Queue by Dorothee Lang

She never had been good at patience. Reliability, understanding, self-discipline, even humour – no problem on those fronts. But having to wait – for a bus, for a waitress, for a reply – pulled her strings.

“And it gets worse,” she confessed to a friend. “Last week, I got in trouble after I tried to sneak up to the front of a queue. A woman almost hit me with her handbag.”

“Get a garden,” her friend advised. “It’s a great way to learn patience and tranquillity. You can’t rush flowers, and they will calm you.”

So she went ahead. She didn’t want to wait, and thus ordered one of the new ready-to-grow gardens with roses, lilies and other flowers included. It arrived in a huge green parcel. She unrolled it and added water. Then she sat down, and imagined to be a flower in her own garden.

It all went well at first. The garden grew happily, and being a flower induced a general feeling of tranquillity. She still had difficulties with queuing for a bus, but she was better prepared now: she always carried a pop-up flower book with her.

Then the snails arrived. They circled her flowers, then started to queue in front of the petals, set to munch one after the other. She tried to practice understanding and ease, and offered to get some snail snacks. The snails agreed, but lost patience while she queued at the counter, and chewed up the petals until all tranquillity was gone.

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