Frankly, I blame the flowers.
It’s a nice gesture, bringing flowers to a grave. But people only think about the bringing. Not about the leaving. They don’t think about the roses three days brown and the cellophane slick with rain.
Do you know what a bouquet lying on a grave looks like? Like someone was there, but then left.
Certain flowers don’t get left. Because nobody put them there in the first place.
You know what wildflowers in a cemetery look like? Like covered tracks tripping up the surfaces of ground and underground. An overnight carpet of wild violets and snowdrops—that’s fuzz on your teeth. That’s sun on your cheek. That’s natural.
The bouquets in their plastic sheaths are natural too. It’s natural that the living want to arm themselves on entering a graveyard. Natural that they would want to leave something, too.
But this? This wasn’t natural. This was a grave turned to garden: Tulips plugged in the four corners. A banner of chrysanthemums, framed by freesia. Symmetric sentinels of foxglove. Not a bare patch of earth. Not a blade of green. Roses too red. Daffodils too yellow.
And the worst: the daisies with their pincushion pupils— a hundred wide-open mustard eyes lifted to the sky.
Who could sleep under all that watchfulness? Who could rest under such landscaped elegy? Could you lie still, laminated in petals?
Floral claustrophobia it was.
If I were Daniel Lazare, I would have risen from my grave, too.
Elizabeth Kiem is the author of a fictional series about psychic Soviet ballerina spies and a non-fiction series about George Balanchine’s ballets. She was born in Alaska, raised in Virginia, calls herself a New Yorker and lives in London.
Learn more about her TrapezeWriting workshops at elizabethkiem.com.