This week’s post was the result of a prompt from the
weekly Flash Fiction contest.September mornings are still warm here. A breeze ripples the thin curtain through the barely open window, and the moving air brings the cries of nature to me from the wide outside.
It is my first dawn in this house, so full of boxes but so empty of life. It has nurtured many lives in its 180 years and now, like a skilled therapist gently peeling back layers of plaster, wallpaper and wood, it is up to me to heal the building to a better future.
The toilet works. The bathroom taps shoot out water that looks clean. In the bare living room, there is a stove which the agent said was fuelled by wood from the orchard.
I am wearing the black jeans that I decided would be my gardening trousers and a shiny pair of black Hunters, purchased specifically for country living. My new gardening gloves are in a kitchen drawer with matches, old water bills and random bolts. I put them on, push open the wooden door and step into the vegetable garden that is being choked out by vicious green ivy tendrils.
Lifting the saggy wooden gate I disturb a frog (or is it a toad?), that flicks away into the long, damp grass.
And there is my orchard. A field of apple trees, plump under the late summer sunrise, buzzing with life and the reason I bought this place.
When I was eight years old Christian Cooper laughed at me for climbing over the wall to take apples from his garden.
“Why don’t you grow your own orchard, you pikey?”
“I will.” I shouted back. Red in the face, humiliated, knowing that our concrete yard held nothing but a dark brown drain cover and the door to the outside loo.
The next day I was forced to return and apologise for punching him in the face. He sneered, knowing that he had no need for manners, grace or sympathy because he had an orchard.
Now I have my own apples and the wall around this orchard will be pulled down so that anyone can come and pick its fruit. The demolition is on my to-do list along with learning how to restore wooden floors, going to a gardening course and getting rid of Christian Cooper’s dead body. I left it here last night after the removers had finished.
He’s still wearing his dark suit, white shirt and blue tie, white eyes staring up at me through dark shattered Ray-Bans. The nettles around Christian have moved aside, framing his body on the ground in which he will soon be buried.
It looks like a fox might have taken a nibble from his cheek which is bright red and missing a few layers. I kick him softly, but he doesn’t wake up, so I do it again, harder and smile. A crow watches me from the grey wall as I walk to the brown shed where the previous owner has left a very good selection of spades.
