A STARTING PLACE #flashfictionmagic
The shoots rising from the bulbs were so strong, so green, the dirt rose tangled with them.
She stared at them in mid January, wondering how such slow growth could lift the very earth.
The snow still lay in swaths, falling and mounting and receding again.
When she stepped inside the cottage again, shivering and red cheeked, he waited at the kitchen table.
“You don’t remember any of this?”
He shook his head slowly at her question. His face was clean shaven, his dark curly hair neat behind his ears. He used to let it go wild, when he sat up late playing music he’d just written.
She spun and pulled his guitar from the wall, holding it out to him. Something softened in her when he reached for it instinctively. His eyes lost an edge of terror as he cradled the instrument a strummed a perfect chord. “My hands remember this.”
A hot tear crept down her cheek as he played the song he’d written the day before his accident. Before he’d forgotten her and the life they’d built.
“Irene,” he said softly as he finished. “I will remember you.”
She held his calloused hand in hers and let herself cry. Like the shoots outside, they would slowly rise together, and build it all again.
🌱🌱🌱
