Short Stories 2020 (Prompts/Contest Entries)

The Flower Hunter

Although it was still only Spring, and still early in the day, Sophia felt warm as she climbed further upstream. The tall trees gave her shade, but the bag of scientific equipment pressed into her shoulders and back. She stopped for a minute to sip from her water, and leaned against an old beech to check the map: only another twenty minutes, she reckoned, before she got to her destination for the day.

The air was fresh and clear, and she took a few deep, appreciative breaths before she set off again. So much nicer than the clogged air of the busy English city where she was a post-doctoral researcher. She was glad to be able to visit this small, unspoilt central European valley and call it work. She pushed off the tree and carried on towards her goal, interested to see whether she'd timed this field trip correctly and there'd be enough specimens of the plant she was particularly after – or whether she'd find that environmental changes meant that she'd left it too late in the season. She reminded herself that not finding the plant, or finding only a reduced number of specimens, would be valid data in its own way.

As she worked her way through the woods, following a barely-discernible old path with the soft gurgling of the stream a few metres to her left, she reflected on the strange little flower she was hunting. Viola odorata aetheria, the so-called ethereal violet, because it was so rare, so fleeting in its flowering season, so delicate, so difficult to get hold of. One nineteenth-century enthusiast had called it the "nymph violet", as she knew they did in the local dialect here. Unbelievably, given she'd been interested in it for some time now, and in what it could tell her about biodiversity, she'd never yet seen one in the wild. The pressed specimens in the university museum or at the national plant collection were lovely but it was easy to see that they were pale shadows of the flower in life. The few written sources were by early botanists and collectors, who'd written about it in flowing Victorian prose which – although very evocative – gave little sense of the real science of the flower. One or two had attempted sketches. Her favourite of the old books (the one that called it the "nymph violet") had a colour plate, and it was this which had as much as anything piqued Sophia's original interest. But still...she was quietly excited to see some for herself.

Sunlight sparkled off water, and the path dropped down abruptly to a small clearing where the stream – officially a small river – pooled before tumbling over a small cluster of rocks to continue down the valley in the direction from which Sophia had just come.

For a long, magical second, Sophia was brought up by the sheer perfection of the spot: the bright sunlight dappled on the water, highlighting a complex mix of greens and blues and even some purple in the depths; the banks and clearing were a patchwork of deep, healthy greens and earthy browns; apart from the twittering of the birds and the trickling of the water, the space was still and quiet, the air stirred occasionally only by a light breeze. And in that magical second, Sophia felt her heart skip and knew with a physical certainty that she'd be happy never to leave such a special spot.

*

With a sense of relief and anticipation, Sophia noticed a patch of small, bright purple-blue pricks within the green on the opposite bank, and went to pick her way carefully across the rocks at the edge of the pool. Her bag made her more cumbersome than she'd have liked, and she was grateful for an overhanging tree branch which she could use to guide herself. As she paused halfway across to redress her balance, glancing down into the pool, she was startled to see a strange face staring back at her from the water: a young woman with long fair hair and piercing blue eyes and an expression as shocked as Sophia herself felt. As if neither of them expected to see the other.

Sophia blinked, and the breeze ruffled the water and the face disappeared. When she looked back she saw her own fragmented reflection, and let out the breath she'd been unconsciously holding: of course it was just a trick of light. She was a youngish woman with blue eyes, after all, and what had looked like flowing locks instead of her own cropped hair was just the yellowy-brown fronds of the water weeds clinging to the rocks. Smiling at herself, she stepped onto the far bank and knelt down carefully to take in her first sight of the delicate, pretty flowers she'd already spent almost two years studying in the abstract.