bad yr for the flowers

A Bad Year for the Flowers

Cormac sat, surrounded by paints: brickish brackish reds and flying auburns that sang upon the walls. I am Cormac. Cormac is me, he repeated. Picking up a wider paintbrush, he began working on the petals. With the mercy of a creator, he let the two angle down softly, intertwining. Whispering to each other, he thought. He felt the wall again: it felt white. Smooth but still, little bumps dotted the ups and downs of the living room, sprawling out into his canvas. In his furious toil, his wooden palette has been corrupted: corrupted indeed! In his reds were the browns of an earth, making it murky. Salty: salty like so many oceans, swirling twirling and wet. He was enraptured by these swirls. The paints went up and down, side to side, in all the ways, laying curls and little flourishes in their wake. Paints are like water, but thicker.

He remembered eating the glue earlier this week. Mother didn’t like that, but she would like this: a rose. Her marigolds died. Her geraniums died. Her chrysanthemums died. They all died. Violet with the screened porch said the garden was cursed. It was demons: demons and hellfire killing the plants. Cormac remembered this, and wanted to give Mother a rose. He let a wayward petal flow and ascend into the ceiling.


***

	Cormac, admiring a pine branch, let the resin ball on his hands with his sweat and threw the ball into the flame; it let out a little scream. Sand in his toes, and grass tickling his heels, he was playing. Music from the radio: its guitars exploding and cymbals crashing and wooshing all around. It felt good. He laboured: tensing the curve of the branches until they snapped, building petty fortresses to burn in the pit.
	...oh won’t you please! Be my little baby...
	I’m a little baby too, he thought. Mother paced— making disappointed rounds around the garden, looking at the withered stalks and depressed, malnourished petals. The gloomy petals were darkened, dried: set in chalky dirt.
“I just don’t get this god damn!” She stomped a petty stomp.
	“Now now, look,” said Father. Cormac pretended not to see his pointing.
	“It’s just that every year, it doesn’t—just quite—“ Mother interrupted herself with a cigarette. Cormac let a big stream of it enter his lungs. It was bitter, nutty: like cough medicine. Flavour cornucopia. Cormac edged away, sensing they may want privacy. They said more alone.

...for every kiss you give me, I’ll give you three…

	Cormac was out of sight with the house obscuring the view. However, he could still hear, though it was a little faint.

	Cormac couldn’t quite make out these words. They were bursts exploding. In the midst, he heard a melody from Father he’d never heard before: it started high, then trickled down into a bassy obscenity. These words were new. He heard the one before, earlier trying to spell it out onto his school books: hoar, hore, hoer, hure: that was a mean lady. Was Ma a mean lady? The words flowed in ejaculatory yells and excursions. The air went from red, pale pink, orange, yellow, and bright intense white, to a black when Cormac heard action. The sounds of action, when something happens there is a crash.

…you mean? …my house! … water… damn flowers …. of course … won’t you listen! …the kid…fine! …fucking…leaving, now!...

***

		It was a bad year for the flowers, this is why Cormac drew the big rose on the living room walls. He studied the chalky dirt, had felt it in his hands, and thought it needed water. He didn’t know. Cormac’s flower would never need water.
Paint is like water, but thicker.