We wait and pace in the garden, our fingers gliding across petals and dipping into the fountain, our bare feet in the grass. It’s not just us women anymore. I’m still getting used to the rumble of bass voices again. After two decades apart, we were wary of the men, but like us, they’ve worked hard on themselves. Everyone has stuck to the teaching, to the rules. Why wouldn’t we? It’s what we all decided. Doubting the plan would be silly.
Dusk tinges navy as night leans in. I look up to the big white house: our home, hospital, school, and I listen: nothing yet. A man whom I’ve not met before stops, says how excited he is, that he’s a carpenter with great skills to pass on. I tell him I sew and cook, and he says so much for sidestepping traditional gender roles, his smile fading at what he’s said. It returns when I laugh. We nod, remembering one of our rules is true freedom of speech. For the children, the ones who will play here, learn, swim in the fountain, plant and pick flowers, grow to be the happiest and best versions of themselves. All because we took a breath.
The moon is out now, bright and bulging. Everyone stops pacing to gaze at it. Then, over the trickle of the fountain, we hear the cry from the house, thin and beautiful like a solo violin. The start of restoration. I reach for the carpenter’s callused hand and find his warm fingers, searching for mine.
Rebecca Klassen is fiction editor of The Phare and supports primary school-aged children with special educational needs. She has won the London Independent Story Prize and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, the Pushcart Prize, and shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bridport Prize, and Alpine Fellowship. She’s had over 100 stories published, some of which are included in Mslexia, Fictive Dream, Toronto Journal, Brussels Review, Writing Magazine, Flash Frontier, Baltimore Review, Gooseberry Pie, and on BBC Radio.