Categories: Flash Fiction

To Everything a Season

I never thought eBay would contribute to my grieving journey, but then I’d never heard about Mourning Seeds until my browser history and poor privacy settings conspired to start suggesting products I might want every time I opened a browser window.

I closed ad after ad (Cribb’s Funeral Services; Eco-coffins; even EZ-Cremain – American, naturally), but the day I finally felt strong enough to auction off my dearly departed’s belongings, something about the eBay advert – perhaps the word ‘seed’ – made me click.

Plant at least four feet deep over the loved one’s grave (in this case, the loved three’s) and as the tree grows, so will the memory of he/she who is lost.
No returns once planted… etc, etc, etc

A tattered, manilla banker was delivered. Not exactly what I’d expected – no branding, no exquisite, environmentally unfriendly packaging, just the envelope containing three things like peach stones.

Did I deserve to be ripped off? Probably. I certainly deserved something. I treated my wife and kids terribly: If I could take back every beating I gave Gracie and Michael I would; if I could show Nat just how much I cared with my lips instead of my fists; if I could hide the car keys from my drunken self on our way back from Elgin last Christmas…

If I could un-click Buy Now.

But I couldn’t.

A time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to harvest.

Daily I pick – remove – the wailing green fruit on each of the little trees I planted: Gracie, Michael and Nat’s hairless, miniature, green heads – like apples – gawp soullessly outwards, jaws dropped to better birth their screaming, screaming, screaming.

There’s only one way to silence the eternal accusations.

The flesh is sweet from such a bitter crop.

Christopher Bean

My first published work is the story ‘Jumbled-up Jack’ in The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel (Woodbridge Press, 2016) anthology (See Cemetery Dance review here). Since then I’ve had several flash fiction pieces published by Haringey Unchained, some of which are included here. My first long-form, Victorian horror novel The Pegge and the Pendrel is finished and looking for a home. I’m working on companion books set in the same universe, designed to be read in any order. I started writing in 2009 focusing on shorts and awkward, wretched little things that were too long to be short and too short to be novellas. On Bluesky, not Twitter.

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Sean Graham says:

28 February 2022 at 6:44 pm

I am here to point out.... that this was a great read... a great sushi slice of a whole fish. It stimulated a much wider world of imagination in such few and well chosen words.

I can definitely see a whole twisted horror script with this.

Thanks you for your gift.