“BITTERSWEET” by Linda R
While she waited for him, she tended to her garden. Recently, it’d been getting more difficult. Onorous. Even a tad morbid.

It was difficult waiting in the midst of midges and thorns. Everything seemed more than happy to seek her blood.

There were harmless elements of nature too—friendly, even. Clumps of wild chamomile, shrubs of sage, tufts of thistle, tendrils of ivy. Weeds and wildflowers by the bushel. But she let those grow, let drops of precious water grace them, too, because she like them. They grew wild and tall and tangled, creating the walls of her personal sanctuary, the shields that sprung up of joint accord—hers and nature’s.

Within the wild walls there were the fruit trees of her toil and labor, sweet and sour and tangy according to season and taste. They sprang from the earth like little souls, like phantoms trying to raise themselves from the ground but found their tails still pinned to the underground tombs, and so they shivered there, stuck.

She’d worked a long time for them. She’d dug their holes with her hands, bruising her fingers against soil and stone until her nails bled. They’d drunk water from her tears. When she laughed, the flowers uncreased their faces and bloomed. At her sighs, their leaves unfurled like outstretched hands.

But sometimes she was clumsy, stupid. She tripped and uprooted them, she tore at the sanctuary walls with her bare hands, frustrated, lonely, impatient. And the walls fell, leaving gaping holes through which vile things could crawl.

Realizing her faults, she’d crouch above the littlest trees to protect them, sheltering them with her body, feeling the wind slowly freeze her heart. The blizzard howled through the cracks she’d created. The cold made her tremble, and her fingers number and crumbled to pieces from the frostbite. Still she persisted, because there was nothing left to do.

Winter’s warmth faded to spring. She’d learned her lesson. Summer came and kissed her with its beams of light, bleeding back life into her body, a life she could radiate as love.

And when her love returned and found her in the garden, she shared with him the fruits she’d saved. Bitter with winter’s scars, sweet with summer’s dreams, it intoxicated them with the same potion, at once a poison and ambrosia, until they lost all count of seasons and souls.

“Angreek87″