Photo by Jamie Street
Room to Grow
Flash Fiction
Just a prick, but it hurt.
Alice removed her tattered leather glove and sucked on a ringless finger. She purchased the gloves a few years ago, about the same time her husband grew violently concerned about the quality of his coffee. The gloves’ leather tips, originally thick enough to withstand thorny stabs, now punctured at the slightest touch.
She had once attended a course led by a tall handsome Master Gardener. He gave expert advice to his class of fawning apostles. Beautiful roses required two actions: pruning back dead branches and using the most expensive fertilizer.
He held up a small bottle. “You only need an eighth of a teaspoon for a gallon of water.”
“What happens if I add too much?” Alice had asked.
“Your plants will die.”
Alice, enamored with dreams of prize-winning roses, had lied to her husband about visiting her sister and drove fifty miles into the next town. She bought new pruning shears, an extra-large bottle of the dark granular plant food and, as a talisman of her future, a bare-root rosebush, tagged with pictures of potential petals so dark they appeared almost black.
Alice re-gloved her hand and continued pruning her formerly sole rosebush, a pathetic spindly thing. Her husband hated that plant, as he hated everything she loved, once going so far as to dig it up and throw it in the landscape waste bin, destined for compost. In the dead of night, Alice had rescued the bush and replanted it.
Now she imagined future flowers. She snipped away dead branches as her husband made coffee in the kitchen behind her. Through the open window, over sounds of banging cupboards, his furious voice bellowed how his goddam wife could never put the coffee grounds in the same goddam place.
Alice clipped too close, a glaring half-moon gash emerging from the trunk. She fingered a similar scar on her cheek where her husband had thrown a hot mug of coffee at her face, telling her she made it way too strong. So, this morning she had only used a half a cup of grounds along with three tablespoons of something extra.
Finished with the pruning of her old rosebush, Alice selected a spot for her new one, jabbing the soil with the shovel, her foot pressing down percussively against its edge. She lifted a pile of dirt and threw it over her shoulder. And again. Finally, the hole big enough to accommodate growth, Alice rested the shovel, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her gloved hand.
Sounds of gagging and retching flew out of the kitchen window. “You stupid bitch. This coffee tastes like shit.”
The back door opened. Alice, spine straight, faced her fertile hole. With un-compromised faith in the Master Gardener, she held steady as her husband screamed obscenities behind her. She heard him clomping down the back steps and crossing the yard, stomps coming towards her, strong at first, then lighter. The sound of a fall, like a toppled massive oak and a clawing noise as if attempting to get upright.
In the eventual silence, Alice resumed digging, plunging her shovel deep into the earth.
She would need more room.
The Author
Barbara Boone is an emerging writer, having recently retired from forty-one years in education. During the pandemic, she took online classes from the UCLA Writing Program, where she wrote her first, as yet unpublished, novel. She lives in Atlanta.
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