romance

[4]

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She was the girl who wore the navy dress, with lemon polka dots. She wore it every single day, her hair decked for conquest. Dressed with an assortment of violets and lilly-of-the-valley, thick auburn tresses braided and intertwined with violent splashes of purple and the most delicate little snowy bells.

So he asked her one day when she passed him by with her basket piled high with the bright little currants. He put his hand out, almost rudely, she thought, bemused, and he said, ‘why do you wear this dress daily?’

How rude! Thought she. ‘How rude!’ said she, lifting her basket delicately higher up her slender arm. She sidestepped him and stalked away.

He watched the evening sunlight glint and shimmer in her hair.

The next day he asked her for directions to Grousetown – and she gave him a withering glance and ignored him, stepping delicately over the stones on the uphill path, past where he stood. Her dress fluttered behind her in the breeze, and she spared him nary a glance.

The day after that, her hair was worn up. Piled high atop her head in an intricate style of weaves and plaits, and adorned with little pink rosebuds. Her nose was upturned, her eyelashes cast downwards, and her pace amiable. The basket hanging on her arm contained the evening newspaper, and in her opposite hand she twirled a small bouquet of wild red poppies. He didn’t say anything to her. As she passed, she glanced his way.

And so the days wore on and still she took the same path, and his work kept him on that path, and he said hello to her on many an occasion, and she would respond. Curtly at first. Short. Irritable. Her eyes were an indignant flash of blue, fringed with long lashes, her cheeks two scarlet dots. One day she responded with a smile, but when her eyes met his, she was startled, as though she had forgotten who she was talking to, and then she frowned and began to march up the hill with flustered purpose.

‘Good evening,’ he said finally, one evening, when May bloomed into her sunny and beautifully scented sister June. Her hair was decked with peonies. A crown of them encircled her head, and long, thick coils of dark auburn locks fell over her shoulders, brushing her cheeks, curtaining her eyes. She stopped, then, turned to him. Her basket had a green bottle inside, a little piece of twine was wrapped about the top, and a handmade label stuck to its side.

‘Evening,’ she murmured.

His work was to take him elsewhere the next day.

‘I hope it isn’t an intrusion to ask if I may call on you tomorrow,’

‘Certainly not,’ she said quietly, but her vivid gaze did not meet his. She told him where she lived. He wrote it down, and without saying goodbye, she turned and hurried away.

When he arrived at her house the next afternoon, he wondered how he would phrase the question. How ought he to ask it, without seeming rude. He straightened his coat, cleared his throat, and raised the knocker once, twice, thrice, before standing back to survey his surroundings. The garden was filled with flowers. Bushes of peonies all along the border by the fence, little blushes of sweetness nodding in the breeze. Roses climbed the brick walls, hundreds and hundreds of them, reaching for the roof and releasing a sweet, faintly lemony scene. Pale pink and ginger fringed with burnt orange. A row of lavender bushes, busy with bees around their nodding purple flower heads, and the sickly sweet smell of the mountainous piles of brightly coloured sweet-pea towers wafted his way. Everywhere he looked there was colour. Every square inch of that garden was a decorated bush or a flowering plant. Lilac trees fringed the Eastern corner, snowy white and soft, delicate pink.

Yet when she opened the door, the plainness of her navy dress with yellow polka dots shocked him. Her hair she wore down, with little daisies carefully places throughout her tresses. Her cheeks, he noticed, as well as her nose, were gloriously freckled. He could lose himself in her eyes, swimming like oceans about brim over her thick lashes.

‘Come in,’ she said, and her curtness, he realised, he had mistaken for shyness. Suddenly the question he had been so burning to receive an answer to had vanished from his mind.

Lady Lillith – by Gabriel Dante Rossetti

He

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It wasn’t the sort of day that required her to do anything, so she lazed about drinking cups of black coffee with lemon-slice shaped ice floating at the top. She picked up a book and flicked listlessly through the pages. She read a sentence about microbes and then another about tapeworm, and she frowned, shutting the book and looking at the front cover. A magnified rendered image of a virus splattered glossily over the front flap, glaring at her menacingly.

When her heart started beating fast she marked it up to her fourth cup of strong black coffee, and made her mind up to stop drinking it. The sun filtered through her window, cutting through the thin white curtains that billowed lazily in the cooling breeze that sailed down the mountains and created a crosswind through the house. Beautiful, beautiful house, she thought, glancing over her shoulder. Scenic photographs of the surrounding lanscape, enlarged and framed, hung on nearly every inch of the cream walls. In between hung little relics of a life well-travelled. Hand-woven rug, coarse yet soft under her calloused feet. The doorframes were painted green, and the window frames white against the dull cream on the walls but you couldn’t notice that because the photography – his photography, hugged every corner of the house and encroached the space.

Encroached? Shrouded?

Embraced.

His presence was everywhere. She breathed and his smell lingered yet. A perfume of warm smells. Tobacco – she took a deep breath. Coffee. Of course coffee. Lemon? No, grass. Freshly mown grass. A little tobacco maybe, a husky sort of smell, and wood. The wood was everywhere though. Hand-carved oak table, carved maple figurines on the mantlepiece, and the mantle itself he had cut and sanded. He loved the smell of pine, he told her, it made him feel at home.

She didn’t feel anything anymore. She could touch what he touched. Without grief or fear of plague. She could sleep on his pillow, and wear his clothes. She wanted to be reminded, now. After so long, she wanted to remember.

When she pushed the curtains away from the window, and the mountain cascaded downwards before her before rising up towards the sunset, she breathed and it was his scent the wind carried. She let it fill her lungs, caress her hair gently around her face. The pines in the valley hugged the foot of the mountain and the lombardy poplars on the slope were silhouettes to the sunset, with the sunrises casting a glorious glow about them. They became alive. Full of character. The sky was vibrant with life. Clouds scudding across the horizon and as the day crept towards night, they began to take on the magnificent hue of the retreating sun, reflecting it back onto earth.

I see you.

The earth was alive in this place. She felt its blood running through her veins.

She saw what he saw, now. His thoughts were hers.

The Girl on the Hill by Alan Lakin

This was Day Three of my Short Story Challenge. The why of which is outlined here, and the challenge of which is outlined here.

O’Henry, also known as William Sydney Porter, said of the short story writing process: “Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.” That is what I shall do.

[28] Waiting

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When something is uncategorised, it is forgotten. She was uncategorised. She was the shelf upon which people put their unwanted things. At home it would be a glove that was missing its partner. A keyring one had collected from a fair. Some vague uncle’s snuffbox. A pair of spectacles left by someone, and nobody knew who they belonged to, so they stayed there, years on end, in the hopes that someone would recognise them and pick them up. She was that. Not the spectacles, the shelf. Well, perhaps the glasses too.

She was the bowl in which people placed their lost buttons, beads, clips, hatpins. Missing things. Miscellaneous things.

She collected stories and feelings, however. Memories of dark puddles of days, illuminated only by that one romantic lamppost. The one that you turn your head to stare at, as the carriage trundles by. The lone station with the arching cherry blossom tree, and she comes to life every spring, a princess, a pink queen draped in velvet finery. Forgotten all year round. Forgotten until one person comes to sit at the bench, and lays out their life story. They leave their sadness at her doorstep, and move on to brighter futures, greener fields, warmer houses. Yet there she stayed.

Waiting.

Waiting for trains, carriages, letters, hope, news, ships docking at the port, stories in the papers, visitors knocking at her door.

[18] A Mile a Day

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Remember that guy who said he would walk five hundred miles, and then five hundred more, just to be the guy who walked a thousand miles to fall at her door? Talk about unrealistic love.

Which young person dreamed up a grand romance only to crash down onto the ebony rocks of a fearsome shore when they were confronted with the harsh realisation that it wasn’t true, that it never would be?

He rolled his eyes at this. Here she goes again. Soon she would lament that he had not given her a handwritten card for their anniversary. He braced himself, and there it came. There it was. A small sharp sentence covered in thorns, aimed expertly at him, and thrown with exceptional accuracy. Why, she was a master at this trick. It hit its target alright, and it was laced with poison, for he immediately tasted something sour in his mouth, and a little ghoul settled itself around his heart and squeezed it maliciously.

He threw his fair share of thorns, too, he supposed. He laced them with poison also. Sometimes the green poison of jealousy. Sometimes the fiery poison of fury. Sometimes it was just plain old hurt.

The hurt we give. Without thinking, mostly. Not realising it escalates into something larger. Like a giant saucer hanging ominously over the earth, it feels too late to take the thorns back because they build up into something elephantine. A literal elephant in the room.

And you pick at it and pick at it each day and it’s like a fungi, exploding into something else.

One day he wasn’t tired though. He stood by the window one morning. It was exceptionally cloudy, but exceptionally beautiful, because the sunlight fought majestically that day for its glorious life, and lit up the world in a hazy, wintry light, shining through the thin shroud of cloud, and giving life to the dead wintry earth below.

And he realised something, when he saw her step out into the back garden with her basket of freshly washed clothes piled high, to hang in the frigid air and become cold and crisp. Her clothes and his. She began pegging the laundry onto the washing line. Her blouse, his trousers, his shirt, a pair of thick white socks he got for her last winter because two of her toes refused to circulate blood in the cold and became numb. Hers and his. She glanced up at the window, saw him, smiled. He smiled back.

And he realised that the thorns were a prerequisite to the bed of rosebushes they had built together.

Winter Morning at the Brook by Walter Launt Palmer

Romance

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Folks I ought to be at the gym right now, it’s the only window of time I have while the kids are just about waking up from their night’s sleep and my husband isn’t rushing off to work. But here I sit sipping coffee and watching birds on a bird-feeder outside my window and wondering why life ought always to be such a rush and where is the romance in life anymore?

Plenty of romance still, I suppose.

Romance in the back of my garden. The neighbour behind is elderly and poorly and had been transferred into a care home two years ago, but his house remains empty. I don’t think he has a wife anymore, but thirty odd years ago they planted two evergreens and a hazelnut tree at the bottom of their garden, which borders the bottom of ours. And when we first moved in said trees were the height of our house, and blocked the May sunset. Today they stand taller than all the houses. Ivy has taken over and carpeted the floor at the back of their garden, and made its sure and confident way up the thickening trunks, snaking here, snaking there, but let me tell you it makes for a luscious summer of various shades of glorious green. The hazelnut tree darkens from an already dark green into almost burgundy towards the end of the summer, and the abundance of foliage is so soothing to the eyes.

And in the winter there is romance too, for the evergreens are ever green… and the ivy does not shed her leaves as most other climbing plants do, and we have replaced the back panels of the fence that separates our gardens with trellises, so that we can better control the ivy, and on the trellises I have allowed my own climbing plants to grow.

I have a ginger syllabub, folks, that takes over and spreads her thorny stalks as far as she can reach, releasing buds which bloom into fistfuls of peachy rose petals, sending out the most delicious lemony-sweet scent, and providing nature’s perfect paintbrush pinkish-yellow tints to the kaleidoscope of greens at the bottom of my garden.

Now how’s that for romance.

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Eighteenth of January

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Every year on the 18th of January I post about my marriage anniversary. This year I forgot. I can’t remember what I was doing. Rushing about like a headless chicken, probably. My husband worked late, I recall. It was our Big Ten. A decade of marriage.

I am not soppy or sappy. A pragmatist, I think. I enjoy romance but not too much of it, and romantic gestures make me want to laugh. I think proposals are silly and believe public proclamations of love to be suspicious. I like romance to be intimate and personal. Only for those involved.

My husband thinks I want him to be Mr Darcy, and after re-reading Pride and Prejudice this year I decided that I very much do not want him to be Mr Darcy. I am perfectly happy with his flaws, thank you, and prefer them over the perfection of storybook heroes. Not that Mr Darcy is portrayed to be perfect by any means.

I am content with our differing tastes in films and books. I am happy that he enjoys laughing at things I shudder at. I can lie next to him reading Wuthering Heights while he chuckles himself silly over an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, both of us in our separate worlds, but happy in each other’s company. I don’t even mind him doing irritating things like mixing coffee with chicory – and I came to the conclusion that although he drives me insanely mad, I enjoy having him around to be mad at.

I think that is what it boils down to really.

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Love Letters

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Dear Pip,

Penelope.

Penny.

Pip, I have known you for approximately six years. And forty seven days. And three and a half hours (at the time of writing this).

We met the day I met with my fate. My fate was you, of course. Didn’t you know?

We were both looking at the same teapot. It was yellow and had blue spots on and I remember thinking you had to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of taste to like such a teapot because let me tell you, it was hideous.

But there was only one of them left and you said, ‘Oh, you have it.’

And I said, ‘Please, no, you have it.’ Because I didn’t even want it in the first place.

And you said, ‘Oh, no, I was only looking. You have it.’

And I said, ‘I wouldn’t be a gentleman if I took it when a young lady has her eye on it. It would be daylight robbery.’

And you snorted and said, ‘Well how about we halfsies it and then share it.’

‘What, like, monthly swaps?’ I asked, ‘or shall we cut it in half?’

‘Sure.’ You were nonchalant. Casual. You even shrugged and that is when I noticed the apple green jacket you are wearing. It was hideous also. (Please don’t hate me. We have discussed the ways colours are worn. And apple green blazers were out of the question. I even made a graph. Please see attached piece of paper for reference.)

‘Well,’ I said very carefully, ‘that then means, of course, that we shall have to swap details.’

‘Let’s buy this thing.’ You picked it up gently and as I reached into my pocket to take out my wallet my elbow jerked yours and it slipped out of your hands and fell down, down down onto the brightly polished John Lewis floors.

We both stared at it.

‘Ah well,’ you said, ‘I was only looking at it because I was curious about something so ugly. Good riddance, I say! I’m Pip. What’s your name?’

I stared at you in pleasant surprise and I felt my lips stretching out my face of their own accord.

‘James.’ I said, and then, ‘let us look for more ugly teapots.’

Of course we had to pay for that ugly yellow polka dot tea pot. It was atrocious. And then for your birthday present a year later I got you a similar teapot which you use for your indoor geraniums. You killed yourself laughing at it and told me I was a money waster because there was no way you would use that for anybody. It could never grace your table.

I remember asking you all wounded, like, ‘What, not even for the reason that it was graced by my hands?’ I was also slightly flirting even though we were firm friends by then, but I could not resist. I can never resist you, Pip.

‘Nope.’ You were very firm.

I am writing to tell you that I want to marry you. I can’t say it to your face because you have beautiful eyes and I know exactly how they will look at me and I will not be able to help myself because I will kiss you and then I will be done for. I know you will be impatient with that and tell me that is nonsense and of course I can help myself but I will not want to. Help myself. At all.

Also I asked my aunt if she read those French books I gave her and she said yes, they were lovely books. You were right. She didn’t read them. Else she would have called me to lecture me horrendously about them. Lovely books indeed. She asks about you a lot and tells me I should marry you quicktimes before you grow too old to have kids.

So back to my fate. You are my fate either way. If you say yes then it will have been a good fate and if you say no I will be broken hearted forever and when I do eventually heal and marry somebody for realsies I will still remember you as the first ever woman who broke my heart. Truly, broke it.

You know love is a strange thing. So strange. I used to think I loved a woman before. I was seventeen. She wasn’t particularly beautiful but I was infatuated by her and loved her to pieces but she always treated me badly. And one day she went too far and I discovered she was sleeping with a right old tramp of a fellow {he was not, he was a respectable LAWYER, but to me in my hurt he was a tramp], but I forgave her. Well I told her I did but I don’t think I really did. Something inside of me snapped that day. She walked on me one too many times. And three miserable months of forced smiles and fake kisses later I met you and the day afterwards she wanted to see me and I called her and I said, ‘I can’t. I can’t do this anymore.’

And when I was with her I thought there could never be anyone else because she was my first love. But it was meagre and ridiculous and pathetic and also desperate. Compared to what I feel about you. I am crazy about you. I look at you and I see my future. And I want to spend all my time with you and walk home from work with you and call you every single day but I stop myself because I don’t want you to get sick of me. I also want to kiss your forehead. It is so gentle and smooth and beautiful.

But see, if we were married I could call you everyday and it wouldn’t be weird, right? I could also kiss your forehead and it would be comfortable.

So, what do you say, Pip?

Yours sincerely and faithfully and truly,

Jim

 

 

 

This image was generated for me by DALL.E 3 – the latest AI photo-generating software. Ahh me. We no longer need to whip out the watercolours to demonstrate the painted thoughts in our heads.

Daisies on a Teacup [26]

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He stayed away for three years. Each term, when his fellow students would pack their trunks and shout their goodbyes, he stayed on. Always finding an excuse to stay. One summer he worked as an assistant for an old doctor who lived in a village not far from the Academy. Another, he found himself inundated with work that he had not managed to complete during term, and had a letter from Master Jeffman himself to say he required the services of one Thomas Norton, if his family would be so kind as to excuse his absence.

Each holiday when John stepped off the train alone, or arrived home alone, or exited a carriage alone, her eyes would lose some spark. Nobody noticed. She was still her energetic, cheerful self.

Nobody thought it odd that Tom did not come back. Not even John. He would cheerfully remark on his friend’s ability to throw himself wholly, completely into his studies. He would detail how well Tom was doing, the praise Tom received from Master Jeffman, praise which any for other boy was hard to come by.

And she smiled when her brother spoke of him. Gracious smile, and then a change of track in conversation.

Nobody noticed.

Until one day, she could not take it any longer.

She sat down, picked up her pen.

Dear Tom,

I do not know but that I despise December. It is cold. It is grey. Darkness arrives not long after it lifts. When I see the dawn, I see no colour, save for the few days of sunshine we are so blessed to have. Perpetual GLOOM, Tom. Daises on a teacup. The only thing I look forward to in December is John’s much anticipated arrival. We all wait for him at the station, you see, since he writes which day he will be here. Mary waits, too, and your mother. She expects you, even if you have written to tell her you will not be on that train.

We get up early in December, before the dawn struggles its way up our side of the hill. The Lake has finally, finally frozen around the edges. Not enough to skate on – never enough for THAT, but we still dream, Mary and I. She is preparing to set off to new horizons. Come February, she too will be gone and then it will be just me left. She will be an Educated Woman, and I shall be the last remaining farm girl.

I could spend the rest of my life here, Tom. Everyday I love it more. I love the wind blowing over the hills and meadows. I love watching the sun set itself over our lake. I love the rustle in the forest. I love the smell of pine and rose when I fling my windows open in late summer. I love, yes, begrudgingly, I love the frosty mornings of December when every leaf, every twig, every branch, every blade of grass is iced most delicately, the most beautiful handiwork ever seen. I have no desire to take myself off into the world, or throw myself into studies, or teach, or marry a rich man and sail the seas with him. I want to stay here. With my roses. With my beast.

Daises on a teacup, Tom.

Our John tells us you are doing so well. So brilliantly well. He says you will be a doctor so renowned one day that none of us shall ever hear from you again, you shall be wanted all over the world. Is that true? I know my brother, he embellishes a lot. He flourishes one’s positive traits until one becomes faultless in his description. You are not faultless, and I know you are excelling, but I want some grisly detail. I want to hear of the fun things you get up to. I want to know what you do when you are not wearing the tip of your nose away on the grindstone.

With Affection,

Laura

P.S. Can we possibly be friends again?

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Freight [24]

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It was the sound of the thundering freight train at 10pm every night that woke her. She knew that now. At first she thought it was something far beyond the reaches of man calling out to her. Something bigger than her Beast. Something deep in the underbelly of the earth, or soaring above the stars.

When the sound reached her dreaming ears it enveloped her completely. It dragged her by her heavy limbs from deep slumber and into the world of the living. Her eyes focused on the ceiling. Silvery in the light of the moon that always bathed her room on clear nights when the it was in its full form.

He asked her. She said no.

‘Why did you say no?’ her mother had asked, when she ran in sobbing after that fateful day in the garden.

‘I couldn’t lie to him, Mother,’ she told her mother, wringing her hands.

‘It wouldn’t be a lie, dearest.’

‘It would. It would!’

‘Well, who else are you waiting for?’

‘NOBODY!’ and she slammed the kitchen door as she flung herself out, threw herself up the stairs, stamping for emphasis, and then fell onto her bed in defeat. And perhaps some despair.

His face kept rising in front of her eyes when she tried to go to sleep. His face. She loved that face. The way he smiled, always. The secret smile. The boyish smile, when he made one of his numerous jokes or teased and teased and teased everybody who let him. The smile when he was just being himself. The smile he had ready for anybody he saw – and then the smile they reflected back at him. The smile when she spoke, the one she knew was only for her, the one she knew he didn’t even know he put on. He had no idea he smiled like that for her. The smile that she had wiped off his face so cruelly with only six little words.

She wanted to snatch those words back out of the air. Unwhisper them to the wind. Take them back and tuck them away where they belonged.

But where did they come from? They had to have come from somewhere.

Her heart felt sore. Yet the tears would not fall.

Image Credit: Euston Next Stop by Philip D Hawkins

Life [21]

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When Tom was set to leave for three years to study the first years of his Medical degree under the renowned Master Jeffman, he went to find Laura.

She was sitting with her mother in the garden, swinging her foot beneath her, a laugh seemingly frozen on her face. He paused for a few moments; the roses grew up and about the trellis surrounding her stone bench, clustered together, so numerous and nodding in the soft breeze.

He approached them with a smile, and Laura looked towards him, eyes dancing.

‘Come and sit with us, Tom,’ she said gaily, ‘we are just enjoying the roses and the sunshine. What little of it we shall have before autumn sets in.’

‘I don’t know,’ Tom looked at the sky, ‘it looks like we shall have much of this sunshine yet,’

Mrs Smith stood up, ‘I have my calls to make, dears. I’ll see you for supper, Tom?’

‘Oh no. I sha’n’t stay that long,’ he said, ‘my train leaves in an hour. I only came to say goodbye.’

‘Goodbye?! I thought… John said… he mentioned you would be travelling together?!’

‘Ah yes. I will wait for him at the Halfway Point. I have some clouds to catch.’

Twinkle in his eye.

Laura’s mother shook her head, turning back towards the house, ‘My boy,’ she laughed, ‘Don’t let those young men at Jeffman’s take your joy.’

‘I won’t.’

When she had gone, Laura patted the seat beside her.

‘Sit awhile,’ she said.

‘I don’t have much time,’ he scanned the garden, hands in pockets, then paced in front of her.

‘Laura,’ he began, then stopped abruptly.

‘Go on,’ she said gently.

‘As you know, I will be gone for three years. Four, maybe, if it goes as well as I hope,’ he looked earnestly at her then.

Her eyes were downcast, and he saw how tightly she gripped the edge of the stone seat.

He went on, ‘And I was hoping – well, it would be my greatest honour if… if you would wait for me.’

Her eyes met the brilliance of his. A sudden wind surged through the garden, and her shoulders rose up to he ears. Her eyes, usually dancing with light and laughter, brimmed with something he could not describe.

‘Tom, I..’ she began, and her voice was like a knife through his chest.

‘Just say yes,’ he whispered, defeat written all over his face.

‘I can’t promise you that, Tom,’ she said sadly.

He didn’t wait for an explanation. He could not. He did not know how he would react, whether his heart would write itself on his face, whether she would scorn him, or hold him in disdain.

‘Very well. Goodbye, Laura,’ he said, in as calm a voice as he could muster.

The he turned on his heel and walked down the path. She did not watch him go. She let the wind follow after him, she heard the wind whisper in his ears, and she strained to listen to what it said.

He asked her, and she said no.

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