In a Perfect World

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Jiselle put the diary back on the couch where she found it and went outside with the watering can. It was already eighty-five degrees, but a morning breeze was blowing out of the west, sifting fragrantly through the ravine. She breathed it in, knelt down, and peered beneath the stones that separated the garden from the lawn.

She had been married, and a stepmother, for a month.

In a bit of shade there, a tangled circle of violets was hidden—pale blue and purple. Small, tender, silky, blinking. If they had voices, she thought, they would be giggling.

She’d first noticed them a few days earlier, while raking dead vegetation out of the garden. That splash of color among the washed-out fallen leaves and other summer debris had caught her eye, and she knelt down and counted them (twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five) before covering them up again.

Somehow those violets had managed to stay perfectly alive through the scorching summer weather and all through the drought. The hottest, driest summer in a century. Maybe ever. They deserved special consideration, didn’t they? If God wasn’t going to give it to them, she would have to.

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