Flowers in an Abandoned Greenhouse

A thin ring of sparrows held court around the boundary of the trashcan. They bobbed and bounced away as I drew near. Only one surprised me. Sitting in the filth, that small brash captain, picking away at the uneaten buns. Magnanimously, I let it too escape, before I threw my plastic cup into the bin.

My own companion waited by the path, beautiful and blurry in my memory. She called to me, and I came back. Soon, so did the sparrows.

“Won’t you tell me?” I pleaded, once we were together on the trail. She didn't answer. She might have been a lover, maybe just a friend; as I look back, I can’t even recall. Perhaps that was the secret I was looking for, some clarity from her, one way or the other. We walked along the path, embroiled in the nature that our city would permit: troupes of sparrows, old oak trees, bees about the business of their pollinating. The greenhouse that we went towards was Victorian, a structure from a bygone era, seated at the far end of a garden in the park. On the other side, far larger, was the zoo, where buffalo burgers and elephant steaks were sold at the Savannah Snackbar.

“If I tell you,” she told me, “you have to swear not to tell anybody.” I would have sworn on my grandmother’s life, in that hot and verdant moment. But as I recall, I simply said:

“Of course.”

She laughed. “How can I be sure you won’t be so agreeable to someone else?”

She couldn’t. “You can." This just made her smile and walk ahead.

When my grandmother was dying, she moved to the Southwest, for a single-story existence away from any trace of the humidity that ravaged her frail body with unending coughs. Despite a one-year prognosis, she had endured for five, growing a universe of life in that rainbanished land. Back home, she had been a master gardener, and when I visited her, myself a weedy teen, I was stunned to see the garden she had raised out of the desert. She would sit me down and ask me how I was, whether I was doing well in school and sports. “Always play the field,” she would remind me with a smile, and she would ask me to tell stories, and remind me too that I should ask about her stories while I could. I sat there, dutiful and sullen, and I sat there when the ambulance arrived, and when, from her hospital bed, she told me she was scared. “Everything will be okay,” I said, somehow believing it. “You’re a good kid,” she said. And then she died.

I remember her body in the hospital bed, its humanity drained out, its mouth agape. Taken and held rigid by cold nature. I never saw her coffin lowered into the still earth.

“A writer,” she had told me, “should really know the names of flowers.” I never made it past 'marigold.'

I can’t recall her stories now, and, back in the greenhouse, I couldn’t retain either what my friend leaned in and whispered, her words falling like petals from her lips. But as I lie here, dying, I remember this inscribed above the entrance to that place:

Where nature springs, there too, nature is held.

I am back there, in the greenhouse, and the people are all gone. We are each of us degenerating, me and all the other flowers. But I am reaching, an endless weed, towards the small cracks that are up there in the ceiling. I am reaching, thorns outstretched, towards the sparrows, and the sunlight, and the sky.