[Kaimee]: 5.Contest Entries.Child's Garden

Written for the famous first lines contest.

---

The air smelled of dank silence and mystery in the early hours of the morning. The overgrown old garden had always smelt like that, and I would have been happy to keep it as the distant memory of four years before.
I remember the last time I went there. Mist had pooled in the depressions my footsteps made in the grass, and crawled it’s whispery way up my ankles as I searched. My bare feet had been painfully, ice-block cold, and the scuffed and ragged hems of my jeans had been dark and damp and hard with frozen mud.
Tears had dried stiff, on my cheeks.
He hadn’t met me that morning, and I never looked for him there again. I’d never gone back at all, until today, and today I wanted nothing more in the world than to be anywhere else.

“Please, you might know where to find him. If anyone did, I thought…”

He wouldn’t know me, not now. After the last time, and that last lonely dawn in that garden, I had gone away. I came back now only because his wife begged me, a phone call in the evening in a town where no one knew me; where I’d never expected to be found.
Or maybe I’d expected it once, four years before. Oh yes, then I’d fearfully expected it every night, every morning, every time I met her on the street or at the bus stop, I’d expected it. Perhaps she saw that. Perhaps she still knew it, years later, a week ago when she’d called me. Perhaps she heard it in my voice, or saw it in my flight, perhaps that’s why she was kind to me.

“I can’t come back.”
“Please, you have to, he’ll listen to you.”
“He wont, you don’t understand…”

After that morning when I hadn’t found him, I had only once met her before I left, and in her eyes was everything I’d expected for months, and I could see that I was everything she herself had expected for months. I couldn’t do it to her, not then.
I’d run away. I hadn’t even gone home. She hadn’t said a word to me, but that day instead of getting off the bus at the lane near my home, I’d stayed on until it had driven into the next town, and then the next. The driver had craned his neck around at the bottom of my hill and frowned at me, confused. Not getting off here, love? No, not today. Not ever again, is what I’d thought. And here I was.

“You think I don’t realise that? You think it doesn’t hurt me that you understand my husband more than I do?”
“I don’t, I never did. He loves you.”

A grey solid smudge in the dawn light, a memory of straighter back and smiles and planes of face and then the haggard man I hardly knew turned to me. A man who loved his wife more than I understood, a man who’s burning eyes stared back at me without recognition, in a face torn by grief, and shock.
I imagined the toddling girl, the tiny bubbling life of him who wiped me from his mind, who had died last week, playing by a tractor. I imagined still little limbs, and saw more than that in his grief. I imagined blood, and ripped flesh, and crushed bones. I imagined his wife at home, a strong voice over a bad line. I imagined her four years ago when I had last seen her, just pregnant, glowingly happy at the bus stop with still grey eyes that met mine and knew.

“You have to go back.” It fell heavily, flatly, into that silence.
His eyes focused on me, and saw me. Confused, he saw the girl from years ago, from a lifetime ago, from that mistake he once made and then buried. Then they focused beyond me, over my shoulder.
“Rebecca!”

I had found him, when it mattered. All those years before with my life in shreds I had run away and vowed to myself that I wouldn’t return, that I’d never look for him again. But today I’d found him in the lover’s garden, in the place that smelt of mystery and forbidden trysts and notes and kisses. A place where a child’s laugh could echo out of the mists and for at least a second, you could imagine it was real. I had found him and met his wife’s eyes as he sobbed into her neck.
I remembered the mists creeping around my ankles all those years ago, filling in my footsteps and hiding the way back. I left them there, those two, in their grief, and walked down the secret paths back to the lane and my life.
I waited for the bus to take me away again.

---

PLEASE add a rating (1-9) at the top of the page!

See ratings for advice, explanations, and instructions :)

---

Piece © Kate-Aimee Conrick. All rights reserved!