After Frank (A Fairy Tale)

Rose loves roses. She also believes there is an angel in every cloud. She dyes her hair the blonde of her childhood and bakes cakes with marrows from her garden, where she works wearing wellington boots over her shoes ‘to save them’, and remains till the moon rises into the sky. Rose lives with her husband Frank, her other love, in a blue house in a seaside town where their lives are shaped by the rhythm of the tides and the rise and fall of the sun. Frank is a carpenter with one eye brown like winter and one green like spring. He is built solid as the wood he works with and is grounded where Rose is quirky. Whenever he finds time, he paces the seashore with his hands in his pockets, breathing in sea air, counting his steps and planning for his and Rose’s future. When Rose and Frank are in their forties, they become parents to a daughter, whom they name Olive. Her birth is breech and she is born after a storm which blows all the petals from Rose’s roses and the leaves of the olive tree on to the windows of their house. After her birth, everything changes. After Frank is a story about a mother’s love for her daughter, about change and adapting to change and about knowing that not all problems can or need to be solved.