I post prompt-based writing drabbles to Tumblr sometimes, and I thought it would be nice to keep them all here, in one place. It's rated T just to be safe, and though I don't anticipate M-rated content, I can't discount it as a possibility.
The lovely cover image (based on this chapter!) is original art by Tumblr user a-small-jar, reposted with her permission.
And if you're wondering why I'm publishing this instead of the third chapter of Restoration, I've had some writer's block lately, but rest assured that I'm working on it. :)
This first ficlet is based on a Tumblr prompt from ladycavalier: What Erik thinks of gardening vs. what Christine thinks.
The little garden is Christine's idea.
At first, Erik has no objections. She needs her own spaces in and about their new home, just as he does, and it matters little to him what she chooses to do outside.
When she proposes that the two of them plant the garden together, however, he balks. He cannot conceive of himself among such vibrancy and softness and sun.
"Oh, but you must at least try!" she pleads, eyes bright, her delicate fingers circling his gaunt forearm. "Think of it: you would be coaxing life and beauty from little more than a plot of earth and your own two hands."
He glances down at his pale hands, at the web of tendons connecting rawboned fingers to knobby wrists. A small, frenetic laugh bubbles up in his throat. These hands have only coaxed death; they are death, affixed to a corpse as they are.
Ah, but he will do anything to please her, his Christine. And so, when it is time for planting, Erik kneels on the ground beside her, his bony kneecaps jutting into the soil, his teeth clenched as he tries not to think of the dirt and dust on his trousers. The sun beats down on his back while he hunches forward, and his face swelters under its black mask.
Christine, by contrast, is the very image of springtime. Her golden hair is tucked under a straw bonnet trimmed with cream lace, and her calico work apron is dotted with tiny pink-and-blue flower buds. She shows him how to weed and till, how to plot and plant and water.
It is worth the discomfort just to watch her—another of the countless moments in which his chest tightens at the sound of her lilting voice and the sight of her sun-pinked cheeks, until he can scarcely breathe, so convinced is he that he is living a dream.
She calls him outside when the first rose blooms, so that he might appreciate the fruits of their labor. He is pleased, and he tells her as much, but then all he can think about is how lovely she would look with the pink blossom tucked into her hair. "May I...cut it?" he asks. She smiles and nods without question.
With a small blade, his spindly fingers sever the flower at the stem. As he moves to put the rose in Christine's hair, his thumb catches on a thorn, and the skin tears. He jerks his hand back at the sight of blood, not wanting to alarm her. The blossom falls to the ground.
But she has seen. "Here, love, give me your hand," she insists. Like a child caught in the pantry, he surrenders the evidence. She presses a clean handkerchief to the cut and wraps it around the thumb.
"There," she says with a gentle pat of his hand. She bends to retrieve the rose, smiling as she slips the stem into the notch above her ear. "I assume that this was your intended purpose?"
But he scarcely hears her; he is looking at the fresh blood seeping through cloth, at the pink blossom against flaxen hair, at his wife's doting hands: all vibrant signs of life, right at his fingertips.
If nature can renew itself in perpetuity, he thinks, then perhaps he can, too.