To Dream of Geese and Bees

There is always a price for a good deal. For example: the cost of finding a non-shoebox apartment in the city for a reasonable price was having it be just upstairs from Chun-Po's All-Day Fish Buffet, situated behind its huge, perpetually-buzzing sign.

Everything smelled of fish. The soap smelled of fish, the carpet smelled of fish, the toaster smelled of goddamn fish. Oddly enough, the cat didn't smell of fish, but he shed everywhere so that didn't earn him any favors.

He sensed my judgement and ceased his snoozing on my wife's lap to glare at me. Patricia, always attuned to the silly little thing, paused her smartphone scrolling to scritch ears until the fluffy hairball was back asleep. Her head, leaning against my shoulder as it was, bumped with every movement.

"Ooh, look at this!" Patricia cooed after returning to her phone browsing.

She held the screen aloft to display a lovely English garden. There were flowers and plants of all shapes and colors and they all had fancy names I didn't know.

I bet it didn't smell like fish.

"I wish we had a place in the country." She nuzzled herself a little closer, "A place with a yard and trees and..."

She trailed off but I heard what she wasn't saying. This place, this life, it suffocated. Not just the smell, but the constant, irregular buzzing from the sign, the mess of street noise, the restaurant clangs and shouts during the day.

"That'd be nice." I let my heart out with the words. "A place full of nature."

"Yeah..." Patricia sighed and put her phone down on her chest, folding her hands over it. I knew that she had closed her eyes. I could feel it in the way she moved.

"With..." I looked outside the windows at the blaring crimson that caused that

"Beeees!" Patricia near-squealed.

"Lots of beehives." My lips twitched at her voice. Just hearing her excitement healed me. "And a great, wide flower meadow to keep them busy. They'd buzz this way and that all day!"

"Mmmm!"

A car screeched in the street below and inspiration struck. "And geese! Waddling and honking and making a mess of the grass!"

I felt giggles jostle my shoulder. I closed my own eyes, hoping for the peace of darkness but only finding the ever-present glow of red and yellow from the windows burning through my eyelids.

"And sunsets." I told her. "Sunsets that take up the whole sky! With reds and yellows and oranges..."

"And pink!" She demanded.

"And pink."

It wasn't much, I knew. In fact it was nothing more than a dream. Still, I hoped that tonight as I dressed for work and she put herself to bed, I hoped she would dream of a meadow full of bees with waddling geese and a sky-stretching sunset above it all. And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't even smell of fish.

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/u3p2y2/tt_theme_thursday_neon/i4yjtoj/