#writephoto: A wish

This little story is for Sue Vincent’s photo prompt. When I saw what she had come up with this week, the Cookie Monster and the Groke paled into insignificance. I have inverted the image I first had, and the result is much happier.

 

For days she had sat by the well and wept. Nothing could stop the outpouring of grief. Her child was dead and cold, the only one she had managed to keep beyond babyhood, and her husband had no words to console her.

“We will have another child,” he said, wrapping her in his arms and kissing her hair where strands of silver were creeping like brambles among the dark.

“There will be no more,” she said. “He was the last one. My blood is slowing and cooling and the source is dry.”

So she took her sorrow to the well, and she whispered all her grief to the one whose presence lingered in such places. She found a stone, smooth and round as a fairy child’s head, a speedwell flower bright as her own child’s eyes had been, and the shell of a blackbird chick that chirruped now beneath the hedge. She dropped them into the well with her tears and she waited.

On the third day, when the first sun struck the still water, he came to her, leaping like a silver salmon from the birthwater of the well and into her waiting arms.