The Teaspoon Census

The tomato plants were dying and Maya had decided it was the soil's fault.

"It's just dirt," Soren said. He had his notebook open on his knee, the page already smudged from the spade. "Dirt doesn't do anything. Water does the work. Sun does the work."

"Then why are Gran's tomatoes sad and the ones by the fence enormous?" Maya pushed her thumb into the bed near the fence. The soil there was dark and crumbly and it held the shape of her thumb. The dying bed was pale and packed, like the bottom of a dried puddle.

Gran was at the far end of the garden, talking to a neighbor over the gate, laughing at something, not paying them the slightest attention. She had handed them a tape measure and a clipboard and told them to figure it out themselves. That was Gran. She thought children who were given answers stopped asking questions, and she said so often.

Soren scraped a teaspoon of the good soil into a film of water on a glass slide. He had brought the cheap microscope from the science cupboard, the one with the wobbly mirror you had to angle toward the light. He bent over it.

Then he went very still.

"Maya."

"What."

"It's moving."

She shoved her eye to the eyepiece. The water under the lens was not water. It was traffic. Little teardrop shapes spun and reversed. Threads lay across everything like dropped thread from a sewing basket, except some of the threads were branching while she watched. Specks too small to be anything jittered in clouds.

"That's from a spoonful," she said. "One spoonful."

"One teaspoon," Soren said. He was already writing. "How many do you think are in there?"

Maya sat back on her heels. She did the thing she did when a number was too big to hold, which was squint at the sky as if the answer were printed on it.

"Loads," she said. "Hundreds."

Soren shook his head slowly, not to disagree, but because he had read something once and it was surfacing now, and it was too large to say casually. "I read a billion. In one teaspoon. Of healthy soil. A billion bacteria."

"That's not right."

"That's what it said."

Maya took the teaspoon and held it up between them in the last orange light. It was an ordinary spoon. It held an ordinary lump of dark crumbs.

"There aren't a billion of anything in there," she said. "There aren't a billion people in the whole. " She stopped.

Soren watched her stop.

"How many people are there," she said. "On Earth. All of them."

"Eight billion, about."

Maya looked at the spoon. She looked at the slide. She looked back at the spoon.

"So eight spoons," she said quietly. "Eight spoons of this would have more living things in them than every person who has ever been born is alive right now."

"More than that," Soren said. "The bacteria are only the start. There's the threads. Those are fungus. Yards and yards of it from one teaspoon, all stitched through, and the little teardrops are protozoa, thousands of them, and they eat the bacteria, and. " He stopped writing. His pencil stayed on the paper. "It's not dirt holding plants up. It's a city holding plants up."

Maya stood. She walked to the dying bed and crouched. She took a fresh teaspoon from the pale, packed soil and carried it back like it might spill, though there was nothing in it that looked like it could.

Soren cleaned the slide on his shirt and set up the second sample.

This time they both knew to wait for the moving.

Nothing moved.

There were threads, a few, broken and grey. There was a single teardrop that drifted once and then sat. The clouds of specks were thin, like the last of a snow that wasn't going to stick.

"It's empty," Maya said. "Not empty. But." She searched for it. "It's a city after everyone left."

Soren looked from one slide to the other, back and forth, his head moving like a metronome. "Same garden," he said. "Same rain. Same sun. Six feet apart."

"The fence side has the compost," Maya said. "Gran dumps the kitchen stuff there. The peelings. The leaves." "She feeds that side. She doesn't feed this side. We thought she was feeding the plants."

Soren caught up to her in the next breath. "She was feeding the city. And the city feeds the plants."

They looked at each other across the wobbly microscope.

"The tomatoes aren't sick," Maya said. "They're hungry because their billion are gone."

Gran's voice carried from the gate. "Have you figured out my tomatoes yet, or are you two going to crouch there till dark?"

"They're starving," Maya called back.

"The plants?"

"No," Maya said. "The ones underneath. The ones we can't see."

There was a pause from the gate. Then Gran came down the path, slow, wiping her hands, and she did not say nonsense and she did not say good guess. She just looked at the two slides for a long time with one eye closed, and then she looked at Maya, and something in her face had gone careful, as if a child had said a true thing she had stopped expecting anyone to say.

"Show me what you'd do," she said.

Maya picked up the bucket of compost from beside the fence, the dark crumbling stuff full of the moving, the threads, the thousands. She carried it to the pale dead bed.

Soren held the teaspoon up one more time before she poured. He turned it under the porch light that had just clicked on, and the soil on it caught the bulb, ordinary, brown, a single small lump.

Maya tipped the bucket. The good earth came down over the bad in a soft dark rush, and the smell of it rose up at them, and Soren leaned in close over the bed where eight billion was already too small a word, and breathed it in.