Johanna’s mother’s garden was nearly dead. The roses, her mother’s prize barely bloomed along the walkway, just a few flowers, nothing like the colors which raged when Johanna was going to high school. During that time Johanna used to clip the blooms on the way out and wear them, first pinned to her blouse, then, as her dates advanced, other places… Now there were so few, each spring, seemed but an echo of an increasingly distant past.
The hedges in the front of the house grew out of control, obscuring half her mother’s bedroom window with leaves. Her mother didn’t care; there was nothing she could do about it. She moved from the television in the living room to the television in her bedroom with the same gritted indifference she traveled from her bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen. Except for those days she climbed into Johanna’s small car, complaining bitterly about the uselessness of another doctor’s visit, her life consisted of these small trips, ten to twenty feet, five or six rolls of the wheel of her chair, challenged only be the folds between carpet and linoleum and the deadly monotony of it all. She would never get back out to tend her garden; all she could do is watch it struggling, like her, to grasp the few tendrils of life which still held her to the earth, hoping they did not yet break.
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Okay, I know you're writing a thriller - and I love the more thriller-like submissions. But I'm always amazed at these small stand-alone pieces you do. I'm also amazed at how well you write Johanna. There's so much depth & complexity to her. I always feel as if she's stepped out of her own literary novel. (btw, I also loved the Summer Vacation piece.)
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