Looking for the Flowers

A short short story.

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Chuck’s hands tremble, reaching out into the shadowed night. It was just a dream, Love, her coming back to him all gold and smiling like a spring morning, the bright bud of life within. He misses that cloak of darkness, where what was becomes only what is, memories feeling so real they pluck him right up out of the dank, winter mud. Now, his arthritic fingers clutch cold bedsheets beside him and he waits for dawn’s breaking instead of his own beating heart’s.

Gracie spies the white blooms in a small patch in the yard. Hardly bigger than a lady beetle, they come up easy. She pulls and pulls, catching them all before they fly away. They’re weeds she knows, Silly, but wraps them in a blade of grass anyway and brings them inside. Daddy always says to scrub the dirt out from under your fingernails, and so she does, but not without forgetting, when she’s done, to sniff the lavender cream beside the sink. She paints only just a little on both palms, but Mommy’s frown finds her, all the same.

Anne drives her seven-seat minivan, loose bumper hanging low, lighting sparks down the two-lane cut through the heart of their small, southern town. She cracks the window to let a little air in, catches her reflection in the glass. It’s fractured: one part to the wriggling bodies buckled in tight to their seats, the other to the wild unknown of her self. Tom Petty’s singing about wildflowers and she can only wonder what all it’s for, not feeling so “somewhere you feel free,” as it is.

Out past the quarry, the road comes round a bend, and a weary mother’s reverie is broken by a strange sight. The bent man tromps in tall boots across the wide open field beyond the gravel. He’s got a brown bag in one hand, spade in the other, and only one thing on his mind. In the back row, a little girl looks for her mother’s glance in the rearview mirror, traces her profile, and then follows her gaze out the window beside her.

All six eyes then, they see them. Starburst yellow trumpeters standing brave and proud on an otherwise ashen day: tree limbs, skies, and hearts alike. They’re hard to miss, but so many forget to look, returning as they do every year. These Lenten lilies, they’ve an audience, now. Little girls that, unprompted, pick flowers for their mothers. Mothers learning to listen for the long-forgotten voice of the girl inside. Men aching for the women they love who grow and then are picked like flowers they, too, love which may someday lay or be planted by cold grey stones with words that never quite say enough.

Photo by Wyxina Tresse on Unsplash

Later, Chuck cruises in his pickup slow and steady down Main, coming up near the corner where the schoolyard sits empty, save a woman and four young children. At the stop sign, he says a prayer like always, and then watches them play for a few, unbroken minutes. Road’s bare, after all.

Anne flies off the swing, chains screeching under the weight of a life now lifted, at last, into the clouds. She lands in a pile of chipped wood on two feet and runs off, her children racing behind her. Gracie giggles loudest of all, but stops suddenly when she sees her mother kneeling in the dirt. Right there in the middle, Anne finds something, calls Gracie to her side. She holds the tiny, canary blossom to the girl’s chin, three other sets of eyes gone wide in wonder.

He can’t hear what she’s said, but he knows it all the same. It only takes a moment for the tears to slip, one by one, from the corners when he watches the mother tuck yellow bloom behind the young lady’s ear. He flexes fingers, still lined with the soil of eternal rest and turns golden ring with his thumb, unthinking. “Always looking for the flowers,” he says to no one and smiles, pulling forward towards the sun dipping below the horizon, turning everything to butter.

A note:

If I share more short fiction in the future, I won’t disclaim like this, but I thought my first attempt at it, both writing and sharing, might warrant a few extra words of my own.

It’s not quite a short story (1,000 words minimum) or flash fiction (500 words maximum), but it’s short and it’s fiction so, there you have it, a short short story.

This one’s been working on me for a couple of weeks, one passing vignette in my day to day weaving its small, then later big, something else besides. That glimpse took on a life of its own in the people it became about, people I don’t know but could see in my mind, had questions about, and wanted to know better, pulling one tiny thread at a time.

That’s all the work is, anyway.

Thank you, as always, for reading.