Smoke in Eden

Jannie doubted this crisp air would ever fully warm. Her fingers tingled and newly shaved legs stung as the goose bumps spread up them. Not a human voice could be heard, and the birds were using this quiet to compose their morning eulogy. She watched as the teenage neighbor, Jason emerged in back of his house. How old was he now? Close to driving age? She hadn’t seen him since he learned to count; he’d followed her mother around all that summer, counting every daffodil, dahlia and dandelion in the yard. He reached for something behind the wood stacks. An axe. He began cutting starter wood, and then returned inside. Within moments, the biting cold air was strung with the smell of smoke.

She closed her eyes and breathed the comforting scent in until her soul felt licked by flames, and her nose was burning from the cold air. She refused to open her eyes. The cars, busily rushing to work on the hidden highway sounded like an ocean. She listened to the waves crashing as the tide came in. She could see her mom and dad lounging in beach chairs in the distance, her little brother Robert helping her build a mote for the sandcastle. The sand rubbed against her ankles and between her toes.

She’d stay on this porch swing all day, drinking her hot cup of coffee, forgetting the world, hidden in her mother’s secret garden. The royal purple dahlias, weeping foxglove, and the pink bleeding hearts surrounded the porch and kept her company. The entire lawn, with its elaborate gardens and hedged-in borders had been designed for perfect viewing from mom and dad’s special swing. She didn’t need to think about the “details,” Robert said he’d take care of them all. The smoke in the air brought her mind back to her old family room, beside the fire, reading a book or watching a film with Robert and their parents. Her hair still wet from a nightly bath, her red flannel pajamas on. All at once the smoke became ashy to her, cremating her past. Her nose stung, and her eyes blurred. The garden around her looked unkempt, and she realized her tears were the first good watering the flowers had received all year.

When she’d rung Suzanne yesterday, she’d been told to take the week off. “I’ll call the other girls and we’ll take turns filling in. Don’t worry, just take the time you need.” Yet, work sounded filling, and Lord she needed something, something more than the old garden that surrounded the back porch, with this creaking swing. She needed something more than mourning birds and an imaginary ocean. She needed her mother. Her mother who could turn any mess into a garden.

When they’d moved here she was only 6, starting second grade at a new school. Her mother had adopted the field of weeds and slowly created an Eden. Eden. Her mother always belonged in a garden, it’s where she knew to love. It’s where she’d held Jannie and promised her she’d make new friends. It’s where her mother told her the news, with a broad-rimmed black Hepburn-like hat covering her baldhead and a pink peony in her left hand. The smoke lifted from the chimney and reminded Jannie she’d better call Robert; let him know she was okay. And ask when the will was to be read.


[My final portfolio is due Tuesday for my "Beginning Short Story Writing" class. Some of you may have read the first version of this piece of flash fiction on my cretive blog. Here is version 2. The assignment was to write a piece of flash fiction (300-750 words). I chose to use a piece I'd begun earlier for the previous assignment in which we were to spend an hour or so in a place, describing it (sound, smell, taste, temperature, anything and everything!), and then write a paragraph, infusing the place with the emotion our character would feel there. I chose one of my favorite places, my back porch swing at sunrise and the hour that follows. I wrote about my mother's masterful garden.]