When Death Becomes You
The Meeting Place. TWENTY-FOUR.
If the Truth Fits
Val never expected to see a car on the stretch of overgrown road where she walked with the dogs. Sure there was a highway within hearing range, but the world was moving way too fast to make the subdued sharp right through the trees to the river and her meadow.
The woman and who-Val-guessed-was-her-husband were stopped dead in the middle of the gravel lane gone grassy, shy parallel lines loyal only to pressure and time. Red lipstick at 6:20 in the morning? Val mused. The dark-haired woman had shimmers of silver circling her eyes and held five long-stemmed roses, yellow, Val’s favorite, the monstrous stems sporting hard-as-nipple thorns, dark daggers clear enough for Val to see from six feet away.
“Are you here for Val?” she inquired to the couple, testing their intentions with trained dramatic irony.
“No, ma’am. We’re bringing flowers to the dead.” the gentleman said as he lifted the bill of his camouflage baseball cap to reveal argentum shimmers encircling his baby blues.
“No dead around here.” Val attested as she tugged the dogs out of the weeds.
The woman bent forward, spreading the buds apart so that each had a space on the grass like a perfect poker hand.
The couple turned toward the black sedan and disintegrated along with it into a waft of something between glitter and mist and left Val standing on the cusp of a truth she hadn’t been willing to see. They were right.
The Unflattening
Later, when she had finished almost all of what she had determined to do that morning, she sat down for the sake of balance whether she wanted to or not. She talked to herself like she talked to the dogs. Sit. Stay. Easy.
If she wanted to feel three-dimensional again, she could. It’s just that she didn’t see any reason for it. Day’s day. Night’s night. What connects them didn’t have to be love or sex or meaning.
She knew she was more animal than most humans felt comfortable admitting. The music of her soul had fluttered beneath time itself and banished her from its charms. She wanted so much to blame anything but herself for the obstinate survivor she had become. Most would say she’d been lucky for making it this long. She had nearly starved that first year, gnawing raw and rotting potatoes, naive not to have thought ahead to food and warmth and winter.
She went to the wash bowl, raised the pitcher over it, poured to the count of five as a slow stream splashed onto the ceramic curves. Before she dried her face, she looked to the woman in the mirror; her sandy hair in twin braids hung like feathers down past her shoulders; the round face a permanent bronze, a spray of freckles across the bridge of the nose; her gray eyes so birdlike she believed them to be. But hawk or dove?
Know the needs of the seasons, Val learned, keeping notes on the calendar at the end of each day about weather and trees and grasses, fruits and flowers. She wrote the wind and clouds and geese calls. She wrote the ice on the river and the break-ups of spring. She learned how to read the sky, greet solstice suns, bathe naked under summer moons. She wrote her loneliness and memories. Then she stopped. Just like that, the unfairness of life flattening her into tar paper, practical, impermeable. Dull.
Her own version of asceticism was something her words on paper need not suffer. She hadn’t written since the blankness took over. Why had the silver-rimmed creatures found her today? Flowers for the dead? She thought of the funeral of her great-aunt, her grandmother’s dear little sister. Val had been a girl of ten or so then and asked Grandma why Auntie had no gladiolas or roses, and Grandma had turned to her and said with a seriousness of tone, Flowers are for the living, Valiant. Don’t forget that. Flowers are for the living.
Val left the dogs on the porch and walked back to the place where the five roses fanned against the crunch of winter’s grasses, buds for the living.
The Meeting Place note: Val’s story appears non-linearly. Check out earlier companion posts to this one. The Meeting Place is a jigsaw of fictional vignettes hosting several female characters destined to cross paths. The series began with The Meeting Place. ONE. (May 12, 2022).
