garden.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl. She lived with her grandmother, who used to be a Rockette, deep in the canyon in a little cottage with a red adobe roof and stained glass windows. The girl had dark curly hair and there was life in every step she took. The girl was very quiet. She preferred to spend her time alone and she made her own clothes. But what the girl loved to do the most was work in her flower garden. She had a very special way with flowers. Her grandmother had always told her that she had found the girl, as a baby, sleeping underneath the shade of a giant sunflower. As the girl grew up, she eventually came to know that this wasn't true, but she never asked her grandmother about her parents or what had really happened to them or how she had really come to live with her in the little cottage with the red adobe roof and the stained glass windows, surrounded by the beautiful gardens that the girl made grow like magic, the flowers blooming around her like Van Gogh paintings come to life. 
One day, the girl went to town to go grocery shopping for her grandmother. She stood outside in the open-air market, looking at glistening oranges and shining apples and trying not to look at the feathery corpses of dead chickens (which made her sad) when she saw him. He had just come out of the florist shop across the street and was heading over to her, a bouqet of peonies in hand. It turned out that this boy had seen her here before on the Sundays when she came to buy fruit for her grandmother to make into pies. He liked the pretty dresses that she'd sewn for herself and the way her thin body reminded him of a stem and her face, a bloom. He told her he reminded her of one of the peonies that he held in his hand, all wrapped in green paper. She thought he looked like a young Sinatra with his dark, crinkly eyes but in his leather jacket, he even looked a little bit like James Dean. In the end the girl never bought any oranges or apples or any other kind of fruit that day. She left with the boy on the motorcycle and they rode through the canyons until the sun set on the gardens.
This went on for every day the rest of the summer, until the boy had to go home, thousands of miles away, back to New York. The girl was heartbroken and she stayed heartbroken for the rest of the year and the flowers didn't bloom so beautifully and the garden looked a little bit more like just a garden. But the boy came back the next summer and he took her places on his motorcycle, through the canyons and to the ocean and even into the desert, where they camped out and stayed up until sunrise, watching it bleed over the rough landscape while covering each other in kisses and listening to Dylan on casettes. They ate the peanut butter and banana sandwiches they'd packed for the trip, and back at the little cottage with the red adobe roof and the stained glass windows, the garden looked even more like just a garden.
Eventually summer came to an end, but this time the boy did not go back to the city by himself. They went to a little pink stucco Mexican restaurant where all of the food was spicy and there were sombreros hung on the walls. Sitting at a table for two underneath a a giant cat with a clock in its belly and eyes that ticked back and forth, back and forth, they decided to get married. The ceremony was small, so small that they were the only ones there, except for one of the waiters from the Mexican restaurant (who served as a witness). They were married by a Bob Marley personator, who really didnt even really look like Bob Marley at all. But it didn't matter.
The next day, the girl packed her things and told her ex-Rockette grandmother, who missed the bright lights of the city, that she would write her a letter every week, and she said goodbye to the little cottage with the red adobe roof and stained glass windows. And she left with the boy, leaving everything behind. Even the garden, which had begun to be overtaken with weeds.
The girl is older now. To be honest, she is not so beautiful anymore. Her body is no longer like a flower stem. She's had several children now, and she's gained some weight. Her face is no longer like the bloom of a peony or lily. It is lined with worry and her eyes sit in it like two stones. Her husband works long hours and she knows she has become this way from the stress of running after several children, trying to keep the house clean, have dinner on the table. But it is not only this. The city has done this to her as well, long years spent in the city. Cold and hard and loud. The lights shining through her windows at all hours give her headaches that make her want to hit her children whenever they do anything wrong. She is so tired all the time, but tonight she rises up from her bed and sleepwalks into her kitchen. It has been a decade or two now since she has been in the canyons or the desert or by the ocean, but she can see it all clearly now, everything flooding in front of her blank eyes like stones. But only one image settles to rest. The cottage with the red adobe roof and stained glass windows, and her gardens. Gardens before the boy with the crinkly eyes took her away on his motorcycle and made her forget herself. She falls to her knees and they don't strike ceramic tile but soft soil, which she immediately begins to knead beneath her hands. She thinks back to who she was before the city, even before the desert washed with waking sunlight like blood, and the flowers begin to grow. Little green shoots at first, sprouting from the soil, but light magic rising up into beautiful blooms, purple, yellow, pink, red, the leaves curling and the stems intertwining. She is a girl again. But only in her mind.
In the morning her children find her on the clean  kitchen floor. She is smeared with dirt but she is smiling. Her breathing is steady and slow.