The Gnome by Lorette C. Luzajic
Mother, a garden gnome, hunkered under a canopy of kale and potentilla, wresting tangled roots with a trowel. Her face is ruddy and hard; it won’t soften until afternoon, when she fills her water bottle with pink wine from the box in the fridge.
I lurk at the edge of the raspberry row, hoping she’ll look up and remember that I need a ride to the library, where I’ll be reading a story for a presentation with the young writers’ circle. Mother loves her garden, and hates doing anything that takes her away from it. I feel sick about reminding her, or asking for what she already promised. “I suppose you’re standing there like a dumbbell because you expect me to make your lunch,” she says finally. “Make yourself a tomato sandwich, for crying out loud.”
I find my voice. “I’m supposed to present today at Youth Words!” I exclaim. “Oh, that stupid thing,” Mother mutters. “Good grief, I always have to cart you around.” Now she looms over me. “Forget it. You’ll have to wait until your father gets home.”
Dad doesn’t finish at the factory until supper time. He works overtime each shift and usually weekends, too. I retreat inside after picking a few ripe tomatoes. I love the way they smell grassy and sweet when they’re warm from the sunshine. I make two perfect tomato sandwiches- a pat of melting butter on both sides, layers of skinny slices stacked and salted, dusted with black pepper. I take them back into the garden, consoling myself that it will be a little picnic, just the two of us. But Mother takes her plate and starts off toward the pond, waves me away. She would rather talk to the geese.
I hear the car in the driveway just as the sun is tucking into the pond and the frogs are starting to croak. I press my face to the screen and look out for him. Mother’s tumbler is wobbling as she weaves toward him. He dutifully kisses her, then asks how my reading went, pride shining on his face as if it was on his mind all afternoon.
“Oh, for crying out loud, we never made it,” Mother tells him. “She must have lost track of time. I called into the orchard but I can’t be expected to chase that girl all over creation.”
When Dad comes in, he gives me a giant bear hug, all his knowing inside the quick secret squeeze of my shoulder. Mother is buzzing behind him about how she is taken for granted. “Honestly, Norbert, you could have thought to pick up dinner on the way home.”
Lorette C. Luzajic writes, edits, publishes, and teaches small fictions, from Toronto, Canada. Her work has (or will) appeared in Axon, Ghost Parachute, Trampset, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres, Unbroken, JMWW, Cleaver, New Flash Fiction Review, Litro, The Dillydoun Review, and more. She has been nominated for Best American Food Writing, twice for Best Small Fictions, thrice for Best Microfiction, and four times each for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Lorette is also an international visual artist working with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far.
Flower Garden by Gustav Klimt
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Loved The Gnome! 🙂