Synopsis: Dougie is sitting in his back garden, lost in unique thoughts and cigarette smoke. Night is about to settle in, but he doesn’t want to go inside just yet.
The few tiles scattered across his back garden looked almost as if they grew that way; large and uneven patches of dusty grey stone, ambiguously distanced from each other, stopping abruptly in the middle of the garden, with no rhyme or reason as to why that was. Perhaps to allow space for gardening, was his best guess. The climbing rose that was making its way across the back end of the fence could have been an uncertain survivor of what might have used to be a lovelier batch of garden flowers, many moons ago. The uncertainty of its state of being came from the way it always looked like it was about to die, yet never did. Dougie wasn’t sure, however, if that impression stemmed from the way the climbing rose looked—slouched over the fence, more like crawling rather than climbing—or if the poor flower was, indeed, struggling over there. He wasn’t exactly good with plants by any respectable standards, so he couldn’t tell. Not from a lack of trying, mind you, not even from a lack of knowing—he had a general idea of what to do to accommodate the rose in ways that didn’t make it want to crawl out of his garden entirely, roots and everything—but rather from a lack of being able to read the signs of what a plant needed in any confident manner. He did what he knew any climbing rose was generally in need of; water it once every few days, prune it when it grows too wildly, add support sticks where the plant gets too heavy, check for parasites every now and then. If the rose decided, at any given point, that any of these steps were not done correctly or enough, Dougie would never know the issue until the thing truly dropped dead. It still bloomed when it was supposed to, red, fancy flowers looking particularly lovely throughout the Summer and even sprouting late into Autumn, and it was still growing, too, so chances were he was doing something right with it, at the end of the day.
In any case, the climbing rose, at the very least, was growing—in his modest estimations—in decent circumstances, therefore its growth felt reasonable.
The persistence of dandelions was mildly fascinating, if not downright mental.
It’s not like they weren’t spreading all over that tiny plot of grass where the stone tiles abruptly stopped. Blotches of yellow lost between patches of daisies and clover, swirling in arbitrary patterns that looked oddly intentional. But every now and then, a seed would fall into the most peculiar of places, and find its way to the surface out of sheer spite, if nothing else. In this particular case, it was the faint cracks in the dusty grey tiles.
What was left of his cigarette was starting to die out, the burning tip flickering faintly in the growing darkness of the upcoming night. Dougie stubbed it out against the side of the doorstep and took another one from the pack.
Not even the uneven spaces between tiles, where sprouts of grass were already growing out, taking advantage of the considerably larger amount of space. No, it had to be the impossibly narrow cracks. Almost as if those dandelion seeds managed their way in there, said fuck it, I wanna thrive and just went with it. One right in the middle of the tiled area, one to the right side of his leg, close to the doorstep. One further away, closer to the grassy plot of clover, daisies and less adventurous dandelions.
And that was simply the deal with these mental little things. If it wasn’t cracked stone tiles in some poor bastard’s back garden, it was cracked asphalt near a power pole, or a pavement, or the middle of a badly built road. Stubborn wee fuckers, he thought. Would rather crawl out of pure concrete than not live at all.
“Huh,” he muttered out loud, letting the smoke out. Oddly deep observation, all things considered, and he wasn’t even on weed that evening.
Perhaps he should start thinking more like a dandelion. The thought made him laugh.
He looked at the flower closest to him, the one near the doorstep. He remembered how his tiny self used to look for the little buggers, once they turned into fuzzy seed heads. For making wishes, of course, what kid wouldn’t want to see their tiny hopes and dreams come to life through the mysterious magic of a fuzzy dandelion? And once the wish had been made, jewelry followed. Bracelets and necklaces made out of the hollow stems, and silly contests of who can craft the most intricate one without the thing falling apart under its own precarious weight. Perhaps that’s why they were so resilient, these plants. When the universal laws of childhood innocence deem you the wish-making flower of the field, you might as well start making sure you can spread faster than children can form their tiny hopes and dreams. But then again, each time a kid made a wish via fuzzy dandelion, dozens of the little buggers would get to fly towards peculiar places such as power poles and unevenly placed stone tiles, where they could grow out of sheer spite.
The evening was growing darker, the wind was getting chillier. The calm of the day was changing into the restless quiet of the night. The climbing rose was now looking like a shapeless blob spread across the fence. The dandelions were starting to blend into the grass and clovers. The daisies were now having a vaguely blue tint to them. Soon, they would blend with the rest of the scenery, and everything would turn into a dark plot of undistinguishable shapes. He had the option to turn the light on, mind you, which would lit up the garden within a certain radius, but he chose not to. He knew that, if he moved, he would simply go back inside. He knew he would. So he didn’t. He stood there for a while longer, somewhat numb to the evergrowing discomfort of sitting on the hard, cold doorstep for god even knows how long.
The scenery kept vanishing under the cover of the night, but he could still distinguish the shapes. He knew them all too well. The climbing rose, the dusty grey tiles. The worn off wooden table on his left, accompanied by two similar benches, one on each side. Sometimes he wished he could do more with the place, but was never sure what. It was what he needed it to be, in a way. Maybe a comfortable outdoor chair would be in order, though. He could start looking for one, he thought, fairly sure he wasn’t going to anytime soon. That was the drill with many such thoughts. They never got to grow into anything but that. His eyes wandered back to one of the dandelions. Perhaps he should make a wish.
The evening turned pitch black. Dougie lit up another cigarette.
(The writing piece ends here.)
