FICTION
A Flower in the Thicket
It is the first time I’ve been outside in months. The birds squawk and howl as my neighbor runs a freight train over his grass. My lawn, on the other hand, has grown into a matted thicket of weeds, which have been burned into crisp spider legs by the southern sun. I shrug about it all and sip my unsweetened coffee. My grandson doesn’t know how I drink it this way. He comes by weekly to do the dishes and judge me.
“Grandma, I still can’t believe you put no sugar at all in your coffee,” he told me, a smirk on his lips.
“I still can’t believe you think you’re drinking coffee. It’s just dessert when it’s filled 98 percent with creamer,” I snipped. “Besides, it’s healthier plain.”
“I don’t see how drinking something so bitter could possibly be healthy.”
The statement took the air out of my lungs. He said it with bright eyes, no double meaning intended. I knew it wasn’t an attack on my character, but I still stopped our exchange right there, returning to the book I was pretending to read. That’s just what I do now. I stare at the pages, seeing how the words curve, black ink distorting the innocence of the white page.
My mind drifts to the day my flag of faded purple and translucent stars was last lowered to half-mast. My husband had just put it down in honor of 9/11.
“Don’t put it back up, Harold.” I had whispered the next morning, “A horror happens every day.” He had frowned, but obeyed, nonetheless. I think that was the first and last time he did. He died that week from an instant heart attack.
I hear the bouncy steps of my grandson on the creaking porch. I peer up to see a red hibiscus being offered to me. Harold’s favorite flower. I could hardly believe that my gruff army man with a propensity toward swearing in church and a hatred of frilly things had a favorite flower. But he’d said it reminded him of our honeymoon in Hawaii.
“Where’d you find that?”
“In your lawn.” He smiles.
“That lawn?”
He hums in response. I know he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that this was Harold’s flower, and that is the lawn where things go to die, not where hibiscus breed. My vision goes even cloudier than it is normally as I thank him. My chest fills with a foreign feeling of weightlessness and light as I realize that I am truly thankful. A horror may happen every day, but a flower also grows. If this thing of beauty could come from rot, then maybe the stain of ink on a page could be beautiful, and maybe I could be whole again.
That evening the lawn is still overgrown and my coffee is still bitter, but the flag that was once half-mast now waves again.
Audrey Laine Streb is an English & Writing student at Liberty University Online. Despite her youth, she has lived in the United States, New Zealand, and India. Throughout her travels, she’s encountered major earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes, and wildfires, yet believes that the peace of God can be found amid anything.
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Image: Single-flowered Chinese rose mallow from Edwards’s Botanical Register (1829—1847) by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley, and James Ridgway. Original from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel. Public Domain.
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