Maddy Johnson
Stories (1/0)
The Heart Note
The soft points of the honeybee’s six legs shifting on Kray’s naked shoulder tickled more than she expected. She knew them to be innocuous, as everyone did, and the thought of being stung shouldn’t have crossed her mind, but Kray couldn’t keep her muscles from tensing when it landed on her, though she didn’t try to remove it. Kray worked quickly among the branches of her orange tree, a tree she spent the last year painstakingly covering, fertilizing, and pruning to survive the New York winter. She was competing with the honeybees, floating from bloom to bloom in the low morning sunlight of early April, for the tree's few orange blossoms. Kray had an encompassing view of her backyard. A mass of Jasmine flowers, white as moonlight, wrapped down the iron trellis which rested against the back of her house, greeting the orderly rows of mint beneath with their heady fragrance. The yard was awash with every aromatic flower to be grown in New York’s temperate climate, meticulously planted in a grid, one foot between each. The sourness of fresh mulch and soil, almost fecal, mixed on a breeze with the flowers’ cloying sweetness, was carried to adjacent yards. Kray considered the smell a gift to her neighbors; they did not. This variety of high maintenance foliage was not merely a point of vanity, it supplied Kray with a bank of scents to utilize for creating perfumes, her trade of ten years. Kray reached for another blossom, pinching it at the base then plucking and laying it in a basket with the others before descending the eight wooden rungs resting against the trunk of the orange tree. Kray thought of her father, buried next to her mother behind a quaint Presbyterian church in the blue ridge mountains of Virginia, and the trees she helped him prune on their farm by stabilizing the base of his extendable aluminum ladder. Her left foot was the first to touch the ground. Before the right could catch up, a car horn from beyond the fence surrounding her backyard threw her off balance. She stumbled backward as two flowers fell from her basket into the dewed grass.
By Maddy Johnson3 years ago in Humans