So: a friend shared this with me and I've decided to take on the challenge: a piece a day for the month of October. I can't draw, so it's going to be short stories, varying in length, probably varying in quality, and definitely scrappily edited - but why not? My agent's currently reading my latest novel and it seems a good time to fool around. Today we begin...
Garden
I love the feel of compost.
Well, there's no sense crying. Into the compost they go. It's all churn; the worms have to eat, and meat is meat once it's finished with. I wondered whether I should wear gloves when I touched the compost as long as the fish were breaking down, but it'd only be out of respect for the dead. I never get sick.
My rosemary's coming up beautiful. For remembrance, they say. I dig in the compost and the air tangs with bitter-soft herbs.
I love making salads with my herbs, actually. Nothing like the fresh taste of your own garden. I chop in the chives and pluck off little fluffy thyme-leaves, and then back into the compost go the stalks. The worms turn their gleaming backs in the feathering soil, and dive for the waste I give them.
The herbs are growing faster and faster. I like to leave the kitchen door open as I cook; the smell of earth gives me strength. And I need it because I'm more and more tired these days; I don't know why. After the fish died I was full of energy, at least for a while: I dug and dug and I felt life thrashing through my veins, so bubbling with it I hardly knew what to do with myself. Well, these things pass.
And there's beauty in the world; just yesterday when I was cooking a little robin hopped in. Right through my door he came, bold as brass, looking to see if I'd dropped any crumbs for him. Little glowing coal of a thing, all alive.
Poor little fellow must have got trapped somehow. I swear I'd left the door open, but when I came down in the morning he was dead on my floor. Little white belly-feathers glinting in the sunrise, and his eyes all dry.
I felt sorry for him, but waste not want not. I put him in the compost. The worms rose to greet him. There's nothing like good feeding: those things are getting thick as thumbs.
I felt good, though. Energised.
I'm lucky to have enough money to live like this, just growing my lovely garden herbs and not worrying too much about the bills. Poor Aunt Margie left me this place, and she had a big trust to go with it. She put me in her will when I moved in, and I joked that everyone would think I was some kind of leech moving in on her. She laughed; said there was plenty of life in her left and she intended to last a very long time.
It was a shock to everyone when she passed so soon. Less than a month, it was, and then one day I went in with her cup of tea and she was lying in bed, pale as a sheet and quite dead.
She'd been kind to me and I really did feel bad about it. It was funny how long the grief took to hit - or the depression, maybe. I was sad and I cried and everything, but when it came to organising the funeral, sorting out her affairs, giving away her things, all the work that goes with a death - why, I was a dynamo. Buzzing with energy. I could hardly stop, I felt so well. It was only about a year after she passed that I suddenly sat down and felt tired, so tired I didn't know what to do with myself.
Well, gardening's good for the soul, they say, and good exercise. And that garden had been neglected for a while; poor Auntie had been the best gardener in the world back in her young days, but she'd been getting a bit creaky and it had been a while since she'd done any real work back there. Gardens don't like that. They need someone to care for them.
I got out and I dug the beds and I fed the worms. I even put her ashes into the compost. It's what she would have wanted, I felt sure of it.
It could be loneliness that gives me these bursts of tiredness. I do wish I could keep a pet for company, but I just don't seem to have the knack of it.
The compost worms are almost like pets now, they're getting so fat. Last time I put in waste I could swear one of them winked at me with several of its eyes.
And as to being lonely - it's not like there aren't opportunities. I mean, I'm still quite a youngish woman, and the word's out that I have this nice inheritance. It's funny how the men start to get interested, or at least a certain kind of man. I never was much to look at, but all of a sudden there are visitors. Suitors, you might say.
I feed them my salads and they say they're delicious. Cookies too; I have this recipe with lavender from my garden that all the fellows love. Or at least they do at first. Perhaps the recipe's too heavy; visitors always seem to get tired after a while sitting in my kitchen, even with the garden looking so beautiful outside.
So perhaps I am just boring company. The lawyer told me to watch out for fortune-hunters when the will was read, but honestly a woman my age who mostly just wants to dig and weed her lovely plants isn't much of a catch.
There's Toby, of course. I can't say he's love's young dream or anything; he does have a habit of patting my knees without so much as a by-your-leave, and when he looks around the place, it's like an estate agent calculating the value of the property. Me and the house together - he'd have them both if nobody stops him, I'm pretty sure.
I do feel tired these days. I haven't tried keeping pets for a while, and I can't remember when I had one of my bursts of life.
Not since the robin, now I think of it.
Toby's not exactly a romantic, but some company about the place wouldn't be the worst thing. And a man about the house to fix things would leave me more time for the garden.
'What do you think?' I ask the worms, hooking my elbows over the ledge of the compost bin. I found a nest of dead mice in the cupboard just the morning, poor pallid little things, so I'm tipping it in. I'm feeling a bit better this morning. 'Should I think about Toby more seriously?'
The worms muscle through the soil, their scales gleaming. Waste not, want not, they say.
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