White pink tulip bursting into rose. Bowing lamp peering into what doesn’t concern. Her not me. Should have been her. I would have loved them more. Cared for them. Arranged them with choral fanfare. Harmonic grace. But she. She lets them topple. Unconcerned.
Pills to pop it all away. Her mother said no. There are other ways. Not the pills, love. I know a man. He’s very nice. Marla goes to him. I can pay for it. Really. Turn my back on her. Sun fidgeting around haloed hair.
Later she hides on the beach. Hiding in full view with all the other bobbled hats heads down watching their prints follow and fade follow and fade. Sand sliding through grit of grateful toes
Starlings all of a thither. He gave her flowers not me. Not her.
Heh, Missus watch out! Och, Donny she made me do it she made me! Petulance from the waist down. Trip over flailing little feet. Catching her balance before she fell. Footie between duffle coats goal!
He’s not worth it, my mother said pouring camomile tea into a mug without a single chip. Let him go. Little Donny has chocolate ice cream all about his chin. Smeared down the belly of my coat. He know the tulips were mine. My thing. She’d always loved tulips. The way they swayed scarlet yellow in drunken armies across flatlands stolen from the sea. Rumba to the right. Tango to the left. Festival flowers. Flowers in her lair.
She’d told him about the tulips the first time. Stomping through the hush of svelting snow. Keeping him at arm’s length. She’d measured. Kept measuring. Not too close. You need to let them in, my mother always says. In different ways but she means the same. That’s why they leave you, love. You never let them close.
Look, he’d said, his hand on the fear of my arm. The first spring of blackbird. Pointing with his free hand. And so it was. I said the weirdest thing, then. I said, yes, grapes, oh and oysters – that’s the feeling. She doesn’t remember what happened next. Or whether anything happened at all. Pills to pop it all away. Sudden need to sit down. Leaning up against the hard fail of the groyne. Pulling her socks back on. Purple lilac handknit socks. Her, me. Every time.
This piece was written during a writing class based on Ann Quinn’s Berg.
SANDERLINGS 