The young woman entered the dark and dusty storage room, loading a few sacks of soil into a wheelbarrow. After the number satisfied her requirement, she headed back out together with her wheelbarrow. The woman pushed it towards the far corner of the flower nursery; a cool, shady spot among a forest of potted plants where her workplace was. Upon reaching it, she settled the wheelbarrow on the ground and stretched her back, thinking about what she might have missed.
Suddenly her eyes caught sight of dark clouds not far from her right. Judging by the wind, she thought, it might cross the nursery in its pathway. Lazily, she walked back to the front of the compound, scanning the area around her as she did.
No customers, she thought. She then approached the main counter, where her mother was sitting down on a stool, reading the newspaper.
“Do you think it’ll rain, mom?” the young woman said as she took an old, rusty padlock from the shelf above the counter as well as a ring of keys hooked beside it, where she placed both of them in her right pocket.
Her mother, a middle-aged woman with grey hair starting to sprout from her scalp, lowered her newspaper and looked up at the sky. She squinted, turning to her right where the dark clouds were. She then stood up from her stool and walked out of the shaded area, inspecting her surroundings carefully.
“I have a feeling it will,” her mother answered after a few moments. “Quickly put up that notice before anyone comes.”
The young woman nodded and made her way to the entry gate towards the left of where the main counter was. She grabbed a notice board saying ‘Sorry, we’re closed for the day’ written crudely with a red-coloured marker and hung it on one side of the gate. She then latched the gate shut. She took out the padlock and the ring of keys from her pocket, intending to lock the gate from any outsiders. However, after finding its key, she found that the padlock was too rusty for her to use. The key could not move even a tiny millimetre in its keyhole. She rechecked if it was the right one, where she knew from all her years there that it was, and attempted to turn it again. But her efforts were fruitless.
“I guess it’s already too old,” she said as she turned the padlock over in her hand. She had applied oil to it just the day before, but seeing how it still refused to work made her conclude that it was broken.
“I should remember to buy another padlock tomorrow,” she mumbled to herself. She walked back to the counter to put the keys back in its place and threw the old padlock into a dustbin. She then went to her workplace again, continuing with her original thought before the clouds interrupted her.
Soon, the sky around the nursery grew dark. A few drops of rain fell to the ground, followed by a shower gradually getting heavier as the time passed. Somewhere among the plants in the nursery, a pale blue light shone weakly in the darkness.
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Author's note: Hi! First of all, thanks for clicking and reading my story. This is my first story on Wattpad and the first "normal" one I've written which is not a oneshot or a short essay. I don't know how often I will update this, but I will try my best to quickly write it up! Please bear with my grammar, or, even better, tell me if I've got a mistake somewhere.
