Purple Becomes Deirdre

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

The year she turned fifty, there were two men in Deirdre’s life: Tom and Diego. Tom was an organic farmer she met at the Open-Air Market, where he sold honey, eggs and produce on Saturday mornings. In the photograph on her refrigerator door, Tom beams at Deirdre over a mound of sweet corn. He is ruggedly handsome with a shy farm boy smile that never failed to make her feel weak. One Saturday, he explained the workings of a beehive to her while they sat on folding chairs behind his stall and drank chamomile tea. His vivid description of the drones mating with their virgin queen in an aerial swarm of lust and eventual death made her blush.

Read the entire story in the November 2022 issue of The Write Launch