BY MICHAEL ANTHONY RE

Mr. Edmund Ashcombe had learned the precise hour the garden would tolerate him.

It was not in the bright insistence of morning, when grief felt unseemly, nor at midday, when the world demanded usefulness. It was later, much later, when the light softened and shadows lengthened without drama.

The grass grew unevenly, as if unsure whom to please. Edmund had not corrected it. He had learned that some disorder was a kind of fidelity.

He wrote in rhymes and whimsy as they were the only stories that would still receive him without argument. “Once,” he said aloud, more for himself than for her, “there was a king who ruled a country small enough to be crossed before supper.”

His daughter settled at his feet, arranging fallen petals into a pattern that would not last.

“The king had a queen,” Edmund continued, “but one day she was gone—she was taken by a storm that had taken over the land—the kingdom remained. This puzzled him.”

His pen moved steadily. Occasionally it paused—only long enough for a thought to pass. A woodland path. Her shoes were left by a tree without ceremony. Bare feet on damp earth. The swing they had trusted, her laughter lifting as she leaned back, fearless.

He returned to the page without comment.

In the fairy tale, the king planted a garden so that something living might answer him. He spoke to it of small things—the weather, a bird he had seen—because speaking of loss directly felt improper.

“Does the queen come back?” his daughter asked.

“In stories,” Edmund said carefully, “people return but not how we know.”

She accepted this, as children do when they sense a truth larger than language.

Sonnet 27 came to him unbidden — how the poet’s limbs lay still while thought began its work after dark. He understood it now, with the understanding that comes only when one no longer wishes to.

The king began to dream.

In these dreams, the queen walked through the garden at dusk, touching leaves as though counting them. She never spoke. She never looked at him. The king understood instinctively that to follow her would undo the dream entirely.

Edmund wrote this down with care, as though accuracy mattered. He wrote every moment, every look and every detail of his dream so as to never forget any memory of her.

Some afternoons, his daughter would interrupt him only to ask for clarification. “Why doesn’t the king speak to the queen?”

“Because,” Edmund said after a moment, “he has already said everything that mattered.”

This was not entirely true, but it was close….

He remembered courting the queen not as ideas or structured memories but as sensations. The smell of pine. The breeze is passing. The way they swing on wooden swings as if they would be engulfed by eternity. As if they were romping in a garden with no beginning and no end.

One evening, his daughter asked, “Will the king ever stop being sad?”

Edmund closed the notebook.

“No,” he said. “But he will learn how to carry it.”

She nodded, satisfied. Children are skilled at accepting what adults take years to forgive.

The first frost arrived early.

The garden stiffened, but did not surrender. Edmund wrapped his daughter’s coat more tightly and told her a shorter story that afternoon—about a queen who became part of the soil, whose presence was known only by what continued to grow.

As they stood to go inside, his daughter slipped her hand into his. The weight of it startled him—not with pain, but with recognition. For once, he did not turn, did not expect another shape beside him. He let the moment be what it was.

That night, he placed the notebook on the shelf beside the others. He did not put it away. He did not leave it open. He had learned that endurance often required restraint.

In the fairy tale, the king did not recover the queen. He did not conquer grief. A king without a crown but a kingdom without a queen endures.

He tended the garden.

Spring came again, as it always does, indifferent to deserving. Edmund watched the first green break the soil and felt something loosen—not sorrow, but its hold.

Love had not left him.

It had simply learned a quieter way to remain. He took his daughter’s hand and said, “Let me tell you a story of a fairy that found itself in a beautiful garden…”