MAYnia Day 3: "Cucumber Wine"

This is part of the #MAYnia challenge run by the Hive account@freewritehouse. Today I have written 1671 words. The first 200 or so were written using the following prompt

Today's Maynia prompt: Cucumber Wine
@freewritehouse/maynia-day-three

The Daily Freewrite prompt: WEEKEND freewrite single prompt options
@mariannewest/weekend-freewrite-5-2-2020-single-prompt-option

…
alt
_{_{If you have nothing better to do you can read my previous “chapters”: _{One, Two}}}
…

The smell in the shed at the bottom of Mindy Morris' garden wasn't quite what she had been hoping for. It didn't quite smell wrong enough for her to pour the bubbling liquid away. But it didn't smell quite right, either.

When she told Howard what she was planning to do, he told her she was an idiot for trying to make cucumber wine.

"You are an idiot," he said pulling her close to him and kissing her lightly on the top of her head. "But you are my idiot, and I love you."

"I am not sure I understand why you think I am an idiot!" Mindy laughed. "We have too many cucumbers, you won't eat the pickled cucumbers, you won't touch the spicy cucumber jam, and you said the cucumber bread was disgusting."

"I don't know why you grew so many bloody cucumbers, darling. You know I hate them."

"Well," Mindy had said pulling away from Howard and putting her hands on her hips. "You like wine."

"Yes, dear," Howard sighed. "I like Sauvignon Blanc, from New Zealand. I doubt very much I will be a huge fan of Cucumber Wine, from your shed."

“Don’t knock it, darling. Not until you’ve tried it.

At least it was fermenting. With any luck, it would taste okay. Eventually.

She would try not to grow so many cucumbers next year. Every year she learned new things about her vegetable patch at the end of her garden, what grew well, what grew not so well.

Mindy had always thought of herself as someone who was in touch with the world around her. She could sense things that others could not. She always thought that that ability would translate well into nurturing living things. But vegetables were apparently harder to read than people. Vegetables - like people - did have auras, of course. They were just a lot quieter. People’s auras were loud, vibrant. All the more so in quiet people.

Timid people’s auras were always so shouty.

Growing vegetables, although very quiet, had faint flickering auras, and they were harder to read. Sometimes when a vegetable was unhappy, it might be because the soil wasn’t right, or not enough water or too much. Or because one of its neighbours was sick. Or even something was happening in the garden next door.

It took Mindy a while to realise how connected the vegetable world was. In that way, vegetables were far more advanced than humans. Or perhaps it was a survival technique, humans had developed the ability to disconnect in order to thrive even when others they were close to did not.

Cucumbers, apparently, were less connected than other vegetables. Or perhaps they just liked Mindy more than the other vegetables. Whatever the reason, Mindy had no problems growing them.

There was a sudden gust of wind and something flew against the shed window. It was raining, not heavily but enough for Mindy not want to spend anymore time weeding. She gave the bucket of cucumber wine a little tap for luck and then left the shed.

The garden was long and thin, stretching down to the railway line at the bottom, where she was, all the way up to the house. Mindy stopped and watched a train rattle past. Sometimes children waved from the windows and Mindy liked to wave back.

She remembered a trip to London she had made with Jenny when they were twelve. Mindy’s brother Andy was supposed to be taking them to the Science Museum for the day. He’d taken them there, as he had promised their mother, but then left the two girls to it - he’d given them each five pounds spending money and told them not to tell mother. He came back later smelling of cigarettes and beer. Mindy and Jenny had spent the whole train journey to London, and the return journey too, staring out of the window waving at anyone they saw in their gardens. They would have passed this garden. Mindy wondered if the previous owner of the house had been in the garden when they passed.

There were no children waving at the train window today, and when the last carriage had passed Mindy began to trudge back up the gentle slope towards the house. She wondered when she had last thought about Jenny, before yesterday. Probably last month. It was - would have been - her birthday on the first of April. “I might be an April Fool baby, but I’m no fool,” Jenny would always say.

She would have been fifty this year. Same as Mindy.

She waved at Howard who was standing at the door to the house. He waved back and then turned to go back inside. Hopefully, to put the kettle on. She wondered how long he had been standing there.

“I’m worried about you,” he’d said, as she had pulled her wellington boots on. “Let me come with you.”

“Stop fussing. I’m not going to a war zone, just down the shed.”

“But-”

“But nothing! I’ve told you, I’m fine. Yesterday, was just a blip. The doctor gave me the all clear, remember.”

That was true. But then Dr Brown was a pretty lazy GP. It was well known in the village he would prescribe anything you wanted just to get you out the door in the shortest possible time. After Mindy’s little incident yesterday, he had taken her blood pressure, asked her a few questions and then said, “Well, you seem healthy enough.”. And that had been that.

Mindy couldn’t remember the last time she’d fainted like that.

No, she thought. That was a lie. You can lie to the doctor. You can even lie to Howard. But really, don’t even try to lie to yourself.

The last time she had fainted like that she had been twenty three. It was the night Jenny was killed.

That night, she had been at home watching television with her parents. Some lame sitcom… she could see the face of the actor who was in it but she couldn’t remember his name, or what the sitcom was called. She remembered feeling faint, she remembered a feeling as if she was being sucked from her body. An out of body experience, one of her healer friends called it later. But, unlike many other peoples experience, Mindy didn’t find herself looking at herself from above. She wasn’t in her living room any more. She found herself hovering above a large man naked man who appeared to be floating in a sea of blood. And on the shore she saw Jenny, her hand over her mouth looking at the man. And behind Jenny was a figure made of shadows. He had something in his hand that glinted in the light. By the time Mindy had realised it was a knife Jenny had turned and seen it too. She had screamed and Mindy joined in.

She was still screaming when she came out of the vision - or whatever it was. She was back in the living room of her house, lying on the floor. Her father was cradling her in her arms, her mother on the telephone - calling an ambulance, Mindy later discovered.

She was taken into hospital for tests. They had kept her in overnight. Just in case.

The next morning her mother and father came to pick her up, both pale and worried looking.

“Somethings happened to Jenny,” Mindy said. Her parents had looked at each other, before nodding.

Yesterday had been different. Not the same at all. Okay, she thought, being honest with myself there were similarities. There had been the same feeling of being pulled from her body. But she hadn’t really passed out. Not really. She had a vision of a young girl Mindy didn’t recognise in a dark place. The girl seemed to be screaming, but - and this bit was weird - Mindy could tell the girl was enjoying herself. She was scared, but in a good way. As if she were on a rollercoaster. And then Mindy saw the shadow thing appear. Mindy saw the glint of something in its hand and she wanted to warn the girl, she wanted to wrap her arms around her, pull her away from the thing that stalked her.

And then Mindy hit the floor. And she was back in her kitchen. A worried Howard looking down on her.

“I’m alright,” Mindy muttered under her breath as she walked back up to the house. “It’s not the same as before.”

Mindy waved again as Howard reappeared at the door, a cup of tea in his hand.

“Humpbuckle-on-Sea is in the news,” he said, a few minutes later as Mindy sat on the doorstep pulling off her boots. Howard followed the Humpbuckle-on-Sea local newspaper on Twitter. He liked to keep her up-to-date on what was happening in her old town. Usually, it involved minor things: an outraged local annoyed at the tourist litter left after a bank holiday weekend, or someone complaining about potholes in the High Street.

“Oh yes?”

“There was some kind of incident on the pier.”

“Oh. What sort of incident.”

“A young girl was scraped by some kind of faulty mechanism on the Ghost Train ride, apparently. She’s got quite a nasty scratch.”

Mindy let the boot she was holding fall to the floor. She felt faint again.

“Are you alright?” Howard was at her side.

“I’m fine,” Mindy said. “What does the girl look like?”

“Oh, she’s young. No one you’d know. She’s not a local. A girl on holiday with her family, I think.”

“Is there a picture?” Mindy felt her heart thump in her chest.

She took the phone from Howard with shaking hands, already sure of what she would see.

Below the headline “Girl Injured on Pier Ride” was the picture of three people: an angry looking woman, a boy and a younger girl. The girl had a red mark running down her face.

It was the same girl Mindy had seen in her vision the day before.