Word Count: 383
She hated the chickens. Hated the bees. Hated the bees the most.
When they’d met he had called himself a gentleman farmer. She thought that meant tomatoes and peppers and beans. By the time he took her up to the house in the country she was so far involved that she believed she could handle it all. But the chickens were dirty, the bees dangerous, and she was deathly afraid of the cow.
He’d insisted that after they’d married she give up her job. She, hating the work that she did and not seeing room for advancement nor other employment in the current economy was reluctant but finally agreed. That left her home to feed chickens, collect honey, and milk the damn cow. There was fresh air and sweet scented lilacs and tree frogs and birds replacing the city traffic noise. She enjoyed the big garden and home-baking bread, and some small part of the days available to sit back and read. Literature and poetry books that had long been stacked up finally filled her spare time.
He’d come home to a clean house and dinner ready to be laid out on the table. Loved the freshly picked peas and tomatoes and corn. The first winter she carried in firewood from the pile she’d cut, split and stacked. She bitterly shoveled the driveway and trails to the coop and the cow. But she refused to slog through waist-high drifts to check on the hives. He brought her fine things from the city. An expensive coffee bean grinder. An apple corer and a cherry pitter. A brand new shovel and hoe.
She begged him to let her take a job as a clerk typist. He asked who would be home to collect eggs, milk the cow. She brooded and steadfastly refused to take over the bees in the spring. He at least compromised there.
He never noticed the small holes she had cut in the netting. It took a long time for him to recover from that. The hives were destroyed. Soon after, the cow appeared to have suffered a heart attack and the last chicken was made into soup. As for him, he hung on through mid-winter until sadly, he died of what she told everyone must have been flu.
