Red Devil

A mini-mystery

She’d had the nightmare again. Soil moving beneath the rose bed. Pale skull-face stalking the drab before dawn. But now it was morning, blissful sunshine and enough heat to warm the patio paving.

In the garden, the white wall was bright in the sun, reminding her of Greece that one time she visited. The spade was against the wall next to the new bench. There was firm soil in the rose beds and the flowers nodded and greeted her like old friends. Silver Ghost, Breath of Life and her favourite, the hybrid tea rose Red Devil. Its fragrance, a marriage of delicacy and potency, was almost as important as the sculpted perfection of the bloom she now handled.

She’d begun planting after they first moved to the village and learned about the regular drain blockages. Although these were not too common they were recurrent and ranged from slight pungencies to overwhelming, unbearable stenches. There had been none for a while now.

Her husband had not welcomed the time spent in the garden.

‘You’ve changed,’ he’d said.

There had once been a fifties housewife in a floral apron with floury hands, replaced in the eighties by a working wife who tended roses.

‘It’s like they’re your children.’

There had never been any children. Perhaps this infertility had led her to gardening. Successful rose gardening was all about fertility and she was an expert in that now. She’d decided that she would like to become compost once her life was over, that way she would become more fertile in death than she ever was in life.

The reds were her favourites. Some bright scarlet, like the bloom of new oxygenated blood, others darker like de-oxygenated blood. She’d gotten muscles from the digging which she rather liked to look at in the mirror while flexing her arms.

It might have been a perfect day except for a slight pungency now bleeding into it. The drains again, probably. She buried her nose in the largest of the Red Devil blooms and inhaled long and slow.

The stink was gone.

Just like her husband.

The soil was firm and the spade leaned against the white wall.