Grass and Reeds

          I wrote a random snippet for spring. It's temporary name is Grass and Reeds because it has grass and reeds in it. I am a master at creatively naming things.



        Ice drip-mixed with mud around the roots of brittle reeds. The shards of ice cut her hands as she tried to dig the pieces out. Sliver bits and mud stuck too far underneath her nails turning her fingers cold and raw. It was painful, but in the way that meant you were doing something; feeling something.

  Underneath her mud-slicked hands and the dead reedy fodder of a previous year, something was growing. Grass green and new. She wanted to see it. To feel it. To touch it. She wanted the smell of a new green thing to be mixed with the steel smell of the dull ice.

  Birds chirped and sang and bickered high up in the trees announcing to each other they'd returned.
The sun pushed through the thick mass of grey cloudy cover. The breezes rustled around things not quite up to the times in knowing it was supposed to be warming, and not still in charge of dripping noses.

  She scratched at this lonely wilderness out of place in the reeds but peaceful. Underneath the stick in her hands she uncovered bits and tufts of green. She laughed at the twisted, pathetic raggedness of it, like a plant growing under a rock. She touched the tips of it. Inside she was bursting, loving it for it's yellowed greenness.

  Outside she only had a smile, her eyes held everything else. Carefully she placed back the brown fodder that used to be this same plant back over top and left. No one had seen her and no one ever would. You'd barely notice the slight difference she'd made to the ground when she'd come to  see some wild grass growing by herself, but she knew she'd been there.