Wittenburg Hostile Gardens

2. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-3-6957-6856-1
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten

Emma is a young woman searching for purpose in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic that has brought humanity to its knees. Wandering through a violent, forsaken land, she encounters strangers, both good and bad, who show her that not everything is lost. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of the genre, Hostile Gardens explores intimacy, belief, and the lingering violence of a world that ended without resolution.

Moritz Wittenburg is an artist and writer living in northern Germany. His work explores the intricate connections between humanity, nature, religion, and technology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wittenburg, Moritz

Leseproben

DEAD LAND, SHEOL

Mid-November. The rain is plentiful and cruel in this land bereft of comfort. Emma comes across a village on her way to nowhere. It lies in a valley between rolling hills and brown meadows once tended to by farmers and their cattle. She abides under a tree on the edge of a forest, and her legs ache as she kneels and eyes the country. There is a road, and she scans the black tar as it meanders through the village. A dark steeple looms above red roofs – she counts roughly twenty houses that once were homes. There is no sound but the sound of the wind, and she knows there is no God in that church. Faint smoke rises from a chimney, and she presses on, keeping close to the tree line. Emma crosses a dead field and, heading west, joins the road far behind the nameless village. Rotten rapeseed stretches as far as she can see, a muddy waste expecting winter. Insipid skies loom above, as always. The wind in these parts is relentless. It makes Emma sick. It tousles her hair, creeps beneath her scarf, and leaves a burning sensation on her neck. She knows this weather is a sign of trouble. Judgment is not to come with toil and sword but with the slow and steady erosion of the land and the soul. Winter is approaching, and it is to be her last. The cold is but a motor of mania as it slowly churns and crushes all, man and animal alike. Emma looks back periodically. The sanest thing to be is paranoid.

She needs a place to stay the night. In the late afternoon, she comes across a dairy farm surrounded by pastureland. Made of ocher-colored stone, the farmhouse stands abandoned at the center. Long, industrial cowsheds flank it to both sides. There is a lofty garage, its corrugated roof hail- poked and collapsing. Everything is old and askew, for the buildings in this land tend to sink into the loose and miry ground. Emma treads cautiously. The property is littered with construction materials and scrap metal, cold and torn. Like the dead, they speak of longgone times. A tractor sits in a ditch by a small culvert. The cabin door is wide open, and mold grows on the driver’s seat. Some vague, sour smell of death lingers in the air – it is all too familiar. Deceased cows line a fence to Emma’s left. She does not turn her head toward them, but her eyes keep wandering over. Thirteen carcasses, mangled into strange yet discernible shapes. Black leather stretched over discolored bones. Hollow, eyeless skulls. Innards long spilled and taken by birds and maggots. Emma’s neck hurts, and every motion feels like a hammer to her head.

She reaches the front door of the farmhouse. It is unlocked, and she carefully pushes it open. Whoever lived here has long left. All the curtains are drawn, and although it smells foul, it is not the smell of death. Emma enters, stepping into a long hallway. The room to her left is clear, a plundered kitchen. She walks lightly, but the planks under her feet are old and ever-creaking. Stairs to her right – upstairs seems safe for now, and she continues, halting at the door to the living room at the end of the hallway. She looks inside, standing neither in nor out. A mint wallpaper, flaking, covered in dust and soot. Torn furniture and a fireplace with a seared mantle. A floor drowned in books – some read, most burned.

Open cans of food surround a bed of carpets and rugs. Grime everywhere, either blood or fecal or something else entirely. Emma turns around and checks the next floor. Here, she finds a modest bathroom. She only ever sleeps in bathrooms. Once locked inside, she drops her heavy backpack, leans against the tiled wall, and sighs. Her breath is a mist in the gelid air. The smell of mold now enters. Emma slides down along the tiles. She cries. She eats dried beans from a can. She knows it is too dangerous to use the fireplace downstairs – the people in the village nearby might see the smoke. As always, she gathers a few blankets from the bedrooms left and right and throws them into the bathtub, climbing after them, hoping the night will not be too hard on her.

Emma’s mind runs free in the silence: part monologue, part question, part prayer, part curse. But then a memory rises to the surface. Here, she walks the woods behind her childhood home. There is an old tree. It stands by the edge of the wetlands yonder. She can still see that tree so very clearly. It is beautiful and crooked – large, with hanging branches. Its mummified trunk seems primordial in how it draws up from the ground like monolithic flesh, all swelling and convulsing. The tree’s crown forms a blossoming bell. Emma finds herself beneath it. She looks up and sees a thousand dots of light and shadow dance to the rhythm of the wind. It is a clear memory – the clearest of them all. Emma ponders now and wonders. She believes that standing on the threshold between life and death is like taking a glance at heaven without God’s consent. She has lingered there too long. He has grown angry. Oh, these hostile gardens – Sheol, Sheol, and whispers from beyond the wall. She sleeps before nightfall.

I find myself standing on a green hill. In front of me is a female figure. Her back is turned. An ashen robe flutters in the wind. Long brown hair lies curly over pale shoulders. As I step forth, she vanishes. My gaze wanders beyond and up the hill. A never-ending cloud rushes across the sky. It moves upwards like smoke yet toward me like a storm. A murmur travels with the wind. I follow it. A valley. I come upon a valley in which three whirlwinds appear. They’re like worms, dancing silently across the earth. I cower in tall bracken and watch them. They suddenly halt and rock in place as if waiting for me to avert my eyes. I see the woman again, and there’s a boy with her. They speak to me in feral chants through the maws of the creatures that dwell in the undergrowth, among which I crouch. I behold a white hare with scarlet eyes. It comes from a hole, tests the impossible air, and faces me. It whispers to me now, but I can’t understand it. There, a stranger grabs my chin and takes a knife to my neck, cutting away. I beg for mercy, but my screams subside in blood.

Emma’s eyes open to the first light of day. She climbs out of the bathtub and stretches. Her body aches. The tiles on the walls and floor glimmer in an eerie blue, forever cold to the touch. She looks out the window and sees black clouds. A lonely star fades into dawn, and a far sun rises behind the scorched moraine like a dingy afterthought of creation. Above a sink hangs a dusty mirror. Emma looks into it and cannot recognize herself. Pale skin, sunken eyes, and greasy red hair. A freckled face, once young, now aged and injured. Skinny, all too skinny, very much declined past litheness. She opens the mirror cabinet and finds a few pads. She takes them even though her period does not come anymore. There also lies a pair of scissors. She grabs a strand of hair and cuts it right above the shoulder. It lies matted and strawy in her hand. She aligns the rest now, too. Next, she eats breakfast: stale biscuits and condensed milk. Emma has enough food for a day or two, but finding more is hard. It becomes harder every day. There is almost no fresh produce anymore. She knows some things still grow, such as roots, cabbages, and rose hips, but she seldom finds them.

Morning fog lingers as she leaves the farmhouse and goes west. Silence haunts her, as always. All she can hear is the grit she treads on and the wind that pipes and cries in the crevices of the world, natural and unnatural. Aside from the road, no trace of man is drawn in the earth, but she sees the hand of God in it. God, the ultimate artist, his most beautiful sculptures safe at last from his children. The serpentine lane takes Emma to the outskirts of a town. From the mist appear abandoned cars. She sees corpses in one, a family of four. They smile at her, their faces withered. Molten blacktop – she passes a burned-out chassis lying on its roof. Ash blows in circles around charred bodies either made of steel or flesh – she cannot tell.

“Long gone, long gone...” she mutters as she trudges on shards of glass.

More and more cars appear, all deserted and left in a hurry. Suitcases and bags are scattered along the road, some hugged by the dead. Emma treads carefully, navigating around the vehicles, catching a glimpse of each interior. There come empty lots and industrial sites. They were already abandoned long before the end of times. She surveys them from afar as she follows an overgrown footpath between the road and a junkyard. A smokestack reaches into the clouds above derelict halls of enterprise. It looms, and Emma moves along. A military checkpoint lies ahead. There is a mass grave, like so often. Shriveled corpses lie in a hole, bound, shot, and covered in quicklime. They were not sick, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the hands of a government desperate to control a situation far beyond their powers. From the abandoned army convoy behind the checkpoint, Emma only retrieves old helmets and boots that are too big for her. No gear is left on the few soldiers rotting away on the asphalt. They are all stripped naked, skin white and bloating. Their hands and feet are missing, taken by animals or other people. Some ritual, perhaps, Emma thinks. She once encountered human heads on spikes dressed in jewelry. Barbaric sanctums to young gods conjured from the wasteland. A distant, distant gunshot – a hunter, maybe.

Emma walks another mile, always cold and always sore. An unmistakable structure emerges in...