SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 101
RUNNER-UP — CREATIVE PROSE
Dylan Brody
Blooming Unlikely
The story began before you know the story had begun, because it began with the end
of the previous story which is hardly worth telling, hardly worth remembering even, were it
not the start of the story that you hope will be worth telling. You hope it will be well worth
telling.
When the girl came home with the stick in the vase, though, you did not know it was
the start of a story. You didn’t know it was the start of the end. You just knew that she had a
stick in a vase that she presented to you as a gift with enthusiasm you deemed unwarranted.
She said it was a Psychic Orchid that could only bloom under very specific circumstances,
that it could only bloom in the presence of true, deep, real love.
You said, “Oh,” because you didn’t want to be a dick and because you wanted, just a little
bit, to believe such a thing could exist.
She said, “When it blooms it will be the most beautiful, purple flower you have ever
seen.”
And you said, “Oh,” because you still didn’t want to be a dick and also you had been
trying to figure out how to end the relationship for a while now and you were pretty sure that
if the orchid bloomed it would just prove that it wasn’t psychic at all, it was just an orchid.
But it didn’t look like an orchid anyway. It looked like a stick in a vase.
Then she told you how much a fictitiously psychic flower costs to purchase and you
could no longer not be a dick, so you said, “You spent three hundred dollars on a fucking stick
in a vase? Are you out of your mind?”
Then there was an argument and you apologized, even though you didn’t actually feel as
though you’d done anything wrong. Then she apologized and confessed that she was pretty
sure she’d been conned into buying a stick in a vase for three hundred dollars with your credit
card. Then you kissed and had sex and the next morning and the next few mornings you ate
breakfast with her, pretending not to be aware of the stick in the vase on the table between
you, pretending not to be aware that it had not bloomed, that it was probably not psychic or
even an orchid and pretending most of all, pretending hardest of all that you had not found
the receipt that revealed it had cost nearly twice as much as she had told you that night.
When she yelled at you that you were not romantic enough, not spontaneous enough
and entirely too judgmental, when she stormed out with a backpack full of the stuff of hers
that she kept at your apartment, it was really more of a relief than anything, even if the
apartment did seem sadly quiet once she had gone.
You noticed, after a while, that you had started talking to the stick in a vase every time
you walked past it. You would nod to it and say, “Hey. How’m I feelin’?” It never answered
and it never bloomed. It was a stick in a vase that had cost almost six hundred dollars though
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