Last week, I gave you a picture prompt:
Often this gets the creative juices going and it certainly did for Geoff Le Pard. He sent in this simply stunning piece of writing, which I just had to share. Sit back, read and be inspired:
Two Become One
They stopped the chair to let him look along his arbour one last time, whispering in foggy ears for him to stir. He didn’t move and they turned, saddened at his incomprehension, but letting him have a private moment.
He smiled as they left. His eyes may be hollow but the westerly breeze showed him the arching boughs; the warming sun coloured in the dappling leaves and the mummeration of the insects stirred the blossom into as clear a picture as from any camera.
He looked back down the long years, back to his sap filled adolescence when the land was brown and the living hard. He had planted his seeds with the tenderness of a lover sowing his own legacy. He nurtured the thin twigs through cruel seasons – sharp winters and harsh unforgiving summers – youthful confidence overcoming the setbacks and slights to his dreams.
He marched with others at a siren’s call to far places where he learned of courage and friendship and inexplicable death. When he returned his hopes lay cracked and neglected, corrupted by indifference and constant dread.
For a time he despaired; as with his dream, he withered, gnarling and twisting away from the light, unhealthy disease seeking an insidious hold in those dank drear places.
They came, with money and paper and saws, offering a refuge from toil and a strong wall to hide his hopes. He prepared to go, it was all too much but some word, floating on a strong westerly caused him to pause. ‘Wait,’ she said.
He had been waiting, ever since those tender, sweet-sweat-softened nights for that word. Like water to a wilted palm, at her touch he unfurled and grew tall. The charlatans and destroyers went, churlish and angry.
Renewed, he bent again to his scheme but now he faced another, bending too, mimicking his swift fingers training, pruning, cropping, feeding, loving.
The twists and gnarls were too deep-set but rather than try and change, rather than risk a fracture, they worked with Nature and as they all grew they leant, slowly at first, but ever constant in their intent until their fingers interlaced and they became one, dancing with and twining into and around each other. Each a different root stock but each reliant on the other for support and shade and health.
Slower now, the work more delicate, intricate, shaping, shaving, giving form to their dreams until the glorious arbour of their love was complete.
Sightless, he looked at his lover, waiting at the end of their arbour, leaning on her stick, her eyes focused on the opposite bough. For the first time in the years since her death he stood and took his place opposite. Carefully he bent towards her and their lips met one last time, melting, melding, becoming one, becoming part of the glory.
When they returned to find the empty chair, their initial apprehension slipped to smiles as they looked on the arbour and recognised the truth, just out of sight, on the edge of the shadows, two become one.
Esther Chilton 
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