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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

Write a short story about someone tending to their garden.

Posted in General on Jun 16, 2020

Submissions are closed!

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✍️ 83 stories

“The Memory Garden” by Ariel Kalati

Submitted on 03/04/2020

          In sixteen years, she will leave the garden. She will tell the buyers of the house how to tend each patch and plant, carefully, and they’ll do it for a while and then the garden will fall apart, because they have other concerns. The soil remembers, though. The soil always remembers.          In eleven years, her firstborn child will pick unripe blueberries in mid-spring, try to taste them and recoil from the sour. She will ...

70 comments 70 WINNER 🏆
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“Ljúfur and the Singer” by Zilla Babbitt

Submitted on 02/29/2020

Ljúfur was a fierce Icelandic woman with big bones who took no giggling from anyone. She lived in New York in a large flimsy apartment building with a half-thousand other degenerate human beings. She hated all of them and would tell the plant on the windowsill that they were all stupid and the people in Iceland were a hundred times better.Ljúfur talked to plants. She had no family, no friends, no one ...

18 comments 18
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“The Butler” by Anthony Neal

Submitted on 03/05/2020

Cast your eye over the Ragged Sea, where the blinding light of the sun could peel the colour from your eyes and cook your brains from the inside out (but give you a wonderous tan if you know what you’re doing!).    Don’t look at that desolate land, Ilios. Don’t give that place more than a second glance, the once powerful seat of the powerful magisters, who ruled righteously and piously, coldly content in placing the blood of the few above the safety of the many.    No – don’t look at I...

3 comments 3
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“ A PARTNERSHIP WITHIN THE GARDEN” by Shirley Medhurst

Submitted on 03/05/2020

A modest little house stands alone, surrounded by a disorderly sea of green. Not that its garden is completely unkempt, but it is hardly a neatly regimented English garden, nor is it a beautifully manicured Mediterranean oasis. It is chaotic, colourful and cheerful.   Behind the house, small square paving stones lead upwards past a pergola which leans over t...

14 comments 14
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“The Beauty In The Little Things” by Artemisia Pearl

Submitted on 03/06/2020

Janessa hated the outdoors. She hated the smells, the sounds, and the sights. But she never had to worry about working outside in the garden, because they had a landscaper. She never had to do any work. But that was before her parents died. Janessa was to be thrown into a foster home like she wasn’t important. She had all of her things packed, and she was ready to move into her new home. Her caseworker, Amelia, brought her to the door of a quaint little cott...

6 comments 6
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“A Girl and Her Garden” by Maarit Mattson

Submitted on 03/06/2020

I sit upon a stray pot, tarnished and coated in a fine layer of dust. “Give me a flower Momma,” I say, my voice sweet and innocent, a toddler’s. In response, she bends over the blushing blue hydrangeas and plucks a bloom from its stem. As she turns to me her dark chestnut hair swings over her shoulder, she pushes it away.

2 comments 2
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“The Money Tree” by Mishka Stennett

Submitted on 02/28/2020

This could never be what I have heard about, I told myself, staring at it in disbelief...and yet here it was in my garden…a real money tree. I was tending to my garden when I spied it. Weeks of intermittent rain had stopped me from doing my usual weeding and shrub pruning. Today was the first truly sunny day and I had been excited to see what the rains had brought, apart from weeds of course.It was adjacent to the fence of my property; short and slim ...

6 comments 6
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“Grandma's Garden” by Joshua Insole

Submitted on 03/06/2020

1Grandma was always tending to her garden. Eleanor watched her as she went about her duties, a smile stretched across her kind and wrinkled face, a pretty little melody being softly hummed (and occasionally whistled), a wide-brim straw hat pushed snugly on her head. The hat always made Eleanor laugh, due to the ridiculous way in which the brim flopped all over the place. Knowing this, Grandma moved her head as often as possible, and in as exaggerated movements as possible, to caus...

0 comments 0
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“Bed of Roses” by Jeremy Rozen

Submitted on 03/03/2020

Eleanor tended to her roses every chance that she had. She admired them proudly, delighted in their luscious, full blooms and intoxicating, sweet scent. Elinor bred Hybrid Tea roses, they grew in a broad spectrum of both colour and fragrances. She was good at it too, her flowers had won first prize at the local fair, the  Double Delight and Folklore blooms stole the show two years in a row. The roses were her babies, having never born children of her own, but, since he...

8 comments 8
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“The Galician Garden” by Kathleen March

Submitted on 03/04/2020

She’d brought the seeds back with her from Galicia. Grelos, broccoli raab, rapini. She had been a bit afraid, thinking it was illegal to bring them into the US, but they had been packaged in a box with a label, and didn't look like they could possibly harbor any sort of fatal disease. She had chanced upon the package in O Toural, in a square with an old fountain. She’d gone into a shop that had been there for years, selling exac...

0 comments 0
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“Mother” by Megan Derouin

Submitted on 03/06/2020

Mother           Dawn was gradual, first it was just a slight lighting of the horizon line and then the sun peaked its head up from its long sleep and she awoke. The birds cried out as rays of pure light danced across the forgotten place she had come to garden. The ground was barren, scorched by children who knew no better. She was patient, she was kind, and a child could not turn her away from her task. She sang back to the birds as a slight bree...

1 comment 1
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“No Place Like Gnome ” by Bree Kokiri

Submitted on 03/06/2020

Lucy Peterson awoke on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, eager to start the day. Following her husband’s passing, she had spent the last two weeks at her daughter’s house in the city, and had finally convinced her children she was well enough to be on her own again. Visiting was always pleasant, but when you stay there too long, the sounds of the city start to bog down a country heart. Not to mention the screams from her grandchildren, playful or otherwise, were enough to make your head spin. She was eager to get back to her home to the th...

1 comment 1
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“Life Lesson” by Aisha Hashmi

Submitted on 03/02/2020

The roses were beautiful, and the scented air around Aisha was heady and seductive.  As Aisha walked around her garden, the beauty of all the flowers she had planted took her breath away. Today she was teaching a group of kindergartners how to plant a flower seed. A teacher had approached her last week about the beauty of her garden, and asked her if she could plan a field trip for her class. Aisha, touched by interest in her garden, readily agreed. The kids were about to be here, and Aisha was making sure th...

2 comments 2
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“In the Garden” by John k Adams

Submitted on 03/06/2020

 Penny munched her filet o’ fish sandwich and scanned her shady backyard. Birds chirped in the stillness of the early evening. A dog barked a few yards over. The new garden ran around the perimeter of the yard. Flowers grew in profusion.Two ancient citrus trees, a lemon and an orange dominated the back yard. They grew there long before Penny arrived on the scene. Glorious Hummingbirds nested in them and would dart about all summer.The sun had already passed behind the big tree in front. Hours of light r...

3 comments 3
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“Gardening leave” by Martin Leigh

Submitted on 03/02/2020

My knees are killing me. Of all the pastimes to take up when you are in your 60’s, gardening has to be the most ridiculous. I’ve got all the equipment; gloves that say ‘sod off’ to anything up to the ferocity of a Blackthorn bush, a little seat that makes it easier on the knees but then piles on the agony when you get up, metal hand tools that buckle and snap with the slightest sniff of leverage, wellies, a sturdy wheelbarrow and of course a decade of old clothes not fit for public consumption.I know one good reason they...

5 comments 5
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Contest #31

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This week's theme: The Ordinary

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Ended on 23:59 - Mar 06, 2020 EST

Won by Ariel Kalati 🏆

Title: The Memory Garden

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