ALL THAT WAS LEFT BEHIND

Frilly Silly Bouquets

The wiry teenage girl started to cry. She crumpled down on the grass like a rag doll, waves from her black dress tousled over the grass around her. Raged tears clawed down her cheeks, leaving red streaks of anguish, making her face a mucky wet mess of tightening despair.

             How strange she looked there. She reminded him of her mother in that very moment. It was all so very strange to see her, as if it was Catherine crumpled there on the ground, lonely and confused, just like the good old days.

            The boy came up from behind like a pale ghost emerging from the shadows, and sat down beside her. He looked pretty good in his sophisticated black suit-cool, handsome even. He and the daughter looked like consummate opposites sitting there together.

            Concern etched in the boy’s eyes; he was almost drawn in towards her to help. Fool that he was, unaware that she and her family were so far from being helped. They whole lot of them were simple ones; flailing against the wind, dangling from a mere root over the edge of a rocky cliff.

            He watched from behind in the trees as the boy talked to the daughter. That silly boy conveyed through his awkward body language that he was trying to comfort the little teenage girl. He swung his arm across her shoulder, like it was the only bridge to get to her. It probably was. They sat like that for a while. The boy had given up on chatting with her, so they just sat in each other’s company.

            It was all so cliché to him.

            Minutes later, the boy struggled to get up, and almost lost his footing in the process. He gestured towards the car, explaining his whereabouts. The girl nodded, and then scrubbed her face with her hands, unsuccessfully trying to destroy the evidence of her tears. Her face remained red and slightly puffy. Then the boy walked away, looking kind of unsure of himself as he hiked over the grass to meet the path that lead to their car, leaving the girl to herself.

            She had a flower cupped in her hands. A white one. The name of it slipped his mind. She turned it over, fingering the flowery buds. The pureness and white aura of the flower beamed in the clutches of her dark dress and black sorrow. He could smell its innocence in the midst of the black ocean of the dark dress. He could sense her own innocence, as she was careful not to fall into the ocean’s grasp.

            He looked away, down at his lap, and then pretended to be engaged with his pale, wrinkled fingers.

            Just then, a murmur washed over him from the wind. It carried the trail of tiny fragments of dust just in front of his face like little sparkles of crystal. Mesmerized, he followed them with his eyes until they breezed out of sight. They whispered to him like a wind chime.

            He saw the woman from the funeral walk into his sight from behind his phone. With one of the pallbearers accompanying her. The two of them located the dark little girl, the daughter, and rushed up towards her.

            The woman pulled her up, taking her under her arm.

            They chatted for a moment, and the pallbearer squeezed them into a tight embrace. Murmurs exchanged amongst them, as the girl only nodded and listened with her broken heart, and attempted to understand.

            When they released, the woman gave a sudden jerk, as if a shiver ran down her spine. She reluctantly gazed around her surroundings, before her eyes fell upon his.

            He didn’t feel embarrassed of the fact that she caught him starring. He never felt that jolted shame that should have affected him.