Orchid | 300 Words Exactly

The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the wide windows of the cottage, spilling over the bench that sat against them. Miriam soaked up as much of that light as she could as she looked out at the vast world beyond. It was nothing new for her, gazing out and watching life pass by. She wondered when it would be her turn to go out and act, but for that moment, she was content to let the clouds roll by whenever they blocked the sun.

It's not like she sat there doing nothing as she waited for her turn. Instead, she dreamed, creating worlds of words or of paint or pencils with large and complex infrastructures. The more complex, the better, she always thought. That meant she had worked hard on them.

Indeed, posters of her worlds decorated the walls of her family's cottage, haphazardly pinned overtop each other: there were many, and each looked like a simple pattern from afar, a circle or a pyramid, but upon a closer inspection, you could get lost in the smaller details.

"You could do a scavenger hunt in these and never finish!" Miriam's mom used to joke.

Miriam sighed as the sun dipped below the tops of the trees. She would be upset with herself if she didn't make at least one thing before the day ended. Perhaps a flower, she thought. Those are simple, and everyone draws them, but they are full of nature's complexities.

As the last rays of sunlight faded away, Miriam finished up her drawing, pleased with its deceptive simplicity. In thinking of it as simple, she had been able to breathe more life into it, and indeed the hopeful, yellow orchid seemed to stand away from the page and find its own place on the corner table, alive.