Feel the Blue Blossom Bloom
At the center of his unfinished basement, Jason found a weed with its petals blushed blue, and the familiarity of its blossom filled him with memories, all tinged with joy. He felt the birth of his son, the day of his wedding, and that Saturday morning in 1963 when an unforced error allowed him his first home run. He remembered Vernice’s excitement, her eyes wide and searching, as if she had discovered within him some hidden greatness. In that instant, everything made sense and every pain had its purpose. Life had meaning. Then a door opened on protesting hinges, and Jason looked up the plankboard staircase and saw himself haloed by the hallway.
“Bulb out?” Vernice asked from the kitchen.
Jason glanced back at her.
“You’ve been standing there an awfully long time,” she said.
He reached into the stairwell and flipped the switch. The light warmed to a bright, white glow. “Bulb’s fine,” he said.
“You come rest yourself,” she said. “I’ll see to the figs.”
“I can manage.” He eased his way down the steps and stood at the center of his unfinished basement and stared at the concrete floor where nothing grew. Hinges squeaked. Vernice stood in the doorway, comfortable in her sundress, her hair a nest of curlers.
“The jar of fig preserves,” she said.
“I remember.”
Glass jars stood in a line, each darkly purple, familiar. Jason’s eyes moved to the shelf above and the shoe box filled with their love letters, long turned yellow.
“We all forget from time to time,” she said.
He returned with the jar. Vernice swirled the preserves into their oatmeal, and they sat together at a tiny table overlooking the garden. Low-hanging clouds robbed the flowers of their color, and Jason tried to picture the blue weed growing. Instead, when he closed his eyes, he saw the love letters and the shape of each handwritten word.
“When we’re dressed,” Vernice said, “I want you to take me shopping.”
Jason nodded.
Days passed quickly, their breakfast of figgy oatmeal coming every fifteen minutes, and on Friday, the sun shone in the eastern sky. The grass changed the ambience of its green and radiated a warmth Jason felt in his soul. The flowers had their color, and tomorrow, their son would be home.
“When we’re dressed,” Vernice said, “I want you to take me shopping.”
A color caught his attention, bright but nearly hidden among the shrubs along the house. He set down his spoon.
“Don’t let your oatmeal go cold,” she said.
He walked to the hedge and pushed aside bushy limbs to reveal a yellow-flowered weed growing out of the red brick. It pulsed, and he felt each pulse pass through him like waves through the sea: Rascal died chasing a motorcycle; Theodore broke the news of his divorce, neither he nor his wife having the heart to go on after Susie’s sudden death; and the doctor sat across from Vernice and Jason, her face dark with the impending diagnosis.
“Jason?” Vernice said.
He looked up from his oatmeal and felt a trail of tears. What sense was there in loss, not the incidental kind but a core-being loss? To be left behind was to be left incomplete, forever. Some holes grew smaller over time. None healed completely. Fractures made the man, and life had no meaning.
“I’ll call the doctor,” she said.
He looked back to the hedge. To the wall. The color was gone, but the pain lingered. The loss hollowed him.
“No doctor,” he said. “Just a little something in my eye.”
He sat in silence as he did every morning. The weather alone added variation to his days, but the patterns remained, sometimes indoors, sometimes out, always the same. Life swallowed up in monotony. Alone with his thoughts until all thought vanished. Fractured, until the fractures won.
He took Vernice shopping.
The dog in the road was not a dog, only a trash bag, split open, its garbage spilled and strewn. Vernice stared at him, eyes wide, her face ashen. Jason pulled off the curb, and the car wobbled as the fourth wheel joined the others on the street. His hands shook.
“Not a dog,” he said. “We’re okay.”
“There was no dog, Jason.”
“It was only trash. We’re okay.”
“You drove us off the road.”
“It looked like Rascal.”
Edging into an early winter’s night, his mind had chosen to mark its passing with fireworks, exploding synapses filling his world with memories, loud, powerful, and heralded with hallucinated beauty. Fireworks signaled the edge of night. Yes. Death. Fine. He knew what was coming, but until then, this was his garden to tend, even when the tended bloom drained him dry.
“We’re okay,” he said.
He drove slow enough that twice cars passed him across the double line, but his thoughts still raced and his hands still trembled. The end of his journey came like a stay of execution, and in the early morning glow, the lot was nearly empty. He checked his watch and waited for the store to open, a small, local grocery, Vernice’s favorite. She’d always said it felt like part of the community, and the clerks had known her like a neighbor. The welcome sign turned, and Jason entered the store alone. The clerks greeted him as the emissary of one they’d lost, their eyes full of kindness, their words full of regret.
The next morning, in the center of his unfinished basement, Jason found the blue blossom blooming. He felt the warmth on Vernice’s hand and the tenderness of her kiss, their honeymoon in Greece, and the trip to the mountains she’d secretly planned to celebrate his retirement. In the pulse of that blue warmth, life healed itself; the possibility carried in every breath burned within his veins. Then something whirred above him, a banshee’s scream prying into the dentistry of docile wood.
Theodore drilled plates into the basement door and padlocked it shut. “That’s done with,” he said. “No more stairs.”
The box of letters sat on the breakfast table. The last of the fig preserves stood in line upon the kitchen counter, and Jason felt the blue pulse of the bloom below, faint and fading.
“I don’t know why you have to be so stubborn,” Theodore said. “You don’t even like fig preserves.”
Jason had few words to convey memories and fewer for emotions. He wanted to say that these were her preserves, and she’ll never make more, that his final wish was death should take him before he finished the final jar. Instead, he gripped the cool glass surface, and in his thumb, he felt what must have been his own pulse beating.
“We’re okay,” he said. “We’re okay.”
On Monday, at the center of his unfinished basement, Jason found a weed with its petals blushed blue, and the familiarity of its blossom filled him with memories.
“Bulb out?” Vernice asked from the kitchen.
Jason gripped the padlock and felt his own pulse beating. “The preserves are in the pantry,” he said. “We have everything we need.”
—End—
P.S. — I had done a another revision of this story, but I opened the wrong document and found the previous version. The revision had been well intended but had ruined everything.
And now it’s published. For such a short story, I worked on this for a very long time.
The illness is not what makes this hard. Every act of protection in it is also a subtraction — the doctor, the son screwing plates onto the door, the line about there being no more stairs. Each one is reasonable, and each one removes the only room where something was still growing. The padlock doesn't change what Jason does down there. It changes who holds the key to it.
The reassurance works like the oatmeal: a formula that comes back every fifteen minutes and settles everything, until it stops sounding like comfort and starts sounding like containment.
Your P.S. interests me more than it should. A revision that was well meant and ruined it — my guess is that it explained the flowers.
This one hits directly in the feels. Thanks.