The Butcher's Bride
Five Years Later
The garden was a riot of color.
Where the old perimeter wall had once stood, draped in barbed wire and fear, there was now a trellis of climbing roses, white, pink, and deep, blood-red. The "Bloodmoon" roses, we called them. We kept the name, but we changed the meaning. They didn't symbolize death anymore. They symbolized what grew from the ashes.
I sat on a stone bench beneath the shade of an ancient oak tree, a book resting forgotten in my lap.