The Visit.
It was a cold, desolate, damp evening, the light fading through Rose Madder to Payne’s grey. The air was leaden with a dead silence, the depressing weight of which was broken only by the distant intermittent hum of some unknown petrol powered machinery, throbbing away to an ear-worm of its own. The occasional creak as the wind forced itself through the skeletal branches and occasional leaves of dark, wet spindly trees closer by. The place lay barren, in parts muddy and in others baked bare. Despondent.
It was a space sparsely filled with rangy, spiked and impossibly thorny rose bushes. Once they had been a vivid sea of red, a thrumming reverberation of bees. But they had succumbed to a slow decay, their petals withered, stunted and brown like the remnants of screwed up envelopes from the tax man. Each stem stood like a twisted corpse, bereft of the vitality that had once been a joy.
The garden had been her refuge, a place where she had sought peace and pleasure from the harshness of the world outside. But now it was a wretched, bleak and empty place. She had tended to the roses with care, nurtured them through seasons and storms. It had made no difference, no matter how hard she tried. It was as if the death of the roses was her own battered spirit embedded in the loamy soil.
The day she had first planted them had been a warm pleasure. A satisfaction. The roses had flourished under her care for a long time. Yet, as the years passed, so did the vibrancy of the blooms. It was as if the very life force that had sustained them had been drained away, leaving behind a skeletal husk. No amount of tending, fertilising or mulching would halt the decline
The reasons for the roses' demise were myriad. Pollution that choked the air, the toxic residue of human greed that infiltrated the soil and poisoned the roots. The indifference of a society that had turned a blind eye to the slow decay of pretty much everything good. Perhaps it was just a message, screaming with all its might that the arrow of time has shot past and nothing remains. Whatever the cause, the result was the same. Dead roses.
She was amidst the lifeless thorns in a bitter chill. Each wilted rose a marker for a lost moment, a forgotten joy.
Outside the walls, the city's lights flickered on like distant stars appearing in the dusk, indifferent. The world outside continued its relentless pace, oblivious. The dichotomy between the sterile urban landscape and the decaying roses encapsulated the bleak reality of a world in decay.
He turned away, leaving behind the skeletal remains of what had once been a vibrant life. The dead roses stood as a haunting reminder of the fragility of beauty and the inevitability of decay. In the cold embrace of the night, he walked away, the shadows swallowing his silhouette.
“Sleep well, my love,” he said.
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