Elena Malkov
The orchid’s spike runs like a supple spine, ribs branching into flowers, bent under the burden of unopened buds.
I’m walking through the grocery store, thoughts sticky with trichomes—vision overwhelmed by violently colorful packaging—a pleasant low thrum in my head. I am heavy with myself.
Bouquets, pots of succulents (spiky, speckled), red celosia in velvet undulations, like a growing brain.
It is too hot to go back outside any time soon, but if I stay here, I’ll buy something. Dervish of capitalism! My existence is only the superfluous drip of financial liquidity.
In orderly brick flowerbeds outside the grocery’s doors, tiny tufts of flowers carefully planted: pansies, begonias, and the occasional purple kale reaching its leaves up as though ready to leap straight off the earth.
I pick up a can of ginger ale and approach the checkout.
Crepe myrtles unfold. Big waxy magnolia petals droop from the branches. Lilies splay multi-hued tongues toward the light.
I merge once more with the thick heat of the sun, trying to inhale the ponderous, thick blue of the sky. Veering away from the parking lot, which radiates its own tarry warmth, I head back to the neighborhood, to that merry cluster of homes and lives.
Vines sprout and spill over raised gardens into the sidewalk. Each leaf is home to a spider web and its occupant, hiding and biding its time. Hostas spit pale, hand-like flowers straight up out of their floppy leaves.
On days like this, I have the immodest desire to feel everything. And I think I can even manage it if I relax the muscles in my forehead and look closely at each door-garden-window and suck out from these the jeweled life they contain:
In the squat house with cream siding, a husband and wife suffocate each other in aggrieved silence. The stately red-brick with whitewashed windowsills and navy shutters contains a hopeless dream and too many small children. On the corner, a wraparound porch encloses an old family pain, something whole generations still see in their nightmares.
Billow hydrangea crowns the most venerable lawns. Clusters of dainty blue buds ringed with careful white blossoms so delicate that to witness them is to believe in the existence of fairies. Bees hover over everything, cicadas chitter, and curious metallic-green flies settle on branches and low garden walls.
Ginger ale soothes the burning in my throat. Fizzy sugar and root magic; I am still walking, still getting nowhere. I’ve let the stories of the houses carry me down the sidewalk, getting lost in fancy. Oh, but this isn’t frivolous! I’m not daydreaming; I’m seeking pure, sweet, bubbling truth. To encompass everything, to know everything—it is the only balm of life. The flowers shout their names to me as I walk, and I can see them, enumerate them, and feel their presence. Perhaps naming is only a desperate form of control. Still, knowledge must be the healthiest object to cling to—awash in drama, memory, shame, gossip, nonsense, and maybe an ounce of something purer: distill it, preserve it in amber. Before they carry me off.
The big, unkempt azalea bush is stringy without its brief blossoms, growing haphazardly on a layer of gray rock.
A dogwood months with
no flowers. And where, I ask,
did all that spring go?
Elena Malkov is a fiction writer living in Richmond, VA. Her work has been published in Ethel Zine, RIC Journal, and Slippage Lit, among others. She is the co-founder and fiction editor of Sublunary Review.