Churchill Garden: A Short Story

My mother was just like me, a beautiful girl who loved nothing more than to play out in her garden. She planted roses just for me, they were her favourite and when she realized I was to be born, she littered the large flower beds with roses of all colours. Red, yellow, white, just everywhere. I spent my childhood watching buds burst into bloom, and letting the overgrown ivy hang down from our canopy to tickle my nose. Mother would sometimes cut the biggest brightest roses from their stems and arrange them around my crib. I was her little rose, so it is only fit that I would be surrounded with creatures like me. She told me everyday that I was her beautiful little rose.

Mother’s mind was frail, but her garden kept her strong. Mothers cries made white roses blue, and her screams tore roots from their soil. At times mother cried so much her throat bled, and I could only look up at her while red dripped from her mouth and onto the roses surrounding my crib. I was young, but old enough to sleep in a bed. Old enough to see how mothers blood made the red roses appear as if they were melting. I was not allowed to sleep in a bed, nor was I allowed to lay with mother as she screamed alone; father forbade it and insisted it was for my own safety. All I was permitted to do was sit in the garden and wait for mother to join me after long moments of pained screams polluting the fragrant air. Father did not like it when mother would cry, but he did not feel sad, instead it was anger that rose in him. The smell of fresh young roses was not enough to mask the metallic smell of blood. Especially if mother is too far gone on a particular day to play with me. I can sit and let ivy tickle my nose while I count rose petals, but mother is too busy counting thorns to regard me. Sharp needle-like spines pierce her skin, dripping red onto her pretty lace dresses and silky gloves.

My face tightens at the sight, but I’m afraid to look away, afraid that she might disappear if I do. The pricking of her fingers is only the start of this bloodshed. Mothers lips are swollen and split, so much that it leaves tiny red spots on my cheek as she kisses me goodnight. Sometimes father is careless and pushes mother down where I can see. There I see bleeding, broken skin trailing up and down her legs, which could not have been split with a rose’s thorn. The cuts too thin and precise to be a thorns doing. It’s after the blood becomes too much for father that he admits her to a hospital. This hospital is different though, it is a forever hospital that mother will not be leaving. I cry and scream for the doctors not to take her but my efforts are fruitless. There is when I kiss my mother for the last time and she looks into my watery eyes with her identical watery pair. Father tries to cheer me up and takes me to our favourite park; the one with the flower garden. Mother used to take me there every Sunday after mass, and made sure no one was looking before letting me reach over the chain and touch the petals. Father was different, I asked to touch the petals but he insisted the smell and beautiful looks of the flowers were just enough. Mother is the flowers, she is every soft, pale petal I feel against my palm. The roses are her heart and the daisies, her cheeks. It is not right to be forbidden from feeling ones mothers cheek against one's own. I argued with my father and in return he threatened to crush the flowers I loved so dearly. Those hands had taken my mother from me once and now this new enemy approaches. I cried into my sleeve which only infuriated father more. He dragged me home and sat me on the stones while I was forced to watch him rip mothers heart out of the ground and throw it against the cobblestones. Mothers cheeks were smashed in his mighty fist and dropped to the ground a pale withered mass. The Ivy that once tickled my nose now yanked down and stripped of it’s marbled leaves. Watching the vines snap was like watching mothers veins bulge and purple while she screamed. Though now I know why she screamed, her body and soul violently taken from her by this villain. Heart ripped from her chest and flesh pulverized lying sprawled on the garden floor. This meant, all my flowers were dead, my mother was dead.