Jack
killed his wife Frannie.
After
several years of suffering from a slow-growing cancer, Frannie became bedridden.
With so many painkillers in her, she seldom reached a full awareness of
her surroundings. A day came when Jack could stand her suffering no longer.
Gently, he covered her face with a pillow until her spirit departed the
pain-racked body.
Jack
had the body cremated.
Jack
was an industrious gardener. He
believed in “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”
When the mortician gave him Frannie's ashes, Jack poured them in a small
tub and mixed in topsoil. Then he
dug a narrow bed along the picket fence in front of his modest brick home and
scooped that soil out into a wheelbarrow.
Carefully,
he layered the mixture containing Frannie's ashes in the bed.
Just as carefully, he replaced the soil from the wheelbarrow and filled
the bed with a colorful assortment of flowers already a few inches high.
Lastly, he planted Frannie's favorite plant, flowering cabbage.
Weeks
passed. The plants grew.
One
day after supper, Jack went out to the flowerbed and began to walk up and down,
occasionally bending over and moving aside the leaves surrounding the thriving
plants. As he came to the flowering
cabbage that occupied the very end of the bed near the front gate, he noticed
how the center of the plant looked different from the ones he had seen before.
It resembled a smooth bowling ball and was about the same size.
He couldn't resist reaching out his hand to touch it.
As
his fingers came in contact with the cool shape, he heard what sounded like a
moan. He knelt down and moved the
lower leaves aside, looking for whatever was in the bed.
"Whatever
are you doing, honey," a voice asked him.
It
sounded exactly like his dead wife, but it couldn't be,
he thought.
He
jerked up straight, still on his knees, and looked around.
"I'm
right here," the voice said, a touch louder.
He
jerked his head around to look up at the top of the fence. Perhaps someone was trying to get his attention from there.
"You're
as dense as ever," the voice said. "What
am I doing out here?" Then a
scream ripped the air around him and his head wobbled into a bowed position.
The
smooth ball like center of the flowering cabbage had eyes that were looking at
him and they were the same color as his dead wife's.
A large red mouth was opened wide.
"Jack,
Jack, what have you done to me?"
"Frannie?"
He bent closer. "Frannie, is
that… can that be you?"
"Of
course it's me, you dumbbell. Who
do you think it is? Get me out of
this dirt!"
Copyright ©2006, Lucille Perkins Robinson All Rights Reserved