Flash Fiction - Fertile Ground

    Back hunched and fingers cramping, I’m huddled by the window with your frail body in my lap when the cottage darkens. Heron-grey clouds grimace overhead, and a baleful wind howls into the eaves, filling the room with a hungry groan. I stop only to light a candle then stitch all the faster.

    Limbs, belly, breasts, your face is the last to prepare. I finish one on either cheek beneath your eyes, seven more along your jaw. Each sewn seed bulges under your skin, thirsty for the rains we summoned if only I can plant you in time.

    I tie off the thread on your lip and kiss flesh, blinking away my drowning sight. Will my name ring strange in your new mouth of vines?

 

    Our old bedsheet spots with the first droplets as I struggle you through your beloved garden and into the shallow-dug hole now marring it.

    Starved shoulder to the mound, I heave soil over you until nothing is left to be seen. When the heavens open, I spend the last of my energy pushing through the mud to take your hand.

    Rivulets of biting cold run down my wrist and over the three stitches in your palm, their new shoots already wriggling free. I squeeze your fingers and collapse across you, knowing by morning something of you will squeeze back.