Orchids and Ivy

Dark clouds cast a gray pall over the countryside, ensuring shadows linger longer and darker.

Unrelenting snows all but consume the earth and trap sleeping seedlings until Spring can take them in her warm and steady hands to wake them.

The path to the pond is overgrown from disuse. The woods reclaimed the dirt eager young feet had stomped into submission. Brittle brown branches interlock with yearning roots and tangled vines to form a sort of barricade. Sharp thorns wink knowingly from within their cocoon of things long dead but not buried, glistening with the bite of the frost preserving them in serene glass.

Naked trees with their bent boughs lean ever so close, as a lover might.

As she might.

As she did - on those illicit summer nights when her father was working too late and her mother was too drunk to care.

But the cold stasis of the landscape stirs little more than a queer, quiet dread. Even in death, even in the hungry maw of the fiercest winter, this is still her place. Each infinitesimal speck of dirt has her laugh imprinted on it. Early morning halls ring with distant echoes of the sheer music and ease of her existence framed in the golden dawn as he swears he can still her singing Billy Idol jarringly off-key to her orchids and ivy.

He never caught on to the language of flowers but it was her mother tongue.

Red roses mean forever, you know.

Forever was what he had been going for. He was fortunate he managed to fumble his way into her incomparable heart before someone more deserving could silver-tongue some sense into her.

In one of those farmhouses on that dreadfully silent and gloomy countryside, he is dreaming.

The faces and places are murky and quick, like scrambling mice scenting a cat. Eventually everything stills into one of those lazy afternoons at the pond but something isn’t sitting right. The way the sunlight bounced off the curls in her hair was seared into his memory, but -

Picnics and ice-skating and study dates. Their first kiss. Where she taught him how to swim, where he taught her how to skip rocks. Where they had their first fight, where they spent their first night together.

Their pond.

She is reading under the bowed tree, haloed by the sun, but everything around her blooms gnarled and brimming with death.

The water is frozen yet fickle as it cracks open beneath him -

He wakes with a startled rattle in his throat, the familiar burn of indigestion rushing to bid him good morning, as was routine.

It was this sinister stillness of the odd hours between three and five am that wounded him the most. He rolls over to squint at the time, habitually moving in such a way to avoid disturbing a soft sleeping form that no longer reached for him with the warm and steady hands of Spring. The sun is rising, but slowly, taking time to fill up the window with hazy light. Framed by the winter sky, the entrance to that familiar path radiates even more foreboding.

It has been one year, eight months, one week, and four days.

He didn’t think he could stand another morning on the porch with his coffee knowing their spot was in that sorry condition. He dresses, stepping out into the frigid morning with the rusted shed key dancing between two callused fingers.

The steady ring of metal meeting wood chips away at the clock bit by bit. When the path is clear his lower back is pounding with agony and he’s sure he pulled something, but the work is done and that’s what matters. He can already smell the pond. He does not begin down the trail. Instead, he stills, leaning down to peer through the freshly released topsoil.

A tiny bud sprouts, its red young petal jutting triumphantly through the snow.