Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 31

This week's photo prompt is by Javier de la Torre, who is a professional Spanish photographer based in Madrid. He has some amazing work. Check out his page here.  He calls it 'Alone'.

I adore lavender: I grow it, and I use the oil for mediation. And of course it's my favourite colour: purple. So this picture just called to me to be written for, and this story also appeared in it's entirety. It moves away a bit from my darker side too. What does this picture say to you?

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A Whisper 

Evie put her hands down and ran them through the tops of the lavender flowers, and then lifted them to her nose and breathed in the glorious smell. All through her life it had been the only smell that cleared her mind. She used it for meditation. It was the fastest thing to relax her. She loved it. But she couldn’t remember how she got here - here being a lavender field.

Evie could see perfectly despite it being the middle of the night. The sky was clear and bright, lit by infinite stars, an arm of the galaxy winding its way across it. It domed the row upon row of the beautiful herbs growing all around her, perfect in their straight lines and their round bushy tops. The night air was full of their scent. It was magnificent. It was heaven.

But where was it? Evie had no sense of place. She hadn’t remembered being in the south of France or any other Mediterranean country that grew lavender as a crop. In fact Evie’s last memory was in her car, looking out over the sea, contemplating her life. Was she dreaming?

Evie pinched the skin on her arm. She could see the skin between her fingers and pressed it hard, but was it the memory of the feeling or the actual feeling? She felt her hair against her face and even a breeze across her skin. She was awake ... or dreaming she was awake.

Evie noticed a tree in the distance and felt drawn to it. As she moved closer it became brighter. It wasn’t the tree emitting the light; it rose around it throwing the tree into silhouette. She wanted to see the other side where the light was coming from. Did she hear a whisper? Was it the tree?

She travelled without moving, the tree drawing closer as she thought about it. She had to be dreaming. And then she heard a voice that hadn’t been with her for decades; the voice of her maternal grandmother. It brought back the memories of sitting on her knee and hearing stories of magic and wonder. Evie felt butterflies in her stomach. Was her grandmother really here?

Then the tree was gone and only her grandmother was there, standing with her arms open, tears running down her face.

“Oh Evie,” she said. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be here for some time yet.” 

“But where is here, Nanna, where are we?”

“Heaven sweetheart, couldn’t you tell?”

Then it all made sense to Evie: her car, distracted by the view of the ocean, drifting across the road and the oncoming freight train. There’d been no pain, no drama, only a dream come true, she was with Nanna again, the emptiness was over.