Fear of the Fuchsia

There is a husband. And a wife. Above them a mild sky. Pretty music plays nearby. “Nice violins,” the husband says to his wife who doesn’t respond.

She is kneeling on the freshly-cropped lawn, ripping weeds out of a round flowerbed. The smell of wild onions permeates the air. The garden is bordered by red bricks, half-buried in a circle. She wears gardening gloves. They are purple and made of tough rubber. They make her soft hands sweaty. The fingertips are hard plastic claws designed for digging. When the husband notices them he makes a remark about Freddy Kruger. She informs him she doesn’t watch horror movies and he knows that. She tells him it was enough already with the stupid movie references. Just stop it. Go away and let her tend her garden in peace.

The soil under the garden is dark and rich and moist. It is perfect for growing strong and hardy flowers. The roots suck up nutrients like a junkie slaking the craving in his veins. She digs the soil. It is a restful activity. It quiets her mind.

The husband spends a minute or two staring at her back as she grapples with stubborn roots, wrenching them away from their stubborn clench to the earth. There is a small pile of uprooted weeds beside her. She plans to use them later. She’d planted fuchsia last year, a strong species of the genus that was supposed to be perennial but failed to grow back in the spring. Now she was uncertain whether to plant them again. 

The husband shrugs and gives up and goes back inside the house.

That was why he missed the rampaging moose that killed his wife. 

The couple lives in a valley surrounded by mountains. Moose are common there. So are bears. But it is a moose that ends her life while the husband is inside playing solitaire on the computer.   

The wife is humming along to the classical music flowing from the open windows of her Volvo V70 sedan. The driveway is next to the flowerbed. She often listens to music this way while gardening. She hates sticking listening devices in her ears. 

She wears a wide-brimmed straw hat with polyester daisies decorating the band. The long loose chin strap swings as she wrestles with a stubborn clump of nutsedge. She is unaware of the moose, as it is unaware of her. It is still a half-mile away.

The husband pours organic coffee into an off-white mug with the Spawnway Insurance logo printed on the side. He adds three teaspoons of coconut sugar and a dollop of almond milk. He repairs to the living room and sits at his desk. He wakes up his Dell XPS 8960. He sips his coffee. He looks at the screen. He clicks. 

The wife is beginning to sweat from her exertions. Mozart fills the summer air. She is not thinking about her husband or her home, garden or the day ahead. She thinks about Osprey Pond and the last time she was there. How she found a watch in the water. A Bell & Ross Diver. Worth around $5,000.

And how she tossed it back in the pond like a worthless perch.    

The husband stands up, empty mug in hand and returns to the kitchen. As he pours more hot coffee, he wonders if he should eat. They’re out of cereal.

He returns to the computer.   

The moose was spooked. It had climbed an embankment of wild grass and moss-covered granite and as it thrust its weight up onto the peak of the steep hill, it lost its footing and toppled down the other side. It scrambled at first but managed to right itself and maintain a precarious balance as it galloped down the embankment, navigating gravity with frantic, forced coordination.

At the bottom it only got worse. 

A street! A car! A horn! The moose panicked and broke back into a gallop, darting across driveways and manicured lawns. It trampled over a kid’s bicycle, broke through a white picket fence and started across another yard. There was music.

The wife does not have time to look up. She is staring at an earthworm. It is short and skinny. Wriggling. She picks it up and places it away from the plot she is working. With her clawed gardening gloves she carves fresh furrows. 

The moose is nearly seven feet tall and 1,500 pounds. A hard-bone rack of antlers. Its huge front hooves hit the wife first, breaking her neck and shattering her skull. The loop of her hat’s strap snags on the moose’s hind leg, lashing it to the body of the wife. The bull moose is gasping and panting and grunting and trying to wrest free of the sudden encumbrance. Its hind legs kick at the wife, breaking more bones, battering soft organs.

Finally, it uses its immense antlers to tear itself free and then escapes into the forest.

The mangled, broken body of the wife rests next to the flowerbed in a tangled heap. She has lost a shoe. Her hat went with the moose. 

The husband is watching the local news for the weather report and sports updates. He is drinking his third cup of coffee. He can still hear his wife’s car stereo through the open window behind him. The piece is familiar but he can’t identify the composer. He wants to go outside and ask her who it is but doesn’t. She’d only yell at him to go away. Best to just leave her in peace.

He wouldn’t discover her dead body until lunchtime. He’d immediately call emergency services.

An hour into the future he’ll be sitting in a room at the police station getting interrogated.

“I didn’t do this, I swear,” he will insist through his confusion and shock.

But the detectives won’t buy his pathetic alibi. “Look, buddy. Make it easy on yourself, okay? Just tell us what happened.”          

“But I don’t know!”

“…”

“I think maybe I need to speak to an attorney,” he’ll tell them.

Nothing will go right.