Soup & Fingers

Back little more than an hour from foraging through the creekside muck, Lena waves him into the kitchen.  Dressed in a calico apron, she garnishes lunch, dropping four hardboiled quail’s eggs, a pinch of minced chives, and a few sprigs of feathery dill into two bowls of homemade wild nettle soup.  She hands him the larger of the two with a spoon and a wink of her eye.  Leaning across the countertop, he slurps down what she’s made as he stares through a cracked window and out toward the space where hard spring raindrops are falling. 

Something has changed here, something wonderful begins, he thinks to himself, feeling her hand slide into his back pocket, feeling a smile start at the corners of his lips...