The Day All The Men Bought Roses

You couldn't believe your eyes at first. Men coming out of the
bookies and the pubs and the factories and the snooker hall and their
vans and the post office and the leisure centre, each clutching a
single stemmed red rose and hurrying home to their wives, and their
girlfriends. And it wasn't even Valentine's Day or anything like
that.

It had been a strange week. Washing up, cooking, ironing; cups of tea
taken to bed. We all started looking at our calendars, shaking them to
see if we'd missed some years or something, whether we'd all slept
through some kind of event which had caused this to happen. And the
sleep we had. Husbands getting up in the middle of the night to deal
with the children, fill bottles, change nappies. Some said that one or
two even tried their hand at breast feeding.

And then the morning after all the men bought roses we all woke up to
this sound, and you couldn't tell what it was at first because it came
from so far away, like thunder moving across the land. And we all went
outside to see what it was and before long you could tell that it was
the sound of laughter and it was heading straight for us. Before any of
us knew what to do it was rolling right across our heads. And it was
frightening. Tiles were blown off roofs, bus shelters were left
buckled, windows shattered, tables and chairs began to rock and trees
were upturned. And all the petals were torn from the roses and flew up
into the sky so that it looked as though it was speckled with
blood.

And from that moment it was as though everything had been a dream. All
the men carried on as they had always done, without saying a word about
what had happened. And for days we wandered about, wondering what had
happened, clutching these long bare stalks covered in thorns.

There are one or two of us who have photographs of that time; of that
week when we all felt fine. With our eyes wide open and expectant.