Blooms

That blue velvet wingback was my grandfather’s favorite chair.  See how the seat pillow sinks in the middle and rises along the edges?  It’s as if he sits in it still, although, when he died at 91 he couldn’t have weighed more than that same number of pounds.  I never sit in that chair, but I do address it, the thin mist of my paternal ancestor keeping me company.  He hears it all -- my joys and dreams, regrets and sorrows –- without judgment.

I often reminisce with Grandfather about, Joseph, drowned forty-two years ago in a flash flood outside Big Bend National Park.  The canoe trip was an eighteenth birthday gift from our grandfather.  Joseph’s broad shoulders and strong legs couldn't win over the Rio Grande when it screamed into that Texas arroyo.  While my twin fought for breath, I read War and Peace in Grandfather’s library, sickly with pneumonia and pleurisy.   There was a moment, however, when the air left my lungs involuntarily and the library whirlpooled into space.  Then it was over and I lost myself in Tolstoy’s grip.

I hear my daughter clattering about in the kitchen making cucumber and sweet butter sandwiches. No crusts.  She sets the kettle to boil.  Gathers china cups and saucers.  She’ll place a flower bud in my cup.  Perhaps today it will be a marigold.  Yesterday a burgundy nasturtium unfolded as she poured hot water over it.  It’s a trick she learned as a child in India.  Whenever I try, the flower buds collapse and die.  She says the secret can be learned only by the innocent.  I believe her.

Iris is here to discuss my death.  She doesn’t agree my life should end on my sixtieth birthday.  I’ll listen to her argument then do as I please.  Next Tuesday I’ll assemble the pills, crush them into a tumbler of orange juice and Cointreau and drink it down.  Cancer wins.  It’s time to go.

She lowers a tea tray onto the table next to Grandfather’s chair and places a marigold bud in my teacup.   Slowly covers it with hot water.

The nascent flower tightens and collapses.

Golden Dreams

The Assignment: Write a Flash Fiction piece using the words, button, fly, plant, trick

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Golden Dreams

When my sister Bonita Kim Lee legally changed her name to Virgin Mary Lee, I, Lily Kim Lee, was amused. Our mother was not.

“She embarrass me,” our mother cried. “What judge make this happen?”

“Probably some atheist,” I laughed.

“She trick me,” our mother yelled. “She say she going to be nun. She confuse me.”

Now I’m ROFL.

“Get up,” our mother screamed. “Or I plant foot in ass.”

My immigrant mother has a way with words.

I know why my sister changed her name: She’s a high class stripper who goes by the name Virgin Mary. It brings her tons of greenbacks in her G-string on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s that whole Madonna/Whore Complex thing, you know? She lap dances on the fly, as it were, while she’s wearing this slinky blue veil and very little else. I think it’s hilarious. My mother would think it’s sick and perverted. An affront to the family and a sin that will send her number one daughter straight to hell. Guys seem to like it. They’re making the Virgin Mary stinking rich.

V.M. has a long range plan: she’s saving money to go to college to study geology. Specifically, vulcanology, the study of volcanoes. Her dream is to stand on the edge of a volcano crater while it’s erupting. She says you can wear protective clothing so you don’t get burned. “It would be like being born of the earth as part of the earth is being born,” she says. “The raw power and beauty. Scarlet lava flowing to the sea.” But I think if she were standing there, she’d probably strip off her protective clothing and dive naked into the river of lava. It would tempt her and she would go. That’s how she is.

She’s also saving money to help me go to college in a few years. I’m a math and computer whiz, so I can probably get some scholarships since I live in a single parent, poor family. But any help she can give will be appreciated. So I’m keeping her secret.

I ask my sister how she can bear to be with all those men while they…they…I can’t even say it. She says she thinks of her future – volcanoes. I say that’s kind of sick in itself! She just looks at me with a blank stare on her beautiful face as if she doesn’t get the connection.

When I tell her how hard it is for me not to let our mother know about the stripping, she says, “Button it up, kid. Remember, I’m your lifeline out of the trash heap and into the world of golden dreams.”