The Widow’s Garden
By Ava DeVries
She buried him underneath the flower beds, when the ground was hard and everything lay cold and dormant. And in the spring, when the earth turned soft, the flowers grew into the shape of a man, with leafy fingers and leafy hair and a leafy cock. All through that fruitful summer, the widow and the flower-husband lived happily again—she only had to water him twice a week and prune him when he grew too wild. But as leaves shriveled and the air turned crisp, the garden began to wilt, and he was gone all over again. The widow could only mourn, each lonely winter, and wait for her perennial husband to return.
Ava DeVries (she/her) holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University, where she’s also starting the MA program this fall. Her fiction has appeared in Crow & Cross Keys and Issue II of BAM Quarterly. Ava is also the Lead Fiction Editor at Beneath the Garden and a Submissions Reader for Fusion Fragment. She can be found @ava_devries on Instagram and @AvaDeVries04 on Twitter/X.