Landscaping | Flash Fiction
I.
I dream of sage green windows and ocean blue windows, the kind of house that is not a house or a home but a space where things breathe and imagine and create, where people come and go so seamlessly even the most impressive leave no footsteps of fingerprints. A place so beautiful and awful that even the front door seems to have a life of its own, where the garden grows on its own wily accord and birdsong sounds different than anywhere else.
II.
You are in a room with gold-trimmed gates and the ivy spills over like a hundred secrets. Maybe someone is burning incense or maybe it is just a taste of ashy sky, of pooling sunsets and sunrises. Even the moon feels more powerful than it should. It becomes unbearable until you turn the corner and the instant you do, there is an indelible sense of something forever lost.
Erin Jamieson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in After the Pause, Into the Void, Flash Frontier, and Foliate Oak Literary, among others, and her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She currently teaches English Composition at the University of Cincinnati-Blue Ash College and also works as a freelance writer.