Wilderness was the theme for Dean Writers Circle’s internal monthly writing competition for April. Here’s my 150 word submission. (You can read the hauntingly beautiful winning entry by friend Jean Cooper Moran here.)
The garden was at the back of Merry and William’s newly-wed home, a mid-terrace cottage.
Merry first saw it in summer, delighting in its rippling wilderness of buzzing grasses stretching from the tacked-on kitchen to meld into a tangle of brambles against an invisible back fence. A concrete footpath crumbled its way to a cobweb-thick greenhouse preserved in ivy.
‘Flower borders,’ Merry enthused, arms crossed over her pregnant belly. ‘Vegetable beds, a new greenhouse.’
Watching the care home’s autumn oak shed its leaves from her chair by the window, Merry relives her joyous labour digging and planting. Her heart patters with the remembered children’s thrill at the quick maturing of radishes, and swells with old pride at William tending the greenhouse where tomatoes and cucumbers rioted against their glass prison for years and years.
Now death and age have time-travelled Merry’s garden to the past. The wilderness awaits the next newly-weds.
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Find Cheryl’s flash fiction and short stories, including audio versions of some, here.