop the lawn in brooding glory as a colossus: the Accelerationist Townmower (his illegible handwriting had apparently resulted in his receiving an older, off-brand model whose name he did not recognize, but no matter), over sixty pounds of slightly dented metal and mysteriously oily machinery. He allowed it to bask there for a time as he read and reread the manual, which was in six languages, none of which were English, French, Spanish, or Mandarin. Complicating this was the typesetting: at least one paragraph was upside down, another was printed backwards, and an entire four pages of text were printed upside down, backwards, and in increasingly small concentric spirals. In red ink.
J. D. Hudson frowned to himself and shut the manual with a disappointed thwap. Well, he’d used these before, or at least seen people use them before. You primed them – like so. Then you pulled the cord – like so. Then you moved it over the grass – like s
J. D. Hudson, as with many people, thought of his life as a series of events, each following the other. Cause and effect strung together like Christmas lights and wrapped in circles around the big confusing evergreen of your mortal coil. He could recite his history since birth as a perfect series of points A through Z, laid in order exactly as prescribed in kindergarten song.
This made the events of that day very hard on him.
The Townmower slid over the grass like a greased pig over a skillet of warm butter, and with much the same noise. J. D Hudson planted his feet firmly to check the machine’s advance and was immediately hoisted off them, dangling from the mower’s handlebar as a fly on a fishing line. His first instinct was to hold on tight, which was unfortunate because that meant he was still gripping the Townmower as it touched the concrete of his sidewalk.
There were noises. Some of them sounded like falling rocks, some like screaming winds, and several as the calls of coyotes and squirrels. Tiny chips of cement and sidewalk screamed past J. D. Hudson’s face as the mower accelerated underneath him, screeching down the street at highway speeds. He pawed feebly at the ignition shutoff, and the shift in his weight sent it swerving wildly into traffic, where a car honked at him loudly for a little less than half a second before being mowed down.
J. D. Hudson found the courage to look back after the shock of having all his limbs still attached to himself wore off. A confused looking man – one of his neighbors, possibly – was sitting in the middle of what had been a road and was now a spry (if narrow) thicket, up to his thighs in prickerbushes and entirely naked bar a pair of sunglasses and a necklace. A tiny fragment of steering wheel crumbled from his hairy paws as he watched, silhouetted against the rambling, untidy hedge that half the sidewalk had become.
J. D. Hudson tore his gaze away from this sight and was spared the trouble of dwelling on it, because that was when he swerved onto Yonge Street and the world was reduced to many small things that flew away in his wake, captured only by his eyes.
A streetcar tumbled away, crumpling into dirt and dust.
Power cables snapped into roots that latched onto buildings that were suddenly very confused trees. Executives hooted in alarm from their canopies, ties dangling as they swung from branch to branch seeking a way down.
The street become a river beneath the blades, lashing violently out around it as dashes and dots and crosswalks were suddenly dashed, dotty, and cross ducks of varying species.
A streetlight fell to the ground, rose up as swamplight.
Streetlights to stumps.
Pedestrians went scurrying into the blossoming copses of shops in fright, hiding in the undergrowth that had once been a rack of t-shirts.
Somewhere in the midst of this, he turned his eyes forwards again and found that the mower had grown substantially, and was chewing up entire rows of housing, shredding bits of tile everywhere as it dropped the structures down to neatly levelled-off patches of mixed woodland forests. Then the Don Valley Parkway was ahead of him, and he shut his eyes again as the blades did their grisly work. Asphalt flecked his face and stuck to the moistness of his tears. Car horns sounded in alarm, then were hushed into the roars of bears and the cackle of birds. Then it all fell away again, far below and far away, leaving him alone in silence with only his thoughts.
The CN tower made a strange creaking noise in the mower’s suspension.
Morning found a slightly different city. For one thing, it now consisted entirely of a single home of modest proportions, with a scandalously unkempt lawn. In its over-lush grass lay a man, naked bar a rumpled collar, whose mute horror left him known only as John Doe.
As for the Townmower, the 401 had been replaced by a series of rolling meadows. It must’ve gone off-road somewhere, but if had, it had left no trace.
Tidily.