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- 10/06/2017
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Dinner is Prompt-ly at Eight - 18. Chapter 18 - Bloom
Bloom
By Cole Matthews
He swore on his mother’s grave, but then he swore on most everything.
It all began with a daisy, plastic, and fastened with a pin to a shirt. The flower drew his eye from across the yard, hanging in a rack amidst other items. Rows of shirts, mostly white, but a few baby blue ones and even yellow, on hangers and had little bits of masking tape with various prices, most between twenty-five and fifty cents.
“What the hell is that?” he asked fingering the shirt with the pinned flimsy fake boutonniere. “Why the fuck would someone--?
“There are children right over there,” a woman’s whispered voice barked at him. “Watch your mouth.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled in response, then he turned and asked her softly, “Why in goddamn would a man fasten an ugly thing like this to his fucking shirt. It’s pretty shitty looking to me.”
“Can’t you talk without swearing?”
He ignored her question. Lots of people asked that question of him.
In fact, on Tuesday, she asked him the most peculiar question. She being his boss, Rita Colwell.
Rita asked him if he had Tour Read’s Syndrome. He didn’t know what that may be. He tried looking up places called Read and the kinds of guided tours they had. There was a place in England called Read and another in Canada. However, except for some especially lovely gardens and a few pubs, these places weren’t exactly vacation spots.
Rita was a red-haired woman of an indeterminate middle age, somewhere between forty and sixty, skinny as a rail, who sent him on his assignments. These weren’t especially difficult jobs, but they paid well. It also allowed him minimal contact with the public. Something which he was eternally grateful to her about. He hated talking with people, because they were so fucking screwed up in the head.
She interacted with him, and it was clear she found his vocabulary enjoyable, at least it seemed so. Rita would laugh out loud when they talked. She’d tell him what to pick up and where and when it was to be delivered. He would do so quietly, quickly, and efficiently. But, during the assigning part of the job, they did talk a bit.
At least they talked, until the day Shirley brought Hillary to his office.
His office was more of a tricked-out mudroom, positioned in the back of his apartment building. It had an old washer/dryer combo that didn’t work anymore and he’d used the dusty tops of the appliances as a bookshelf. He had his manuals lined up neatly with old coffee cans of rusty nails and screws as bookends.
His desk was a coffee table that had long legs attached making it an appropriate height. His chair was an old tractor seat on three iron legs. It was painted red and was shiny in the morning light. He was sitting at his desk, fiddling with his phone, when his mother showed up with his sister. Hillary looked distracted and uncomfortable, like something sinister was bothering her.
His mother looked pissed. She had a steely grimace set to her lips, when she said, “We have a problem.”
He asked what it was, and Hillary spilled the beans about her husband. It was unforgiveable, so he shook his head as they explained the situation.
Quickly, he assured them he’d take care of the problem. He grabbed his car keys and left them in his office, Hillary crying, and his mother tending to her depressed daughter.
Austin opened the door to him. He entered and they moved to the bedroom quickly. He helped Austin pack a suitcase, they had to leave. He finished placing the neatly folded white, blue, and yellow shirts, and at last, he moved to the dresser.
Austin was fingering the ugly plastic tulip. It was crushed, smashed by his wife’s hand. She’d found it in their bed, recognized it from the back of her brother’s car, and ordered him to get out. He was doing so.
Austin kissed him, and the kiss deepened. “I’m sorry it came to this.”
“I’m fucking not,” he answered. “I love you, goddamnit.”
Austin enfolded Blake into his arms and they just stood there feeling each other’s warmth.
Thanks,
Cole
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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