The Fleetness of Love, By Marie Croke

When I blossomed into being, I knew I would not last more than a season. Such is the way of life. Everything is fleeting; desire, friendship, and even love, they are all but temporary.

So I stretched out, determined to enjoy the warm days, the light rains, and even the tiny creatures that crawled throughout my petals, before I succumbed as all my ancestors before me.

When the strange man came, my neighbors whispered and the birds twittered. He walked oddly, they said, paying no mind to the tiny buds he trampled. I leaned further out over the path he strode, intent in my scrutiny as the quiet gossip faded when he finally came into view.

So close he was I could feel his breath on my being. It caused my petals to shiver violently, nothing like the gentle gaze to which I was accustomed. I shut out my sight, willing him to move on, and instead felt my insides wrench as he gripped my stem with clumsy fingers and broke me from my family.

He cursed. A tiny part of me smiled in the wake of my death sentence, glad that my thorns had done their job, even if a bit late. Far off, beyond the pounding in my leaves, I could hear my family moaning, their calls becoming ever fainter as the man carried me back the way he'd come.

In those moments, had I the ability to scream, I would have. My very being felt fried, my body oozed liquids, and I was certain I would be dropped and stepped upon every time the strange man cringed. The fire in me blotted out all but the ringing of my family's calls, still echoing despite the time and space that seemed to stretch between us. The stranger packed me so clumsily I began to wonder if I'd have been better off having been crushed.

Then, after an eternity, he handed me, oh, so proudly, to gentle hands. So enraptured with being cared for once again, I ignored the hugs, the sobbing, the pleading, so was surprised to find myself back in the garden from which I had been plucked, my family bending their hellos. I was scarcely able to see their wilting petals before I was taken into the castle I had only seen from the garden, to bear witness to my gentle caretaker and his new guest's first meeting.

The two of them were never angry, so gentle each was in character, and I sat in the middle of the table, observing their blossoming love. I laughed at them during their formal meals, although they never heard me so intent they were on one another, for they saw each other as so different. Only I could see the truth; they were one and the same, digging nails into their lives and loves as if they could stop them from blowing apart when the winds became heavy and the skies dark. One morning they would awake to find the bits of what they thought would last forever, scattered in the grass, just as I would one day find my petals.

While the vase halted my decay and the windows held the frost at bay, I knew they simply postponed the inevitable. That was why it did not bother me to know that my family had gone already to the nether garden while my existence was dragged out as representation of that odd couple's love.

Those two didn't dwell on such things though. Instead, conversations and spoken thoughts flowed about the tomorrows and the possibilities to come in the next years, as if those years were sure to come and not as unpredictable as they truly were.

Sometimes, when I felt pity, I would whisper to tell them to enjoy today. I wasn't sure whether they ever heard me, and yet, over time, their actions began to scream that they had. A part of me began to wonder if my philosophy had been wrong, that perhaps there were things that could outlast even life.

That is, until the smaller one begged to see her family. That annoyed me, though I was not clear why. Maybe it was because I had already come to terms with the loss of my own family, or that she was so eager to leave what she'd just built. But they never asked my opinion, not even after I protested when she settled me next to her mirror at her home where I could watch my petals curl.

She stayed longer than she should, and, although I expected it, I was disappointed. Every morning she asked herself, "One more day can't hurt, can it?" I always answered, "Yes," but she never wanted to hear. She avoided looking at me as well. I assumed it was so she wouldn't have to admit that her life would fade just as I was drying up, my stem no longer bringing me sustenance, just as her love was sinking to the edges of her heart where it would be cast out for newer, fresher feelings.

I, too, refused to look for a few days, the longer life I'd been granted, which had given me more time to dwell on the futility of it all, finally slipping away, taking with it the scarce bit of hope I had harbored when I'd seen them so happy together. Now, it was over, my petals ready to flee at the softest of breaths, and their love drowned in the normalcy of life.

It was her scream that tore me from my mood, giving me the will to look once more in the mirror. The other, the man, lay in the garden, his body covered with frost, his hairs cold icicles like the dead flowers above him. And she? She was somehow there, gathering him in her arms, her warmth melting away the ice and hair as if their love had never been fading at all, merely morphing into something stronger, steadier.

I tried to nod in a quiet understanding, but found my stem would not budge; death had crept up on me while I had been preoccupied. My gaze refocused, letting the two lovers fade into the background as I dared to look at myself once more.

What I found would have made me gasp, had I been able. My petals were still crisp, every wrinkle now frozen in beauty, without the softness of fresh life. Where I should have been a wilting mess, I was stiff, my body still whole and my being very much aware.

I shivered, feeling my petals shake, and stared back at the two now kissing one another gently. That freshness of love that hovered in a state of uncertainty for a long while, it could become nothing, as fleeting as I'd always thought.

Perhaps, though, it could also bloom into something else once that first stage dies. To be dead, and yet still alive. Nothing is everlasting, but maybe some things were meant to last long after others have since withered.

*

The author lives in Maryland. She was recently a finalist in "Anthology Builder's Match-That-Artwork Contest," has had work published in Emerald Tales and The Lorelei Signal and forthcoming in Pill Hill Press's Four Horsemen Anthology.

Image by Eleanor Vere Boyle.