By Abbie Franklin
This flash fiction was chosen as one of the top three stories in the Iridescent Words Spring Challenge. Enjoy!
Ice crystals melt into the ground and spring up as forget-me-nots. Trees breathe out fresh leaves and the hills explode with plumage. Bleary eyes emerge from hovels, becoming soft furred animals who warm themselves in open meadows. Another winter passed.
Resting on the roll of the hill above it all is a bucket. It sits collecting water, generating a faint tinny whistle, and with each opening of the sky, the bucket fills a little more. Now it must be noted that this bucket had not always been a bucket. Indeed, it used to be something quite different. Indeed, entirely different for this bucket used to be a woman. An unhappy woman at that. She could not seem to see the world around her, too trapped in her own head. How she cried. She would cry and cry and nobody, not even herself, could fathom the reason. She would walk all around the meadows and glens, not seeing the pink bloom of summer, the orange crunch of autumn, the white crystals of winter, or the green sprigs of spring. One day when stood atop the roll of a hill she cried out, pleading that she could not continue in this way. She needed a change. A bruised sky brewed thunderclouds and the world around her was fraught with shadows.
The empty bucket soaked up the heat of summer. It lay witness to the fruits of summertime. The bucket found it liked to watch the birds peck at berries strewn across the grass. How the sun would glint off the lake like a great jewel in the water. In autumn the bucket would clang as winds blowed and swirled kicking up a parade of red and yellow leaves. It found comfort in watching the animals make their beds for winter. The longer nights allowed the bucket to better know the badgers and owls, besides the night was never truly dark as the hillside was illuminated by a litter of stars. It helped too that buckets don’t feel the cold. The bucket sat all through the winter, the water collected inside at times freezing over. It observed the creeping frost that inched across the grass, the intricate formation of twigs so often hidden under foliage, looking close at the pattern of each falling snowflake. You wouldn’t know it to look at it but the bucket was quite content.
As the seasons changed the bucket filled, drop at a time. When spring arrived with April showers how the bucket felt alive. Dew drops coat the scene in honey, there is a sweetness in the air as bees dust each opening flower with sticky pollen. Skylarks cut through the clouds to reveal a brilliant blue sky. Wind whispers in the rushes, frogs splash leaping from lily pad to lily pad, deep in the earth a mole scratches for sunlight. Turgid with water, the bucket could almost feel itself smile.
The bucket had been sat long enough for clumps of moss to nestle around it but not long enough for the water inside to overspill, but one day, as happens in spring, rain began to fall. The water rose an imperceptible amount. There was nothing to mark the day as extraordinary. Squirrels and birds laboured in their trees, bees skipped from honeysuckle to hyacinth, and a cool breeze ran through it all. The bucket was confident it could absorb every detail of the scene. Explain the curvature of every unfurling leaf and anticipate where budding fruit would fall come summer. The rain made the moss spongy, sprinkling the scene with a freshness found only in spring. It was the bucket’s idea of a perfect day. Odd how change tends to occur long before it is perceptible. It is not altogether clear what drop of rain caused the water to overflow, perhaps it was the first one to ever fall, or the one that fell after the bucket had seen a red admiral for the first time, or a drop from the shower of an otherwise unnoteworthy day, but the water spilled out all the same. And the bucket was a bucket no more.
She breathed in the world around her, feeling it fill her heart. Alive again.
Abbie Franklin is an undergraduate student at Glasgow University who likes watering her plants and makes a mean margarita.
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