Weekly Writing – September 16 2023

The most gorgeous garden in the city, in the tiny backyard of a middling sorcerer. The fence, rotten with rain and neglect, bloats like a wooden belly, trying to contain it. The hum of the bees that make pilgrimage to it in their hundreds can be heard from three streets away.
I’m no botanist, but even I can see that the flowers pushing through the fence and teetering on two-storey lattices above it are different from those in the rest of the city. I’ve seen the second- and third- and so-on-most gorgeous gardens in it, mostly uninvited, and none of them have the scarlet trumpet flowers bursting like slit veins from their vines, or the tiny gold-button blossoms that look almost like they might be made of the real thing.
Magic. It has to be. Which means I’m doing something monumentally stupid by leaning over the fence, trying to snip off the stray, winding end of a vine. But sorcerers and proud manse-owners alike would pay my weight in silver for the secrets of this garden, and I don’t realize just how stupid an idea it was, anyways, until that vine draws back from my shears like a slapped snake.
Until it darts forward, a green blur bleeding red petals, to lash around my wrist. My hand springs open in that sudden, crushing noose, dropping the shears into a rustle of undergrowth.
I try to pull back. But I was leaning just as far as I could over the fence, trying to cut the lushest vine I could reach, and it pulls back harder. I tumble after the shears, and, as thorns close black, fang-like around my face, as the rustle becomes a hum that might not ever have been bees after all, I know I have as little chance of finding those shears as anyone else will have of ever finding me.