I needed a short story, because my silly posting schedule demands that I have a short story to post that isn't a part of Places To Read or Writing Prompt Stories.
So I googled book title generator.
I picked the Romance genre and this is what it gave me.
No, this does not class as a writing prompt, because I said so. This is a short story, which has not been prompted by a starter sentence.
I'll start writing.
THE STORY
There is a wall at the bottom of my garden.
It's old, the kind of old where none of the stones are the same size, all pieced together like a puzzle, stuck together in a mosaic of shapes and sizes. It's so old that it's crumbling, and after every storm I take a walk to the bottom of my garden to see if it's still standing.
It always is, the moss and ivy that has covered it acting as a net, as a support, holding the stones together and protecting the bed of wildflowers I planted next to it.
When I say planted, I mean I bought a cheap packet of seeds and threw them on the patch of earth, not expecting them to grow.
The day after I had thrown those seeds, I met someone. He wasn't tall, he didn't have sparkling blue eyes and he didn't have dark hair. On paper, he was the opposite of my type. In reality, I fell almost immediately for him. He was a farmer, not in the sense that he owned his own farm, but that he worked on one. His hair was blond and it was constant messy. His chin was scratchy with stubble, but for once I didn't mind, because although his eyes weren't an ocean of blue, I quickly decided that I prefer chocolate and coffee to the sea.
It had shocked me when the little green sprouts sprung from the ground, more dense in some patches than others, but still growing. Not that I hadn't been looking after them, I had made sure that the soil was damp enough, but the earth had never grown anything before. I had tried to grow some garden herbs there, but they had all wilted and died before they could be of any use to me.
When the sprouts came up was when he asked me to dinner. He picked me up in his car, which was for once void of the mud on the ground and bits of hay on the seats, and drove me into town, to a small diner. I had been there before, it was where everyone went when they didn't want to cook. Some people spent every single evening there, although that was mostly the middle aged men who didn't have a family at home to eat dinner with. I ordered chips and salad, he ordered a burger. We laughed, we ate and although I offered, he paid for both meals. On the walk out to his car, his fingers brushed mine, and in the car ride on the way home, I reached over and interlocked my fingers with his.
With more sun shining down as summer approached, the flowers grew more. I wasn't sure what type of flowers they were, but the buds were pretty, some oranges and some pinks. There were a couple, scattered here and there, that were a lovely blue colour. It seemed that this was the rarest of all the buds, because while there were uncountable amounts of pinks, whites and oranges, I could only count four blues.
We spent increasingly more time together, seeing each other nearly every day. He would finish work and go home, get changed, and then come straight round to mine. If he wasn't working, I would drive to his and we would go for walks, walking through the fields and along footpaths, talking non-stop or walking in silence, listening to the birds and the running of a stream. We would hold hands, swinging them slightly as we walked, and if we stopped to look at something, he would wrap his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close and kissing the top of my head. Sometimes he would reach out and cup my face softly, turning my head towards him so he could kiss my lips.
When the flowers came out, it was a magical day. We sat together in my garden, on an old, rickety, wooden bench. We bought a cheap, disposable barbecue and with the smell of smoke and sausages in the air, we sat together, taking it all in. As he turned the sausages, I stared at the flowers, swaying slightly in the breeze, trying to find the blue ones, and when he sat back down next to me, he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me close. I rested my head against him, reaching up to my shoulder to hold the hand he had around me. When the sun went down, we went inside to escape the chill that had come into the air. He kissed me, with the taste of the chocolate biscuits we had been eating all evening on his tongue, and led me up to my bedroom.
The flowers stayed in bloom for a month or so, some dying off and others coming out, keeping an almost constant display of colour. I cut the heads off the dead ones, to keep the whole lot looking greener and stopping the plants from dying prematurely. He spent more and more time with me, and we were almost never apart, except from when we were at work. He spent most nights at my house. His car broke down at one point, so I drove to him to work and back, bringing him home with me. We would cook together in the evening, although he was better at not burning things than me. I spent more time sitting on the counter watching him, or occasionally chopping something, rather than doing anything that could directly affect our food.
The day we had our first argument, I went out into the garden to sit with my flowers. It had been silly, just a little thing. He had asked me earlier in the day to get stuff ready for dinner, so when he came home he could cook it without any hassle and I had forgotten. I ran my hands over the flowers, watching the stalks bend slightly and sway when I let them go. The petals of the orange ones were soft, the white ones had stalks that were rough on my hands and the pink ones left pollen on my fingers. I cried more when I realised that one of my blue ones had gone to seed than when we had argued.
Within a month, all of my blue flowers were gone. I let the flower heads go to seed, so I could grow more next year, but they were a stain on the rest of the flowers now. The flower heads made the oranges and the pinks less appealing, my eyes always going towards the brown rather than the pretty colours. He spent less and less time at my place, instead spending more time with his friends in town, or being too tired to drive over to my house in the evening. I didn't want to see my flowers anymore, to see the colours when all the blue ones had died.
When the storm came, I didn't care. I didn't care enough about the windows that let in drafts of air, which were making my house cold, to close the curtains. I didn't care about the noise, the howling of the wind, the rain slamming into my roof, the rattling of my door against the locks. He had phoned me earlier in the day, saying that he didn't think it was working, that he thought we should go our separate ways. I agreed, I had gone too long without the head kisses, without his arm around my shoulders, without the phone calls when he was at work, saying that he loved me. I had gone too long without my blue flowers to care enough to cry.
The next morning, I pulled on my boots and shrugged on a coat, heading to the bottom of the garden. The first tears I shed after he told me he wanted to break up weren't over the relationship, but about the wall in the bottom of my garden, my flower patch, which I hadn't expected to grow, or to love as much as I did. About the ivy that had finally given up and let the stones tumble away, crushing what was left of my flowers. I shifted the rocks, desperately, but the seed heads from my blue flowers were broken, destroyed.
In the spring, I had someone come and rebuild my wall. I might not have liked it before, but over the course of the year I had grown to love the wild part of my garden. But when it was rebuilt, even though the same stones were reused, there was no ivy or moss growing on it. The wall was bare, too strong and new looking.
I went back to the same store I had gone to before, looking for the seeds, but try as I might, I couldn't find them.
I bought a random packet of wildflowers and threw the seeds over the ground like I had the year before. I waited, making sure the ground was damp, that the seeds had enough water and light, but the weeks passed and I couldn't see any green sprouts. Eventually, I stopped going to the bottom of my garden. Every time I saw the bare earth, my heart broke a little bit more, wanting to see my blue flowers just one more time, to run my hands over the orange ones and watch as they swayed in the breeze, the stalks dancing with the wind, but never breaking.
The End.
Applause ensues.
I have a standing ovation.
I bow, the audience cheers.
I am very humble.
Honestly, though, this wasn't where I though this would go. I actually spent about an hour writing this, but I'm pretty proud of it.
In case it needs explaining:
The flowers are her relationship (pretty self explanatory). She hadn't tried to grow anything before, and didn't expect them to grow, like she didn't expect the relationship. When they did grow, she started to love the flowers, to love keeping them alive. When the flowers started dying, so did her relationship. The blue flowers specifically represent her love for her boyfriend, and when they die, her relationship is not going well. Her determination to keep the seeds, to grow more blue flowers shows that she wants love, but the storm, the wall falling, means that the relationship is truly over, that she can't manufacture another one as easily as keeping seeds to grow. When she buys more seeds, she is wanting to start another relationship, but without her blue flowers, her heart isn't in it, so any relationship is doomed to fail.
At least, that's what I think my strange, long metaphor should mean!
I hope you enjoyed. I don't really write romance, but this story at least had tears and misery, which is what I usually write about.
That's it from me.
Bye!
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