Ugly vs. beautiful

 

Day 16 of the Flash Fiction Marathon. The photo is the prompt

Each day on her way to work and back, Megan had to walk by the empty lot with dead grass, leaves and litter. She loved beautiful things The lot definitely wasn't beautiful. 

She tried imaging how it could be. Some days she pictured an English garden. Another time, it was a grassy play park with swings, jungle gyms and slides. She pictured children laughing. 

When she saw trash she picked it up: it could be bottles, McDo bags, cans. Once someone had thrown Hershey Kiss wrappers. She pretended they were silver flowers.

When she told her boyfriend about it, he sneered. "You are the most unrealistic person, I've ever met," he said. "The world is an ugly place."

Megan thought about what he'd said. So many times when she pointed out something nice, he saw something negative. She commented on the red carnations in the flower boxes on the white Northeastern Student Union. He pointed out the ugly air conditioners. When a movie they wanted to see wasn't being shown, she found another one. He ranted about how stupid the theater was not to have the right publicity. When she dropped an egg, he chided her for clumsiness. She saw how happy her dog was to lick it up.

Megan knew there was ugliness in the world: famine, war, fires, climate disasters, illness. She also knew that flowers were beautiful, people did kind things but they didn't make the news, that when the leaves changed color in the fall they created a riot of colors even if the weather was colder.

She started keeping a spread sheet of what she thought was good and what he saw was bad. When it reached 100 negatives in five weeks, she told him that it would be better if they each found someone else. He ranted for about an hour than accepted it.

The next morning when she walked by the ugly lot, it was snow-covered. A child had made a snow angel. She thanked the lot for being the catalyst to make her see that she needed to end her relationship with her boyfriend.

352 words