White

Mar 26, 2008 - 23:17 PM PST

She was a tall woman with squinty green eyes, plump lips, and a long nose. Her hands were unusually large, with crooked fingers and pointy, white knuckles. Her nails were long, uneven, and split. The carried black dirt beneath them, and her unadorned fingers shook incessantly after a sip of coffee. She worked at a small flower shop and spent the majority of her days dreaming of being seventeen and taking a road trip in a rusty mini-van. Her shop was on the main street in a small wisconsin town, Salon Springs. Not many customers came through, flowers are expendable. During this time in her life, her joys came in little things, a cigarette or a glass of Jack after work. She liked to watch the sunrise despite her love of sleeping in, and made an effort to watch it everyday. One morning, after a pink and creamy-orange sunrise, she met a boy. He died early the next year, for the deep scent of flowers drives some to feel indebted. The boy was quiet, lanky, with light brown hair, and his father once owned an insurance company. Everyone in Salon Springs wondered why he spent so much time with the reserved flower woman.
When the flower woman closed her hands her knuckles looked like clusters of sharpened walnuts. When she uncurled her fingers, the tendons on the back of her hands danced up and down like the strings in a grand piano. She smoked out of a long cigarette holder when no one was watching, and dreamed of living in the twenties. She had never been married, and since her father had died she had given up on ever leaving her small town. Her father had lived in the city, about a three hour drive west, and she felt guilty for never visiting him. She sat all day in the back of her shop at a desk, waiting for the bell above the door to ring in the next room. Her room had no windows, and she read by light of the flickering over-head, spotted with dead flies.
The woman spent everyday inside her head, exploring memories that evoked nostalgia and depression. She formed new memories by revisiting the same dreams day after day. It was as if her time had once been full of life and happiness, and she was content with the seemly recent loneliness. Sometimes, reality would shake her like the loud, constant beep of an alarm during a blissful dream. To the world, she may as well have been dead and gone, and she walked the streets at night remembering a time when another would hold and kiss her. Her hand would timidly reach out into the darkness and find no fingers with which to intertwine her own.
Salon Springs had forgotten about the aging woman, but back in her alcove she was at work. She collected every fortune cookie fortune she had ever received. Occasionally, she would sift through the hundreds of left-over take-out snippets to see if anything ever came true. Alone in her musty office, the smell of decaying flowers wafting through the doorway, she wrote her thoughts on the backs of the fortunes. She pulled out truths with her clunky hands, re-presenting what her mind already knew. After she was satisfied that what she had written was a secret truth, she folded the papers into little squares and dropped them into her jean pockets.
The flower woman had worn the same clothes since she had lost contact with any family members or friends, five years by the time she met the brown-haired boy. The bottom of her jeans were faded and fraying. The buttons on her blouse were loose from being pulled day after day, and the color was noticeably faded on the shoulders. Her tennis shoes cracked with mud, and her socks sported secret holes. She washed her only pair of jeans once a week, always loving the loose feeling they had taken on by friday. The squares of paper formed tight balls in the wash, and she left them there, creating lumps in her deep pockets. Once they had filled, she would take out her scattered thoughts and throw them wherever she pleased. Usually, this was at a sticky web in the back of her office. She would yell at the fat spider, "Here! I baffle, no, CONFOUND you, you glutinous arachnid!" It was at this point her hands would shake in fear of losing her mind, and her stomach would tremble with laughter.
The story of the flower-woman and the boy who became her lover is a simple one. The bell chimed one day, and the flower woman assumed it was her wishfully thinking mind playing tricks on her. The boy came in, flowers for his girlfriend on her birthday. It was October, and the ground outside was already glistening white with frost. Some acorns speckled the ground, faded and white like the flower woman's knuckles. Timid footsteps creaked through the doorway to her office, and she followed them out with a tight, toothless, unsmiling smile. He took a bouquet of lavender lilies and they exchanged few words. At this time, white scraps of paper were overflowing from her pockets. Inside her pockets the beginnings of thoughts and ends of thoughts linked together, mixing to form a truth that clouded her mind and detached her further from reality. These truths were so consuming she tossed them out, and her small thoughts began again.
The boy had lost both his parents two years earlier, and the entire town knew he had been left some money, and that he was a nice, quiet boy. He had been on a number of dates, all the same, and all the girls talked the same and sounded all the same. They laughed at anything, and talked too much about nothing. They wore clothes that were too small for them, and fried and dyed their hair into what would otherwise be an unconvincing wig. They lined their eyes with think, black, liner, and clumped together their lashes with mascara. He kissed all the girls, and called only a few of them again. Most of them wore like-tasting lip-gloss.
The girl he was with at the time, though uninteresting, seemed nicer than the others, and wanted only him and nothing he owned. For a while he thought he could raise a family with her. One day though, as they were talking, he realized that there was a greed in her that he had not seen before. He looked into her eyes and found them cold and unfeeling. They looked like they could strike straight through him and keep going without turning back. That night, he dreamt that she cut through his back with her pink-painted nails, pushed out his lungs to the other side of his body, and walked through him. He had this dream three nights in a row, and did not tell anyone. A few evenings later, in a moment of passion, she clawed at his back until his skin gave way to the blood cells beneath.
The next morning, the boy went into the flower shop. He said very few words to the woman, and bought one rose as his excuse to be there. He spoke gently and slowly to her about the weather as she opened the register. She told him she found small talk more awkward than not saying anything at all, and that he should have a good day, and to come back soon. He came back again, three days in a row, and stood silently at the counter for a few minutes before leaving. Twice, he found scraps of paper on the ground and took them home with him. After the boy came to know the flower woman, it seemed he never wanted to leave her again. And without him saying anything, the woman knew.
For several weeks the boy and the flower woman spent everyday together. They went on cold walks down dirt roads, and picked up fallen acorns because they could. They spoke, and when words were not enough to express their thoughts, they said nothing. They looked out at the cows and the white frozen fields which would be full of corn the coming year, and talked of how some of the dirt they walked on would eventually end up in grocery stores in cities, where corn on the cob would be served to a family in an apartment in a city. They talked about Whitman, and wondered how many other feet had been where they were at that moment. They walked on the paved street down from the drugstore, and the flower shop, and the wet, fallen leaves smelled to them of death and spices. She told him how the fields and the farm houses reminded her of Christina, and how she had for a long time envisioned herself clawing at the dirt, reaching for something unimaginable to her. They shared a cigarette every evening, and went to their homes at night. In late November they moved in together. In December the boy learned he was sick, and the following spring he died. During the winter, the boy's face reflected the pallor of lilies, while the woman's face looked wasted and her pink eyes contrasted with the lavender crescents beneath them. Every evening, the flower woman's knuckles seemed to rattle together as she read the boy her faded thoughts. After finishing each thought, she laughed and said that she was silly for ever writing such foolish things, and stuffed them back into her pockets to become hard white balls.



COMMENT PLEASE... all criticism appreciated.