Arums - Flash Fiction Piece by Bruce Meyer

 

Arums

 

“If I had arms like an octopus I’d wrap them all around you and give you a big birthday hug,” Aunt Harriet wrote on the pink card with oversized arum lilies on the front and a poem inside that rhymed “a friend so kind” with “you in mind.” She was large and her kisses were wet as oceans.

            When Harriet passed only days after the card arrived, his mother cancelled his party for the second year – he’d had chicken pox when he was seven – and packed him in the car.

            “Nothing is fair,” she told him, “not life, not death, not even love, and of those three life death happen anyways and love was the most difficult because it is hard to hold onto.”

            It rained all the way south. Spring was barely in bloom and the car windows fogged. His mother refused to drive with the radio on but the beat of the wipers and the steady thread of boredom put him to sleep.

            When they arrived, Aunt Thelma had turned the mattress in Harriet’s room for them, and when they woke and his mother adjusted his suit she insisted he wear his clip on bow tie because all the men in the family wear them.

            Aunt Harriet lay in her box in the living room window, the bier embellished with arrangements of arum lilies. Their open mouths made the flowers appear to gasp or cry out for help. The rose scent of perfumed women and the headiness of the flowers in the fierce humidity made him think he was wrapped in a dog’s panting.

            A bald man, heavyset with his shirt buttons pulling, stood next to him as he stared at his aunt in her stillness.

            “I’m your Uncle Grant. Thelma and Harriet’s brother. I don’t think we’ve met.”

            The boy said nothing. 

            “Your Mom’s raising you. She’s a brave woman. They’re brave women. Has anyone given you had the talk yet? I want to get to know you, teach you how to tie a bow tie like mine, and tell you where to hold your hands on the steering wheel when you get pulled over.”

            The boy didn’t understand. He’d watched his mother drive. He turned and went outside to the porch.

In the grey daylight, the houses in their stiff front faces looked alike, but what made each one different was the paint on their clapboard, some of it peeling, some blue, some yellow. He leaned over the porch railing.

            In the flower bed directly below, a single white lily had bloomed, its mouth open to the sky as if it wanted to suck down the clouds by catching raindrops to quench its thirst so he and his mother could go home.

            He went down the steps and tried to snap the stem, but the shaft was supple. It bent in his hands. The sinews held fast. The flower drooped. He knelt and using his pocket knife, cut through the stalk, mangling it with each pass of the dull blade. He would give the flower to Harriet, lay it beside her in her box, and write a small card that said, “You in mind.”

            The women in the kitchen didn’t see him tear the bottom off Harriet’s last shopping list or notice as he laid the arum beside his aunt. He wanted her to know he loved her though she had always been far away and ruined his birthday.

            He heard his uncle calling out, almost in a shout so everyone could hear, “Where’s that boy?”

Grant grabbed him by the shoulder and took him out to the porch and made him look over the railing at the lily stub.

            “Why did you take your aunt’s last flower? She grew lilies. That was her last. She poured her love into them, every year kneeling close to the earth and saying she thought she heard angels there. The last lily was her way of saying goodbye to everyone, and you’ve ruined it. You got mud in her coffin. What were you thinking?”

            He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to cry.

He ran upstairs to his aunt’s room where he and his mother slept and buried his face in the pillow until everything was dark with a terrible darkness that pricked him with shame and emptiness from the weight on his shoulders down to his stomach.

            His aunt had so many arms, so many ways of reaching out and drawing people to her, and the void he saw as he pressed his face to the pillow resembled ink, and he thought he would ask her forgiveness by writing a story about her, perhaps with the title “You In Mind,” and the ink was right before his eyes.

Bruce Meyer is author of 67 books of poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and literary non-fiction. His most recent collections of short stories are Down in the Ground (Guernica Editions, 2020) and The Hours: Stories from a Pandemic (AOS Publishing, 2021). He lives in Barrie, Ontario.