In The Garden

I’ve always loved the beetles in my garden. They scuttle within their own universe between the lawn and the flowerbed borders with their gleaming black wing-cases and tiny thread legs, moving too rapidly for me to get a fix on them. I followed a beetle last Sunday as he ran up the wall, and a filmy wingtip protruded from his back where he was constantly about to spread both wings.

I pounced at the wall, not to catch him but only to watch, and locked eyes with my next-door neighbour: wary, lined face; floppy apron a little askew; grey bun with wisps of hair escaping around her ears.

“It’s all right, I’m only looking at that beetle,” I said.

She digested this information, her expression gradually changing to one of resignation.

“Do you often watch insects?”

“Oh, yes, when I’m out here. I love them.” I realized I must sound like some kind of nutty biologist.

“All I want is to get rid of mine,” she said. “As soon as I see one, I spray the insect killer.”

This was clearly what she had been doing, for as my shiny beetle crossed over the top of the wall and ran down her side of the wall, he fell off it, dead. I said no more and returned to my comfortable garden chair.

That night I dreamed a beetle ate her.

Seagull

For years ino would give a writing prompt for a flash fiction story, and we both wrote one with the same title. Some of them are no longer on this blog. Here’s one of my favourites:

My story

My colleague passed round photographs, and I remembered my photo of a seagull alone in the blue sky. Then I remembered my many photos of flowers, the album I put them in, and later the folder on my computer.

But these were photographs of a wedding, and my wedding had been postponed on a rainy May afternoon and in the end, had never happened.

The bride and bridesmaids in my colleague’s pictures held bouquets of flowers framed by tufty, trailing leaves and starred with a smooth loveliness, just like the flowers in my album. The expanse of sky above the wedding party was a deep blue; they were lucky to have had a fine day. But no birds could be seen there, flying.

Ino’s story

I announced that the subject of my lecture was ‘seagulls’, and everyone turned their heads away and muttered about seagull droppings landing on car windscreens.

“Why aren’t seagulls more popular?” I wondered, and an albatross flew by outside flapping its long wings in a slightly overlapping way, right by the window of the lecture hall.

I began by speaking about pale blue and pale green eggs in nests, precarious on a windy cliff side. Mentally, my audience climbed and leaned out to see the eggs more closely, and then some stole them, and some smashed them, and only a few nurtured the young birds.

After all, who wants unpopular birds which do not hatch until the audience are back home and putting their dinner in the cooking pot? I can see them hatching, and I hear the crack.

This is my original grainy photograph from 1983!