Ms. CeeCee's Story Contest
Prompt: Garden
Notes: Gave my students this prompt and had their stories judged anonymously. This was the story I came up with as an example. They're seven-eight, and their faces when they realized the ending, followed by, "She found a new boyfriend?!" Giggle.
She stood there once, the sun filtering through the falling leaves, creating a golden halo around her small body, her braid gently floating in small waves through the air with the cool spring breeze.
Her hands were tender on my face as she held me close, whispering her soft words against my skin, "We'll come back here. When it's all over, we'll come back here."
I left her, standing alone in our garden beyond the wall with only the roses and her tears as company as I traveled through lands of mud and rain and falling bullets. Every day I closed my eyes to see her face, her kind smile, the blush on her cheeks as she said, "I love you. I'lll only ever love you."
I lived for that love. When my comrades died, when my body began to fail me, when only the darkness was there to listen to our cries for help, those whispered words of loves gave me strength to carry on, to make sure I boarded the plane bringing all of us soldiers home.
I went to our garden, looking for her, wanting to hold her in my arms, so tight against my body as I've only hoped to for so long.
But the roses had died, the leaves had fallen and only her ghostly memory stood in the spot where she once promised me the world. My love? She'd found a new garden to live in.