FICTION
A Flax Flower
You took root so eagerly. Just a seed, so little, so frail. But you latched into the soil with such confidence.
Then you grew. You were pulsing with promise. You were entirely alive. If someone had bent close enough to the ground, hands and knees pressed to the grass, ear turned to the earth, they could have heard you singing, singing with expectation in every note.
Your shell opened, and your tiny head pressed upward towards the sky. You broke through your blanket into the open air. Five blue petals and a slender stem. You were vivid. You were delicate. The morning sun beamed across the world, and you lifted your face up to the light. But you were drooping by night.
Wilting, you vanished in what seemed an instant. No one ever saw you. No one even had the chance to. You were gone like a breath. You won’t ever prompt a smile on the face of a passerby. You will never grace the table of a family or brighten a florist’s display.
But oh what a beautiful life you lived to exist only and ever for the One who made you. What a pure purpose, the whole of your life meant solely for His delight, the whole of your being meant solely for His glory.
You were like the baby, so small and still, that we wrapped in strips of linen and laid inside a box — the box we carried across the field and buried in a flower patch beneath the rocks.
Leah Johnston delights in capturing beauty through various forms of art, including music, painting, photography, and writing. Her work has been featured in Pure in Heart Stories and Wandering Lights Literary Magazine. She is currently attempting to finish every C.S. Lewis book before her graduation in 2027.
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Image: “Linum pratense, dry rocky prairie on Bell Branch Road” by Mason Brock (Masebrock), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by Veronica McDonald.
Heart of Flesh Literary Journal 