A short story. Made up, like the others.

The seed library was a cabinet of small wooden drawers in the back of the branch, and the rule was on a card taped to the side: Borrow seeds in spring. Grow them. Let a few plants go to seed. Bring some back in autumn.

Nobody checked. Nora, who did Thursdays, had stopped being surprised by that in the first month. People took envelopes of beans and left nothing, and the drawers emptied, and every January somebody from the council’s parks team came with a box of packets from a catalogue to refill them. The cabinet had never once been full of what people had actually grown.

So when Mr Okafor put an envelope on the desk in the second week of October, she didn’t pick it up straight away.

“Lettuce,” he said. “Well. It was lettuce.”

She looked at it. Somebody had written on the front in careful capitals, RED SALAD BOWL, 3 MAY, and then, underneath, in a different pen, bolted July, I let it seed, sorry.

“You don’t have to apologise to a drawer,” she said.

“I felt bad bringing it. The card says bring back what you’ve grown, and this isn’t what I grew, not really. It’s what was left when I’d failed at it. It went up like a tower. Five feet. I thought, this is wrong, I’ve ruined it. My daughter said pull it out. But I’d never seen one do it before, so I left it, and it flowered, and then it went all fluffy.” He held his hands apart, about the size of a grapefruit. “I didn’t know what I was looking at. Then I thought, oh. It’s a dandelion. It’s the same idea.”

“It is, actually,” Nora said. “Same family.”

“Is it?” He looked pleased and a bit cheated, both at once. “Well. Anyway. I shook it into the envelope. There’s probably a thousand in there.”

She opened the flap. They were small, pale, shaped like a grain of rice that had been pressed flat, and there were far too many.

“They might not come true,” she said, because it was the thing you were supposed to say. “If it crossed with something. Or it might not like our soil the second time. You don’t know what you’ll get.”

“I know that.” He said it kindly, not sharply. “It’s not for the lettuce. It ought to go back in, even if it’s a shabby sort of return. I took something out in April.”

She filed it under L, in the drawer that had held the council’s packets. She had to move three of them to make room. Then she wrote it in the book, which nobody had ever asked her to keep: Red Salad Bowl. Returned O. 12 Oct. Grown here, one generation.

He watched her do it.

“Is that the first one? Back, I mean?”

She thought of saying something vague. She’d been there two years and she’d never counted, but she had never once seen a returned envelope.

“That I’ve seen,” she said. “First.”

He stood there a moment longer than he needed to. Then he said he’d better get his bus, and put his hat on, and went out past the large-print shelf and the radiator that never worked.

In April a woman came in asking for something that would grow in a north-facing yard. Nora showed her the cabinet. The woman opened drawers, read the packets, and then pulled out the one in careful capitals and turned it over.

“Bolted July, I let it seed, sorry,” she read. “Is this a joke?”

“No,” Nora said. “It’s someone being honest. Take it or leave it. It’s the only one in there that’s been anywhere.”

The woman looked at it a while. Then she tucked it in her bag.

Nora went back to the desk and opened the book and looked at the line she’d written in October. After a minute she added, underneath, in pencil, the date and Borrowed.

It wasn’t a rule. The card didn’t say to do it. But someone would want to know, she thought, what had happened to the thousand.