Flowers

Compliments bloomed from his mouth, he’d take them and slip them behind her ear.

“You’re a delicate pink peony today,” he said when she wore that summer dress. Her cheeks burned.

“You’re as captivating as a rose,” he said when she charmed the room with a tale one night. The burning entered her bosom and set her eyes alight.

“All the bees in the world never found a tulip as pure and perfect as you. For if they did, they’d stay forever and give up flying.” He was on his knee and begging, so she took his handsome face into her hands and kissed his warm mouth. She promised to clip her wings and make a nest with him.

But she was mistaken, he pointed out later: she was never a bird, she was only ever a flower.

“Why would you think you could be anything else? You exist to be beautiful and to bear seed and nothing else!”

She shrank and drew her beauty into herself for a long time.

But he was wrong about flowers. There was one more thing they did.

One day, he found dozens laid out on the dining table, pulled out by their roots from the garden. Puzzled and angry, he found a note lying among their stems that read, “You forgot that flowers also die.”

He dropped his bag and his anger and called her name and searched all over the house, but he never found her. So he sank to his knees upon the floor.

And outside the window watched a little bird, fiery red. It beat its wings, teeter-tottering before taking sure flight. And it flew so lightly upon the breeze you could mistake it for an iris floating on the wind.

But you’d be wrong.