Lisa's harvest

Some flash fiction, thank you for reading!

In Wexford, on a farm near the sea, a vegetable garden was rotting under a glaring sun. The next-door neighbours rang my uncle about it, as it was his land. But he was entering that period of life where his awareness of what was his was fading away. My mother noticed the missed calls on his phone when she was over during the week tidying up and making tea. She told the annoyed man she’d try to sort it this weekend.

My uncle had a few plots of land like this dotted around Leinster and my mother was already mourning the loss of his shoddy empire to the HSE. In the car down, she said things about how you could work your life in this country and it meant nothing in the end. I said her brother should have sorted the succession years ago. She hmmmmmm-ed and looked out the window at the trees that made the Wicklow parts of the motorway almost pleasant looking. 

I turned off the motorway an hour later when the app told me to. Made our way into fattening hedgerow and tractor country. I hated country roads. Whenever I thought of my death, it took place on a country road far away from a hospital room full of blood bags and beeping and booming defibrillators. The type of ebbing, hopeless passing we tell loved ones was sudden.