The story below is so fresh the keyboard is still rattling and is my entry for this years Writing on the Wall contest (link over on the right). Some others up on there from friends of mine.
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They walked deep into the orchard through the high grass, arms round
each other. Their soft conversation accompanied by the constant buzzing
of bees and the chattering of birds chasing each other through the
branches laden with this years crop. They stopped under a tree and
laughed as he plucked the ripest, reddest apple and offered her a bite
before taking one himself. Now it lay a few feet away, browning in the
late afternoon sun, discarded as they had laid down to satisfy another
more urgent appetite.
He lay there sated, watching the branches waving in the warm breeze,
swallows flashing across the gaps of blue sky. Breathing in the fecund
smells of summer and feeling the grasses blow across his chest as her
hair had done before. She slept wrapped against him her breath warm
against his shoulder and his hand protectively on her head.
Sighing, he prised a grass stem from the corner of his mouth with his
tongue and spat it gently away only for several more to take its place.
He tried to spit them away as well, with rather more force this time but
no effect. Moving slowly so as not disturb his lover he made to raise
his free arm and pull the grass from his mouth but his arm had become
entangled, the harder he pulled the tighter it gripped. He tried to
wrench free, a warning shout to his lover at once choked off, the grass
filling his mouth the instant his lips parted.
As his muscles tightened with the effort he felt her wake and start at
the realisation she also could not move. Her face was clasped into his
chest by the grass that was woven about his hand and tightly into her
hair. The more she struggled the tighter its grip. He pulled now with
all his strength aware that she was fighting for breath. Both their
hearts racing as she was suffocating
against his shoulder. He couldn't help, he was restrained as tightly as
if bound with rope, could not even talk for the grass filling his mouth.
Now it was forcing its way into his nose. He could neither breath nor
move. His senses were now just grass. The smell and taste, the rushing
sound of it forcing its way into his ears, the all encompassing embrace
of it pulling his body into the ground He saw only blackness as it
covered his eyes. He felt as much as heard his lovers last scream die in
her throat as her struggle ended. He lost his last grip on life praying
she had not believed him responsible.
Days later the farmer drove his tractor into the orchard carefully
mowing around his trees before this year's crop was harvested. He left
the latest, slightly higher, hump near the centre for later and smiled
at the thought that next year's crop would be equally as good.
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