The Gardener

I watch her from my window. Across the street she brushes her hair at a vanity. My father’s garden is forever at odds with the one under the lattice climbing up to her room. Their grass is always greener, he says to me. Our fathers exchange subtle insults in the form of advice to keep and prune healthy vegetation, always a step short of escalating to a fistful confrontation. This has not stopped me from visiting her via said lattice. I pick a rose and present it to her along with eyes deep and longing to meet her own of similar taste. She holds on to the stem too tight, blood trickles from the soft wound. As she leaves to retrieve a bandage, I take refuge at the vanity I’ve peered at from behind my own blinds and brush my hair with the same bristles that touch her silky head. I am more at home here than there. Her father comes in unannounced and knocks me into the mirror, disfiguring my image, cracking it and sprinkling a little of my blood in between. He argues. I plea. He forces me to meet his garden head first, and before the silencing thud are heard screams from the one I love. I watch her from my window, watch and nothing more. She cries at nights and shuts her blinds from my stare and the withering garden below her broken lattice. Underneath my father’s garden is the body of the lesser man, an outcome of the finished fight between two gardeners. A prize for my own father, and for me a loss of a life that could have been.