Flowers

- The flowers, I say.

The flowers. I say these two words the way you would say I am dying if
you were dying. Why are you being so pissy today? This is what the
other person would say, this is what would provoke my response: I am
dying. Raging: I am dying. Firing the words like angry bullets into the
carcass of a dead cow. Realising in the doing so that the act is futile
- after all, the cow is dead, the bullets will not kill him more - and
gaining satisfaction from the futility.

This is how I say The flowers.

She is reading a magazine on the couch. I say reading. The magazine is
open on her bare legs (the hem of her cotton flower printed summer
dress is high, obscured by the edge of the paper which she is holding
up like a lazy shield, her bare thighs emerge naked from paper), she is
turning pages much too quickly. She couldn't be reading that fast. She
is being pissy.

- What about the flowers, she says in an unregistered letter lost in
the post voice.

She doesn't even look up. There is an article she is tracing with her
finger. A crease appears (a beautiful crease, I am derailed) between
her eyes: this is something she wants to know about. It takes me a
second, standing there over her, looming as it were, to ascertain that
she has not in fact asked me a question. She has said the words what
about the flowers one after the other, has set them, in fact, in a line
the way a child arranges brightly coloured building blocks.

- The flowers, I say again. The flowers - the fucking flowers -

and I understand as one who has newly attained great wisdom that she is
sick of me, tired of me, wanting to wash her hands of me and my
theatrics always straining at their leash like a dog on heat.

She doesn't speak and I sit on the floor, abruptly, by her feet.