The Orchid

 He gave me a flower, only once. He turned up to my front door, orchid in hand, and held it out to me with a sheepish smile. When I answered, I feigned delight, pretending surprise. 

We’d spoken over the phone, only an hour before. I’d told him the news about my new job without him having to ask, as usual. The week prior I’d been round to his with champagne and roses, to celebrate his promotion. He’d blushed, his cheeks turning almost the same shade of pink as the roses in my arms. It was as if no one had ever bought him flowers before. 

The supermarket price tag was still attached, to the side of the plant pot facing me. I took it from him, thanking him by pressing my lips to his for a brief second, and carried it upstairs with me, the pot propped in the crook of my arm. I'd already placed it on my windowsill by the time he'd followed up behind me.

Only two weeks later, he was smoking a cigarette out of my bedroom window. He’d declined my offer of morning sex, and I was watching his hands as he ran a fingertip along one of the leaves remaining on the stalk. I wished for my body to be an orchid. 

“This is dead,” he said. We both exhaled. 

“Do you think? I thought maybe I could save it.” 

He said nothing, just smoked some more. He broke his eye contact with the dead thing to raise an eyebrow at me. I tried to maintain his gaze, despite the sleep clumping in the corners of my eyes. He turned back round again to face the street. 

“I’m sorry,” I said eventually to his back, once I’d gotten over myself. “I told you I wasn’t very good at looking after plants.”

His shoulders tensed slightly, though he said, “It’s fine.” He spoke so quietly I almost asked him to repeat himself. I refrai–

“It’s fine,” he repeated, without my asking, and without turning round. 

But I could tell. It was his posture, the slump of his shoulders and the dead weight of his forearm propped up on the window ledge, as if bringing the cigarette down to his lips was no longer worth the effort it required.  I imagined the smoke settling like soot into the basin of his lungs. 

The sharp angle of his wrist, bent, as if snapped, punctured the outline of the outside scene, capturing the cigarette smoke as it trailed through the cerulean sky. From here, if I squinted, I could line up the shape of his breath with the tendrils emerging from the chimney breasts. In this one-eyed view I imagined the smoke climbing up out of his lungs, up through his chest, and flowing all the way along his long limbs until it reached the jagged, almost perpendicular jut of his wrist bone. Like a cloud eking out of itself until every last inch of breath had met the sky. 

I tried to make a joke. I don’t know why. I said something like, “God knows why you think I’d be able to look after a child, when I can’t even keep a single orchid alive.” 

He didn’t laugh. This made it much worse. 

“It was a gift, not a test,” he muttered. 

Some distance behind him, his body blocking the sunlight that was trying to stream through the window, I was still lying in my bed. He spoke to the open space outside and the new day that lay before us, horizontal like me. 

From where I was, I heard only his last words, and thought about how I’d failed. 

Today, I put on my prettiest dress and went by myself to buy a bouquet of flowers. I went to my favourite florist in town, the one I’ve been going to for years, that I always go to. The bouquet I selected was a combination of two; I never could resist the sunflowers. The flowers themselves weren’t for me, but it felt right to wear white for petals. 

Afterwards, after smiles and thank yous and exclamations of beauty, and undeterred by the sunshine-y rain shower, I walked myself home. On the way I passed through my favourite park. It was almost completely empty, save for a couple of basketball players on the courts. They were playing on through the downpour. The thud of their ball mingled with the taps of the drops of rain on the leaves all around me, and my bouquet. I stopped and tilted my head upwards, smiling, and, for a brief moment, I remembered. 

He gave me an orchid, once.