The Sky Gardeners
The Sky Gardeners were named Fenella and Horace. Not all skies have a garden, just like not all houses have a garden, but the sky of Klah is so abundant that at certain times of the year the sunset was green, and the sun decorated her face with petals.
It hadn’t always been this way though. There was a time where everything was shrivelled and gasping, flowers lay right down on the earth to rest their feeble necks, and weeds like the claws of vultures choked everything, and sometimes grabbed hold of the clouds until they cried and cried and rained and rained in one place for so long that whole towns were washed away. Meetings were held and feet were stamped, and an ad was thus placed on the great canvas of the sky: SKY GARDENERS WANTED, APPLY WITHIN. Shortly afterwards Fenella and Horace moved in, or rather up, with one very large and very heavy battered suitcase between them.
Inside the suitcase was an assortment of books, but they were not books on gardening, because Fenella and Horace knew what they were doing - and besides, sky gardens are very different to earth gardens.
The plants of the sky do not need water, they thrive off diamonds, which may sound wildly expensive and impossible to keep up with, but luckily Fenella and Horace had discovered they had been born with a special ability to produce these.
The way they did it was this: Fenella would read to Horace from the suitcase library; romances with tragic endings, or excerpts from cooking shows where the dish completely failed, and Horace would cry tears of diamonds to feed the plants with. Sometimes she read him comic skits and he cried with laughter, or heart-warming tales about dogs on expeditions hoping to be reunited with their long-lost owners, and then he would well up with happiness, and cried a different shade of diamond.
The plants seemed to like that too; it seemed they needed all the colours and all the types to thrive and jive and live their most abundant lives, with many sides, just like a diamond.
