A Garden for Children

Walking the soil between the rosebushes she marvelled at their growth of bloody blossoms, thinking of full-bloomed lips, wet and waiting through the windowpane.

She remembered the white and twisted bed sheets, with fallen petals of clothes discarded, their legs entangled like her varicose veins.

Divorce, she screamed from the bedroom door. But she knew he would keep the ivy-sieged house, the sprawling gardens in which to cultivate their children.

She had only her darling rosebushes. Imagine, a gynaecologist’s wife who could not bear fruit. She was a rose between two thorns. Or was it a prick between two roses?

Yet when she was finished what fertiliser the pair of them made.