Spoonflowers

LISP

I love a good image. I especially love love love lit mags that love good images.

PromptPress, I discovered through a willy nilly online search. Impressive. This unique site offered and continues to offer an online series “Image + Word”, a collaboration of artists and writers.

“Spoonflowers” found its roots in “Anniversary”, a flash fiction written 7/23/2019 as my response to a PromptPress image inspired by the work of Maggie Jaszkzac.

A rocking chair. A tattered coverlet. Silver spoons aplenty stuffed in a weird spot. (Image here).

A list of selected contributors to the work is available to read here.

I didn’t make the cut, but I had a graft. I put the piece aside, researched fine cutlery (Meadow Rose Watson Wallace Sterling Silver Flatware) and rewrote “Anniversary” as “89 Pieces”, revised again (probably more than once) and finally, a story with a folktale vibe emerged.

“Spoonflowers” appeared online at LISP (2/24/2021) here. Thank you, editors.

It intrigues me to compare the drafts that came before any final work. After reading “Spoonflowers”, check out the original PromptPress declined submission “Anniversary”.

Definitely check out PromptPress.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe out there.

Public Domain. William James Webbe. “A Thief of a Magpie” 1856.

Spoonflowers

The girl pulled an old spoon from the garden. Tarnished and bent with a hole in the bowl. Her grandfather with his old world ways quickly blessed the odd spoon and reburied with one new, an offering to hungry spirits who placed the spoon in his granddaughter’s path, a plea for sustenance in the cold afterlife. When he died the winter of the hard freeze, the granddaughter slipped two soup spoons inside a sleeve of his funeral suit, in case he needed a spare.

She did the same years later with the death of her young husband and every anniversary of his passing, buried a spoon from the wedding silver with the planting of the spring bulbs. Tiger lilies, tulips, double bloomer daffodils, a silver spoon for ghosts in need. The demitasse marked her first seven years a widow, the tea spoons the next sixteen and the elegant long-stemmed iced tea spoons eight widowed years more. The spoons dwindled to a single sugar and a smattering of serving, enough for six years future. Knives and forks spooned unused inside the cedar storage box. Dinner set duets. Pastry forks, butter knives. Fish knives. A single lemon fork with tiny tines. The fancy carving set mongrammed S. Sterling plenty to satiate starving souls the next quarter century. The widow tied a note to the cake server, her wishes should she die spoonless. “One can’t do without the other,” read her daughter to her daughter the first day of them without her, “so bury both the knives and forks together, in pairs like man and wife; but hear me, when my final day comes, the berry spoon and the jelly spoon wrapped and hidden where the sweet iris bloom will slide nicely inside the sleeves of my best dress.”

Anniversary

My mother doesn’t see me. Not really. She looks my way often enough, yet past me at the same time, at some point over my head where a case might be made by anyone watching to explain away her distance. “It’s her way, ever since she lost Fred. She can’t bear the thought of seeing him in your eyes.”

The garden, she sees. Takes in, drinks in. Wraps herself like a shawl. She sits by the window overlooking the wisteria and counts - one, two, three and on to twenty-five, stops and begins again. Listening from the doorway, I look over her head and out the window into the garden, where I bury a spoon, once a year.

The good spoons. Her wedding silver. A gift from Fred. Her husband. My father.

Twenty-five years gone and counting.