Mark A Morris is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
The Porch
by Mark A Morris
We’re at Aunt Agatha’s today. Her grass needs cutting; its greenery is sprinkled with buttercups and daisies. It used to be Uncle Donald’s pride and joy, the personal project demanding most of his time. It used to be stubbornly immaculate, a bowling green or a surreal, uprooted billiard table he’d had transplanted into their yard.
Uncle Donald went away less than a year ago, but the grass already knows it, rioting wilfully where it was once restrained.
Aunt Agatha prefers flowers. She never used to agree with her husband, Donald. She never used to approve of the mundane, matter of fact things he imposed upon her, his fussiness, his obsession for regularity. She was quick to sell the allotment where he spent most of his weekends, seeing nothing there but contempt for her and her passion. He had himself a radio and an armchair and a view overlooking the hills, none of them things he’d thought to share with his wife. It was as though he’d needed a secret bolthole and never thought to say why, forever choosing to be alone and apart. But when he was at home, he had his lawn to attend to, eight metres long on each side, filled with grass.
And then he was gone. Nobody knows the where or why, but we all suspect. The view from the porch overlooks a meadow our Aunt Agatha made, untroubled by a shovel or a spade, a place she’s made sacrosanct.
If only that grass could talk.
