From the Archives - Fir Hollow, ch. 12: Tending the Garden (Patreon)

It wasn’t actually Larry’s garden; at least not in the way most people thought.  The bent, wrinkled old man who tended the sprawling beds hadn’t planted any of the vibrant flowers as much as he’d inherited them.  But even then, Larry wasn’t sure he could inherit something he left for himself.  It was complicated.  He remembered being a young boy growing up in Fir Hollow, watching the town expand and contract like a set of mountain lungs as jobs came and went.  He saw it all unfold from his little house up on the hill: the birth of the lumber mill, the rise and fall of the mine, the influx of tourists, and all the strange goings-on that happened in the shadows of the looming peaks.  When he stopped to think about it, he knew the memories made him far older than should have been possible, but he didn’t dwell on it for long.  He wasn’t even sure they were his memories.  Or they were, but not this version of him.  As he grew older, Larry started to get his memories mixed up, not knowing which ones belonged to this Larry or the one before.  Like his flowers, he’d always just been there.  And after he was gone, another would spring up out of the garden to take his place.

That’s how it went.  When you live in a place long enough, it gets inside you, Larry always said.  The air, the dirt, the people; they all become a part of each other after a while.  And Larry had been there for a long, long while. To the people in town he was just a kindly old man, one of many friendly locals that everyone seemed to know, but who no one actually knew anything about. Not that anyone asked. The only thing people ever seemed to comment on were the beautiful flowers that spilled down the hillside like an iridescent waterfall behind his small, one-story house. The vegetation seemed to shatter against the structure, spilling around the sides and settling in the front yard like the perfectly manicured debris of a fallen rainbow.

Larry would always smile and give demure thanks for the compliments, the whole time wondering how people would feel if they saw the flowers the way he did. To him they weren’t just a few well maintained beds but a living representation of the town itself. Each bloom and bud was a resident, a charge that he unknowingly tended from afar. Larry didn’t know which flower represented which person, just that they were a born-and-bred child of the Hollow. Nothing sprouted for the tourists, only for the lifers, the people who had the air and soil of the mountains in their blood. When you live in a place long enough to put down roots, real roots, that place gets inside you, Larry always said. It was a charge he took seriously. He’d tended the flowers since people first showed up in the valley and he’d tend them until the last person was gone.

Like the people the flowers represented, Larry didn’t know exactly what happened when he looked after a given plant, he just knew he made their lives better. Nor did he set out with a specific agenda. He simply strolled through the flowers waiting for one or more, like the pair he stood in front of now, to catch his attention. Larry made a tutting sound and shook his head as he eyed the mismatched flowers. He dropped to his aching knees and examined the first, a healthy-but- spindly fellow with only a few pale yellow blooms hanging off his thin branches. It was sturdy enough but in need of a good fertilizing, Larry knew. He reached into a small leather bag on his hip and pulled out a pungent mixture of compost, mixing it in with the soil at the plant’s base. He murmured a few encouraging words while he watered it, already seeing new growth beginning to sprout. Even the flowers around it seemed to respond, their petals slowly shifting in its direction. Larry knew that was a good sign. He watched one of the fresh buds blossom, spurting out a cloud of pollen from the yellow flower that caused the plant next to it to immediately sprout a string of new buds. Larry watched as the cycle played out, the yellow flowers he’d just fertilized sucking up a burst of pollen from a nearby plant before the golden petals shook and gave another burst of their own. This caused yet another nearby plant to sprout a string of buds in a cycle that would continue on and on.

The old man gave a satisfied nod and turned his attention to a tangle of growth behind the spraying, yellow flowers. There were a few lovely, crimson blooms dotting the interior but they were buried beneath a cluster of thick branches and cumbersome leaves. Larry felt a stab of sadness for the plant’s burden and began clipping away the unnecessary growth. He pruned the heavy limbs and pulled away the leaves that only served to block the sun, ending up with a plant that was significantly smaller, but far more beautiful. The crimson petals were lined with a deep purple, and the delightful little flower stood out as unique even in the sea of vibrant growth. Just looking at it made Larry happy as the small-but-proud blossoms vied for attention. Even the flowers around it were affected, their blossoms seeming torn between facing it or the bright blue sky overhead.

Larry brushed the dirt from his hands and climbed to his feet. The day was still early, and there were plenty more flowers that needed his attention.

********

“Come on...that all you got,” Mason egged on, his wiry frame darting back and forth to block Tyler’s path.  The sandy-haired young man was nowhere near his friend’s towering, 6’5” stature, and it was only the rules that kept him from getting flattened.  At nearly three hundred pounds the dribbling giant was a beast of a man, his meaty paws making the basketball look small as it bounced up and down.  Standing six inches shorter and almost a hundred and fifty pounds lighter, Mason knew that, if he’d wanted, Tyler could have used his free hand to scoop him up and carry him down the court just as easily.  As it was, the pug-faced giant only had to hold his arm out like a beefy girder to keep the lean blonde at bay.

“Nope,” Tyler grunted as his bare, beefy torso slammed into Mason like a brick wall.  The brawny giant laughed as his friend staggered, letting his body speak for him as usual.

“Hey!  Where’s the ref?!  That’s a foul,” the smaller man cried, his loose tank-top billowing as he pivoted to keep his balance.

“You’re the one that wanted to play him!” Marty called from the other end of the court.  The stocky brunette was busy trying, and failing, to keep his redheaded friend from scoring.

“Yeah, you could’ve had an easy win like me,” Dylan laughed.  His hands rested on his trim hips while he caught his breath, accentuating the tight, trim waist that glistened in the afternoon sun.

“Easy?  You beat me by two points,” Marty grumbled, baring his hairy muscle gut as he lifted his t-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face.

Dylan folded his freckled arms behind his head to ease the stitch in his side.  “Have you even scored two points yet?”

“Fuck...you…” Mason spat, the distraction allowing Tyler to barrel past and sink the shot.  “Goddamnit!”  He stomped his foot in frustration and shook his head, glaring at the other two.

“Hey man, don’t blame us,” Marty said, holding his hands up.  “You knew what you were getting into.  Shit...you guys have been friends since, what?  Preschool?  And in the twenty years since, have you ever beat him?”

“Nope,” Tyler grunted again, tousling Mason’s sweat-slick hair.

The thin blonde winced and pulled his head away.  “It’s not exactly a fair competition,” he said, looking up at his towering friend.  “But I guess you could say the same when we go out.”

“Here it comes,” Tyler sighed, rolling his eyes.  Falling back on his superior looks was Mason’s usual strategy whenever he lost.  The tight blonde wasn’t the most handsome man in town, he was squarely average by objective standards, but compared to Tyler’s blunted features and buzzed scalp he could have been a model.  Having been friends for so long they were commonly referred to as Beauty and the Beast, though both men liked to try and claim the other’s title for various reasons.  “Don’t gotta be pretty if you win,” the big man rumbled, his crude vocabulary a perfect complement to his rough-edged bulk.

“Just keep telling yourself thaaaaAAAHHHH!”  Mason broke off in a surprised yelp at the sudden pressure that erupted from his lower half.  There was a tingling, pins-and-needles sensation as the area between his knees and waist felt like it was being squeezed in a vice.  It all happened so fast that the stunned blonde had barely registered any of it before he heard a loud tearing, quickly followed by an easing of the strange pressure.  “What...what just...FUCK,” he cried, his eyes going wide and his whole body flushing a deep shade of red when he looked down.  His baggy basketball shorts and what remained of his boxer-briefs lay in tatters at his feet, but Mason was more focused on the rigid, leaking cock that loomed above them.  What should have been an average, six-inch rod had somehow become a thick, ten-inch pole, the bulbous head dripping like a faucet as it stood out from between Mason’s exposed thighs.  The wiry young man staggered, his stomach dropping when he felt the real reason for the shredded shorts jiggle behind him.  His crimson sheen went a pale green and Mason gasped when he reached behind and gripped what felt like a pair of jiggling watermelons.  The heaping cheeks were impossibly large and would have looked huge on anyone, but given his tight, whipcord frame they seemed absolutely colossal.

Instead of panicking, the big man next to him just nodded as he looked at his altered friend.  “Ohhhh, you’re blossoming.  No wonder I beat you easier’n regular.”

Mason didn’t find Tyler’s casual tone at all appropriate given his horrifying situation, nor did he understand why Marty and Dylan seemed equally calm.  “Blossoming?  What the fuck are you talking about?!  Look at me!  What just...how did this happen?!”  As the initial shock began to settle, the exposed blonde had more room to process his growing humiliation as he looked around at the rest of the park.  The basketball courts were thankfully empty, but Mason could see a few people walking their dogs or jogging at the far end of the park.

“Fuck you mean ‘how’d it happen’,” Tyler said with a surprised laugh.  He reached down and grabbed one of Tyler’s exposed cheeks, the pillowy globe actually making his massive hand seem small.  “You been gettin’ fertilized left and right.  Bound to pop off sooner or later.  Should’a seen it comin’ with the warm weather.”

“HHHOOOUUooohhh…” Mason gave a hissing grunt when Tyler’s meaty fingers slid into the deep valley and pressed against his hole.  Much to his surprise, the supposedly-virgin orifice swallowed the big man’s fingers, instinctively tightening and loosening around the invading digits like a mouth sucking on a thumb.  “Guys...what’re you...I don’t know what you’re talking about…” he panted, his mind racing to understand why Tyler’s fingers felt so good, and why the sight of his friends made his stomach flutter.

“Dude, Spring Mason is my favorite,” Marty laughed to the others.  “I’ll fuckin’ fertilize that ass all year, but I love how out of it he gets when he’s all worked up like this.”

Dylan grinned and nodded towards the bottom-heavy man.  “Since you both lost, why don’t you take this one?  I can hop on the next round.”

“How generous of you,” Marty said.  “Like the dude isn’t gonna be this way for the next six months.”

It was all Mason could do to stay upright as his dexterous hole worked Tyler’s fingers.  “Guynngg...guys...please...what are you...dude!  What are you...you doing…?”  The panting blonde couldn’t believe his eyes as he watched Marty shuck his shorts and briefs right there on the basketball court, though despite his surprise, the sight of the stocky man’s beefy thighs, stout, girthy package and plump cheeks drove him to the edge.

“Fresh ground, ripe for seeding,” Marty laughed over a broad shoulder as he wagged his hairy rear in Mason’s direction.  The flustered blonde had no idea what was happening, but he couldn’t stop himself.  He slipped off of Tyler’s fingers and lunged forward, wincing as his oversized cheeks shook and bounced wildly.  His wiry arms were wrapped around Marty’s furry muscle gut before he even knew what he was doing, pulling the other man back onto his eager cock.  The copious fluid acting as a natural lubricant, he slipped effortlessly inside, the slamming of his gargantuan rear adding additional force to the reflexive thrusting that followed.  “Fuuuuuuuuck yeeeEEEeeeUUUeeesss…” Marty groaned, his stubble-covered jaw falling open as his own thick cock slapped wildly around.  “No...nothing like...Spring in...the mountains…”

Mason didn’t understand any of it.  He didn’t know why he was so desperate to be fucking Marty anymore than he knew why the other man was so desperate to have him inside.  The stocky stud was straight, they all were, but while he slammed into his burly friend, Mason started to have flashes of himself in a similar position.  Much to his humiliation they seemed to happen all over town, in public and in private, the one common element being his lack of pants and constantly rigid, leaking cock.  The flow would increase and decrease accordingly, but the permanently solid organ was always hard and ready, growing smaller in the fall and winter and larger in the spring and summer.  Mason felt dizzy as the images flowed in and he watched his oversized cheeks steadily inflate with each pounding he received, his cock doing the same.  He somehow knew the reverse would steadily play out through the summer and fall, his ass shrinking back down and his cock receding with each of his many, many releases.  The plump cheeks never shrunk back down to their formerly perky bubble as he never made it long without a fresh deposit, but the spring and summer especially sent him on a wild growth spurt.  Like Marty said, the warped blonde would spend the next several months as a blooming flower, constantly spreading his seed as he was in turn fertilized over and over.  The reason no one batted an eye when it happened in public was because there was nothing surprising about it.  It wasn’t sex; it was gardening.

Mason’s lingering question about why the men in town were so eager to be seeded was explained when he came.  Not only did Marty spasm and grunt like an ecstatic bull, the furry beefcake’s wide cock expanded ever so slightly as the blonde pumped stream after stream into him.  It wasn’t the kind of extreme growth he’d experienced himself, but Mason watched Marty’s thick rod twitch and lengthen before erupting like a geyser.  The other man’s fattened member stayed hard even after it was done spraying, but Marty didn’t seem bothered in the least by his tented shorts as he pulled them back on.  He had a contented grin on his face as he hefted the heavier tent and gazed longingly at Mason’s still-leaking pole.

“Whooooo...thank’s man,” he sighed.  “I want to see how big I can get it this year.”

“Careful,” Tyler said, kneading the twitching lump that had grown in his own shorts while he’d watched his friends.  “Bigger it gets in the growing season, smaller it gets the rest of the year.”

“Oh...is that your problem,” Dylan laughed, slapping the meaty giant on a massive arm.  “You should’a gone first, then.”

Tyler opened his mouth to respond, but the words dried up in his throat.  There was a sudden rushing sound and the sensation of falling, his eyes going blurry.  For a moment the brawny hulk thought he’d fallen over, but his feet were still planted firmly on the ground.  He swayed and staggered, and when his vision cleared he assumed he’d fallen to his knees.  Instead of looking down at Dylan he stared at the freckled man’s flat stomach, his eyes almost level with the outline of the ginger’s cock pushing against his shorts.  Assuming he just needed to stand Tyler lurched and lifted his leg, but instead of climbing to his feet he stumbled forward, off balance.  He wasn’t on his knees at all, and all he’d succeeded in doing was lifting a tiny foot free from an oversized sneaker.  “Oh!  My!  What in the world...happened…” he said as he face-planted into Dylan’s bulge.  He trailed off at the higher pitch to his voice, his heart racing when he stumbled back, his other foot slipping free as he looked up at the three men towering over him.  The feverish pounding in his chest became a whole-body tremble when his gaze shifted down to the compact, naked frame, his comically large clothes laying in a pile at his little feet.

Tyler’s first instinct would have been to panic, but there was a sudden clarity to his thoughts.  As he looked down at a body that had become as sculpted and chiseled as it had small, his agile mind kept itself together.  He studied the prominent pecs that hung over a tapering, shredded waist, and the striated, well-muscled arms that hung at either side.  Just below the point where his abs pinched inward his body exploded outward again, not in the disproportionate manner that Mason’s had, but with the precision-sculpted expertise of a bodybuilder.  He’d somehow become an Adonis in miniature, and unlike his previous lumpy bulk, every fine-tuned muscle was exactly where it should be.  Even his formerly short, thick cock had become long and shapely, and though it was comparatively small it was perfectly built for his tiny frame.

The shrunken beauty gasped at the realization, knowing what he’d find before his little fingers began poking at his altered face.  His formerly blunted features had become sharp and distinguished, his buzzed scalp now sitting in a perfectly styled coif on top of his excessively handsome head.  In the blink of an eye he’d somehow gone from a grunting brute to a gorgeous hunk, and if it weren’t for the fact that he guessed himself to be no more than three feet tall it would have been a dream come true.

There was a rush of panic when Tyler thought about his reduced size, but it fled before taking root.  Like his lubricated thoughts there was a sense of lightness that went deeper than his missing bulk, a carefree attitude that seemed incapable of experiencing worry.  As he looked around at a suddenly huge world, Tyler didn’t feel any of the fear or embarrassment that he should have, and he quickly began to doubt that he ever would again.

“Careful, stud,” Dylan said, reaching out and swallowing one of Tyler’s shrunken shoulders in a giant hand.  There was a slightly condescending edge to the ginger’s voice, an unusually protective tone in the way he spoke.  “I told you those things would make you trip.  Why’d you even bring all those big clothes?  Just want to play dress up?”

Instead of being annoyed, Tyler’s cock twitched to life as Dylan both literally and figuratively spoke down to him.  There was still a part of him that knew he should be embarrassed, or angry, but all he could do was smile and shrug.  “I don’t know,” he said, looking down at the oversized pile.  “I thought it would be fun.  I never wear anything...guess I wanted to see how the other half lived.”  The pint-sized hunk didn’t know where the words came from, but his racing mind filled in the gaps as he said them.  Of course he didn’t wear clothes.  Everyone liked to see him, and it was his job to let them.  He got to do whatever, or whoever, he wanted, living a carefree life in exchange for keeping himself on display.  He was a beautiful little flower meant to be cherished, not hidden away.

“It’s all fun until you fall and hurt yourself,” Dylan chided, scooping up the shortened stud.  Instead of tensing or fighting Tyler gave a delighted laugh, suddenly infatuated with the athletic redhead’s freckled face and button nose.  He was leaning in for a kiss before he even realized, grinding his cock into the other man’s torso.  The rigid organ couldn’t have been more than a few inches, but to Tyler it felt as big as ever as he rolled his hips, loving the sensation of Dylan’s firm grip on his exposed, muscled rear.  Instead of pulling away the straight ginger let it all happen, as if it was impossible to deny the miniature muscleman.  And as he humped Dylan’s chest, Tyler realized it was.  Whatever he wanted, everyone wanted.  There were limits, but it was the reason he could start blowing a guy in the middle of the grocery store and no one would bat an eye.  It finally occurred to the diminished bruiser that all of his desires seemed to be focused around men, but as soon as he had the thought it made sense.  He wasn’t some common specimen like all the other guys.  He was as unique as he was pretty, and it was his job to spread his one-of-a-kind joy to the straight men in town who needed it.

“Well, I guess we’re done with basketball,” Dylan laughed, tilting his head away as Tyler shifted his attention from his mouth to his neck.

The tiny stud shivered when Marty walked over and tousled his hair, still pumping away against Dylan’s side.  “You should take a ride on Mason, big guy,” the stocky man said, giving his still-tented shorts a squeeze.  “Be awesome to see you walkin’ around with a fat little log.”

“His log is just right,” Dylan spat defensively.  He grinned down at Tyler as the sculpted stud worked the rigid poker through a growing patch of liquid smeared against his side.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Marty agreed, patting Tyler on the back as the shrunken man tensed.  “He’s perfect.  I’m just sayin’...”

“NNNgggnnn…” Tyler came as Marty spoke, launching a surprising amount against the underside of the ginger’s pecs and into the crevice of Dylan’s armpit.  Far from being humiliated by it all, the former behemoth just grinned at his friends.  “Thanks for that.  Guess I got worked up watching M&M over there.”

Marty gave a loud laugh and reached out to slap Mason on an inflated cheek.  “Dude!  That should totally be our name from now on.”

“It fits, as much as you two go at it,” Dylan said.  “Gonna have a dick the size of Tyler’s all winter you keep this up.”

Marty was undeterred.  He wrapped a hand around Mason’s oozing pole and grinned.  “Whatever.  Just means I gotta put it to use now, right man?”

The blonde nodded, still in a daze over everything that happened.  “Uh...sure,” he stammered, his ever-present lust already distracting him again.  Looking at his friends, all he could think about was who he could seed next.

Dylan met the blonde’s gaze as he set Tyler down, kneading the front of his shorts.  “Gotta love spring in the mountains.”