-Monet’s Meadow of Giverny
*This is a piece I wrote a couple years back. Seemed a fitting first contribution to the fiction section*
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She stares away, a hat covering her face and neck. With legs crossed seductively, invitingly, she lounges lazily in the summer heat. Daisies spread around her white legs, in her arms, in her hair, a bouquet of them held distractedly, forgetfully.
She waits in the field for a stranger to see her, to catch her and try and run off with her. Her legs hold a promise – if only they would uncross and draw from the face unseen, the one that stares away toward distant hills.
Enticed, captivated, wanderer pursues the golden beauty who sighs into the wind and lets her fragrance follow, heady – his mind is filled with carnal thoughts, dirty thoughts, but she doesn’t seem to mind – she beckons still.
Closer, wanderer slips while running recklessly, foolishly, impatiently most – over a patch of fresh dirt – devoid of the sunny flowers strewn like forgotten strands of hair. No time for wondering, less for thinking, she stands, unseeing, and walks away.
Madness now floats around him – a storm of gnats, buzzing. Need and desperation drive him, for her body, those legs. He aches in longing. He must have her. He shall!
Sprinting now through patches flowered, through patches dirt, heedless of fallen relics – shredded pants, torn tunics, helmets dented dinged and strewn about like cheap wine bottles – nothing more than obstacles to his prize so near.
The final leg she stops.
He keeps going, far too arrested to pull back now. His fertility screams release, his longing demands sustenance, and she is his for the taking.
She turns.
He stops.
He breathes.
It is his last.
“Silly boy.”
The gold-haired girl of the meadow lies in wait for another wanderer. Her valley fills again – always empty, always filling with each repast.
Oh how he got his desire and satisfied her completely, pushing up daisies in her field.
-D.Scott Phillips
