Fiction fragments #1 - Repurpose

She walks in the garden getting a whiff of the foliage. She halts and bends to snap a leaf off, gently rubbing it in her palms to sniff it. What in the world does this remind me of? A familiar smell perks up her senses to a point where it tricks her to feeling hungry.
"Italian" She whispers to herself, "Parsley!"

Her mind wanders around into the database of her recipes, wondering what she could transform this lovely flavor into, except her taste palette, quiet confined to the finicky familiarity of her native cuisine, rejects the prospects of taking some into her kitchen and whipping up a freshly made 'from the scratch' pasta sauce for instance. She remembers how her sister measures up dried parsley leaves to add to her home made marinara to smear on the pizza crust.

"Too much work for something I might not even taste" she dismisses the idea. But the herb holds her attention. She runs her thumb on a leaf, while gently holding it on her fingers, and smiles to herself.

A recycled glass tumbler holds the fresh cascade of parsley on her dining table for almost a fortnight. She would light her candle next to the herb and gently pluck a leaf to sniff every now and then...this tiny indulgence of her senses acting like a  pleasant punctuation to her daily chores. The leaves fade to an interesting yellow at the edges and the smell dwindles into a milder version as the days flip by. She feels a sense of achievement to have put the herb to some use, albeit unconventional. She realizes that she's slowly becoming an expert at her game - to find 'out of the box' ideas to fit into her pesky rigidity. Sometimes she wonders if a lot of what does linger around in her heart could be revamped this way - if a heart ache could be plucked and arranged into a display, somehow making it an eye candy. If a loss, a void or a suffering could be used to generate similar sense of achievement. She smiles to herself. Sometimes, she could only let the time wither them into subdued, faded versions of themselves - their remains, still burning like embers in some concealed corners of her heart.

"How cool it would be?, If we could feign a suffering into sanctity, a deceit into a delight?"

But for now, the delicate bunch of parsley substituting as a centerpiece of her dinner table is enough distraction for her. Until the next opportunity to repurpose a shrub or a slash presents itself...Then she'll up her ante, and one day, lets hope, that she might transform a deceit into a delight!