Two years ago, Alices grandmother passed away, leaving her a cottage in a quaint English village, complete with a sprawling garden and a vegetable patch tangled with memory. The place shimmered in her mind with echoes from childhoodsun-laced afternoons spent tumbling through flower beds, giggling under apple trees, and lending her small hands to the daily rhythms of life. Every weekend, she would journey there with her family and her mother-in-law, breathing in the green-fresh country air and savouring the garden’s bounty. There had never been even a ruffle of discord between Alice and her mother-in-lawtheir visits were peaceful, as soft and ordinary as buttered toast.
As the harvest drew near and the world hummed with ripening, Alice had quietly gathered all that was needed for her magical preserves: jars that winked in the sunlight, sugar, and everything for pickles and stewed compotes. But when she arrived, she was swallowed by a strange dismaythe blackcurrants, gooseberries, and raspberries had all vanished as if spirited away in the night. Town whispers floated over the fence that perhaps the local lads had swept through, pilfering ripe fruit. Yet even in her dream-frayed logic, Alice knew: that much fruit would have required a whole day’s honest picking, not a fleeting midnight escapade.
Abruptly, in the way of dreams, her aunt (who was also, inexplicably, her neighbour) hurried over, cheeks flushed and eyes wide. Breathless, she blurted that Alices mother-in-law had turned up the day before, and had trundled away with two great buckets brimming with berries. Fury and confusion danced in Alices chest, turning logic to mist.
Confronting her mother-in-law, Alice was met not with shame, but a placid confession. The older woman explained she wanted to give her grandchildren healthy fruit, and couldnt afford to buy such luxuries at London prices. Alice reeled, the scene spinning around her like a merry-go-round. Outrage flickered through hernow she’d be forced to buy fruit for winter on the high street, with the cost stinging like nettles.
She returned home and spilled the story to her husband. Even he was dumbstruck by his mothers cherry-picking escapade. So Alice, draped in the odd certainty only dreams can conjure, decided to take the keys to their Morris Minor from her mother-in-law. From that moment forward, her mother-in-law journeyed to the cottage only with them, insuring by strange new rules that the gardens treasures would never again vanish without Alices knowingat least, not while dream logic held sway.
