I grow flowers, and shrubs, and even several trees. I do not take credit for their achievement, even as they rely on my efforts, the watering, the feeding, and removing the invasive weeds that also seek my attention. Those weeds are masters of mimicry, often flowering, acting as if they could add something to the display. The authentic plants poke through the supple soil, then grow, then reach for the sun, only to die, hide and repeat the circularity, which would happen without my help. My help is not natural, but it seems that way.
There was a time when she would walk these gardens, pointing out the weeds I had missed, playfully, because she knows it will somehow hurt my feelings if she sounds dismissive. Never contemptuously; just perfunctorily suggestive. But not this year. The air is different, inside and out, and the late February freeze followed by the early March snowfall did little to help a garden wanting to exist as it had in the years past. These plants are here because of me. I broke the clay, and it was I who removed the recalcitrant sod. This tended plot of once rebellious land is not where they were born.
She assumed as the snow lingered well into the second week, dirty clumps of what was once silent whiteness remain visible, remnants of that desultory effort, that there would be no flowers. And then I notice it. Not the seasonal discursiveness. On the other side of the street, in a home where the man with the memory issues was moved to a place where memories go to die, slowly, I saw it.
If flowers could appear prepubescent, it did. But I could tell, even still encased in green sepal, a floral chrysalis, the blossom beneath would be red.
I took a wet paper towel and stuffed it into a fluted champagne glass we no longer seem to use. We no longer use it as intended. We find it celebratory just to be alive, even if ten thousand bubbles rising was not present to help. I arranged the tulip I had stolen from the man’s abandoned yard and stood it in the glass.
It bloomed, and I watched his yard, every day, many times as the clock wound from one darkness to another. He never came back for it, never missed it. She enjoyed it. The stolen tulip did bloom, red, with white lace frills along the petal, suggesting coquettishness as it revealed its sexual self in an inverted skirt.
Four days later, the weight of the tulip bent the pedicel, a head bowing in reverence, or homage, or perhaps in thanks.
A.M. Mann is an emerging writer currently querying novel-length works. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife of thirty-six years and a blue-eyed dog.