Teaser Tuesday again?

Wow, Tuesdays come fast...

This is the opening of the book I wrote right after Handcuffs. I rewrote it three times, and I'm doing a bit of looking over it, as a writing exercise (and because I love it).

The soft cotton lining of the protective gloves catches on my fingernails as I pull them slowly over my hands. I angle the pruning shears. Snip. The rose falls. I lean forward, pinch the thorny stem between my too-thick gloved fingers. The cotton snags against my left thumb nail, the one I gnaw the most, as I drop the red rose-bud into my mom’s wicker basket. There’s a rose-shaped indention on the almost-black soil. I smooth the earth with my foot. Potting soil and little bits of mulch are dusted from my ankle down to my toes. I push my hair back from my face and feel something sticky smear across my forehead.

Tomorrow is the first day of school, the first day of my senior year. I need to trim back the roses in this walled garden behind my father’s church. Once school starts I might not have so much time, they might get overgrown, wild. There isn’t much that I can do for my family, they’ll barely notice when I’m gone, but this garden, I’ve cared for it over the years. It provides fresh flowers for the sanctuary. We can all agree that flowers are nice, even though when I look at the roses I see stems and pistons and the glorious bright green of chlorophyll absorbing sunlight during photosynthesis. They see something different, a miracle, I guess.