My Thursday Doors posts this month will be short stories, not photographs, although I won’t say a photo will never be part of them. Thursday Doors is the brain child of Norm Frampton, who puts a little blue frog blog-hop link at the bottom of his Thursday Doors posts. Click on that li’l frog, and be transported to a list filled with Thursday Doors posts. Add your own and/or check out others’.
The Garden Door
by Marian Allen
Flora no longer looked at herself in the dressing table mirror, but did her hair by habit. What had once been thick chestnut curls were now thin white wisps. It seemed only yesterday that she had piled the heavy coils atop her head and carried them like balanced books. Now, all her “tresses” amounted to was a knot the size and weight of an orange. A Mandarin orange.
It was still early March, and damp, and chill, so she tugged her coziest socks over her knobby feet and snugged the elastic hems of her sweat pants around the ankles.
Her rose-patterned cane helped her down the hall to the mud room, where she stepped into her insulated boots and struggled into her ragged gardening coat.
Down the flagstone path, worn thin with years of her passage, brown winter grass on either side. She stopped and regarded it, delighting in the faint tinge of green deep below the sepia tones.
“Not long, now.”
Her destination was the walled rose garden at the end of the path. All the bushes would still be pruned and tied and mulched for winter, drifted with leaves from the oaks outside the walls, possibly with small pockets of snow in always-shaded corners and hollows.
As she approached the door, it eased ajar. She could smell the fragrance before it fully opened.
Bill, her gardener, greeted her with open arms. He led her into the garden and closed the door behind them.
He had raked the leaves and, from the smell of him, fertilized.
Flora didn’t care how redolent he was. They had been rendezvousing in the garden gazebo every day since he had come to work when she was twenty-three, and she had never let a little manure put her off her game.
MY PROMPTS TODAY: rose fertilizer, cozy socks, Lady Chatterly’s Lover
If you liked this story, you might like my other stories and my novels. Support an author: buy a book and leave an Amazon review. I thank you, and my cat thanks you.
MA
Ian Cross
May 4, 2017 at 8:52amWhat a great tale! Better to view with the mind’s eye, I agree. Thanks for sharing.
Marian Allen
May 4, 2017 at 9:57amThank you, Ian!
Norm 2.0
May 4, 2017 at 10:57amBow-chicka-wow-wow 😛
It’s probably best that there’s no visual references to go with this one, #ThursdayDoors is after all a family-friendly event you know.
All the same, nicely done. Is this going to be part of a bigger piece?
Marian Allen
May 4, 2017 at 3:29pmLOL! I don’t plan for it to be part of anything else. Just a flash fiction.
Pete Laberge
May 4, 2017 at 12:32pmOh! MY~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A nice little story, with just a soupcon of salaciousness!
And a hint of pleasure!
(Carry on!)
Marian Allen
May 4, 2017 at 3:30pmDid you see I wrote a Steffie story for you yesterday? 🙂
Pete Laberge
May 4, 2017 at 6:52pmYes, but when I tried to comment, your site crashed, and said I had no authority….
Strange….
Maybe Steffie was mad at me?
Marian Allen
May 5, 2017 at 7:35amIt must be those pesky enemy agents!
Joey
May 4, 2017 at 12:35pmHehe! Cheeky! I love it! I want to read more of this!
Marian Allen
May 4, 2017 at 3:30pm😀
Dan Antion
May 4, 2017 at 5:26pmYou bad girl, ou. Great story and a perfect selection for Thursday Doors. I love how you worked around that 🙂
Marian Allen
May 5, 2017 at 7:34amThanks! 🙂