—YOUR ACCOUNTANT CALLED THIS MORNING, THERE WAS SPRINGTIME IN HIS EYES

Bellflowers

 

She fed me bellflower after bellflower, as if each leaf was an elixir, some kind of magic mushroom, an extraordinary deliverance, and so I sat stunned and bewitched until alas I twitched and twitched, like a scarecrow struck by lightning. 

I was a knave then, on the cusp of something more, orange-ripe sunrises perhaps, while she was accomplished, wise as tides, or the sea cliffs above them, watching through a window as each wave crashed like glasses among the soldiered boulders below.

I was young and dumb, but I still believed in love, beauty and hope, all that sappy stuff, for the longest time I did, because it felt nourishing to bathe in such thoughts, and because she’d made it seem true and obtainable, and because, for a spell, I actually believed in her.

But then the lava came, the flames and the fire and the furnace, everything smoldering and discombobulated, my mouth so dry that I choked on a stalk of bellflower, no air, no hope, only anguish. 

In the end. In the end, she could have lied better, could have painted the future better, could have not stolen my soul. But the bellflowers fell nonetheless, a fatal shower of them—plum and purple stuck in my throat. Mauve leaves. Mauve stems. Mauve, all of it.