Spoken

He had come to the garden for days now, letting his hands speak for him where words would not. But this morning, kneeling beside the bloom he had steadied the day before, he felt the silence grow thin, as if it could no longer hold all that had gathered in him.

“Will they last?” he asked. The words came rough, unpolished from long disuse, and they seemed to startle the very air between them. He did not look at her; he looked at the flowers.

The keeper’s hands went still in the soil. “If they are tended,” she said. That was all. It was a small answer to a small question, and yet it seemed to settle over the garden like the first light of day. The silence returned, but it was a different silence now—no longer the quiet of two strangers, but the quiet of two people who had, at last, begun to speak.