Evelyn shakes her head angrily, tears
spraying out to circle her till she is surrounded by weeping.
Turning the shower off, she steps out onto the cold blue tiled floor
and grabs the towel. Closing her eyes, she centres herself, calms with
deep breathes.
Slipping into jeans and a T shirt, she goes to the kitchen, boils the kettle and makes
a steaming cup of coffee. Mid morning now, she wanders out onto the veranda across the creaking old dry planks to her wicker chair and settles in to enjoy the morning’s warmth.
From here, she can see the soft haze of the mountains in the distance, clouds encasing them like a lovers embrace. She lets her mind and eyes roam, over the green fields around her small house, down the rutted road towards the stream.
It had been ten years now, since she last went to the stream, the whispering waters
sliding softly across the pebbles and rocks within. She closes her eyes and allows memory to come to her, in soft color waves of emotion.
It had been a morning like this; she had a day off from her exceedingly dull job in town, typing up invoices for a hardware store run by a man with bad breath and a surly disposition. She had walked out onto the veranda and decided to treat herself to a picnic lunch by the water. She packed sandwiches and wine, fresh fruit, a kiwi and some grapes. Walking down the road, allowing the rural sounds to envelope her.
Old Roger’s tractor throbbing across the way, as he worked on the back nine, rutting it up for sowing, the cawing clatter of the crows as they dove and swooped on the dead cows carcass in the Miller front paddock. Two weeks and still he had not removed it the old bastard she thought, if only he could stop drinking long enough to realise the smell was starting to permeate the whole area.
She heard the pig’s crunch and grunt at
blending into the miasma of farming smells filling her senses.
to be continued…..
2 comments:
A strange coincidence ... my cousin was married to a farmer named Roger who had an antique tractor. He died very unexpectedly leaving her with four children under 7. At his funeral the tractor was chugging away on the road beside the graveyard. It's as though you were there and saw it yourself, you describe it so well.
moon
Four children under 7, hells bells Moon, that is so hard for her and the kids.
Thankyou, trying to make myself write a short story a bit at a time, seeing if that will work better for me, thing is my mood changes all the time, so the voice changes too, and that makes the writing inconsistent I think, not sure how to rectify that yet...
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