hooftaps

micro: upon entering the kitchen: Fill for the flower bed retreat warm-up: "language of flowers" in 50 words or fewer -- Flowers wait with coffee. Orange petals, not ones from their garden. A market find. But when did he go out? He’s asleep upstairs. His shoes are dry; it’s been drizzling all morning. Near the back door, bare footprints stamped in mud retreat, return. Clippers on a muddied towel keep…

Verity: She’s got a broom in her hands and is sweeping dirt from the lowest stair when he walks past. Seeing him doesn’t surprise her anymore.  When he first went by—years ago now—she felt the shock like lightning in her stomach and in her chest. It was his back that she saw, but she knew him at once by the color of his hair, the deep rust brown that hung past his shoulders, out of style her whole lifetime. The particular motion of his step, always favoring his right leg. An accident when he’d been a child, she assumed, although he never spoke of the past. He was dressed the way he had since the day they’d met, in exquisitely tailored pants and a crisp linen shirt, like the ones she would whiten in the sun, spread out in this very yard where…