Boys Like Flowers Too

nightly summons

XI
"I DON'T KNOW HOW OFTEN to water the big wiry one," Cillian confessed into the phone.

He heard shuffling on the other end of the line. "Cillian it's three in the morning."

"I know."

"Did you expect me to just be awake or did you expect to wake me?"

"I don't know. Neither, I suppose. I'm just looking at all these plants, thinking: I don't know how often to water that big wiry one."

Oliver laughed. His voice was softer than usual, like sleep hadn't loosened its grip on him just yet. Cillian would find the time to be sorry about waking the florist later. "Which one, Cillian?"

"It has— I don't know. The bottom looks braided together."

"Weeping fig. You can water it once every two weeks, or whenever the top several-or-so inches of soil dry out. But, I mean, everything got watered with the flood, so you shouldn't need to worry for a while. Couldn't this have waited until tomorrow?"

"Yes, maybe." No, it couldn't have. Don't you know this wasn't the reason I called you for? "Were you actually asleep?"

"Well, no."

Oliver expected Cillian to ask him what he was doing still awake; in fact, he probably should have asked Cillian what he was doing still awake, staring at weeping figs. Instead: "Well, that's all I ringed for. Go to sleep Oliver."

"I will. Goodnight Cillian."

OLIVER HAD ALWAYS IMAGINED their voices entangled somewhere in space when he spoke to someone on the phone, their words jostling back and forth along a vibrating string. Other people's phone calls would thread through the ado en masse, oblivious to one another. Even when the call was disconnected, their voices would continue flirting and frolicking together in that timeless vacuum, replaying old conversations like new, like someone who relives fond memories of their childhood friend, without realising they died last week. It always left him a little unsettled and wanting inside.

"AM I TO CHANGE the water everyday?"

At least Cillian's phone call was at a more reasonable time of night this time. "For the cut blooms? Yes. If it's too much of a hassle I can come and do it for you. I know it was already presumptuous of me to ask you to look after nearly half my stock." There was an extended pause. Oliver thought about it. "But you already knew that, didn't you? That it needed changing everyday."

There was another pause. A breath out. "Yes."

The florist smiled, resting his head against the headboard of his hotel bed. This was something Oliver thought he could store at the back of his mind for later dissection, slow and savoured.
     
      They listened to each other's breathing. The expiratory gesture of breath begins in the upper body, and flows downward from there: the head drops back, the chest and abdomen collapse, the pelvis rocks forward. The inspiration of breath produces a fluid reversal of these events. What results is a cyclic sensation of emptiness, followed by fullness, and so on; of death and collapse, life and revival. The movement of the pelvis, to and fro, and the perception of death-unto-life are both distinctly sensual. Everything can be extrapolated back to a diminutive of sex.

"What did you do today?" That, too, can be derivative of sex. What did you do today, for you should have been with me?

Oliver sounded reluctant to reply; he might have liked to have stayed syncopating breath with Cillian for eternity, or at least until the sun rose. "The pickup truck I hired to take my unusable stock to landfill came this morning. I loaded everything up, dropped it off, came back. It took two runs. That took all day. Then I called up the suppliers I couldn't get ahold of over the weekend and rescheduled my shipments. Postponed them until further notice, really." Oliver couldn't get through his sentences nearly fast enough. He purposefully missed off the parts of his day where he thought of Cillian.

"Sounds productive."

"What about you?"

Thought of calling you, he was tempted to say. "Didn't change the flowers' water."

"That's very funny."

They fell back to mapping each other's breath, that mortal rhythm, simultaneously as though their words had been merely wasted breaths; in, out. It was at once sexual and asexual, decaying and regenerative. Was Cillian smoking? Oliver thought he could imagine it; three beats for embers in, two for out. He thought back to their hands, entwined, apart, outspread, clinched together. Moving over each other, drawing away, orbiting close enough to pull each other to pieces. He thought of all the ways the hand can promise, praise, betray, refuse, beckon, command, control, worship, cherish, wound. A silent language vast enough to make the tongue envious. He thought of Cillian's hands, their genius. How Oliver wished he could have watched the boy transform wood with his hands. How Oliver wished he could be transformed under them too.

They stayed like that until Oliver surmised Cillian's cigarette had burnt itself completely to ashes. "I'm going to go now." A pause, no breath. "Goodnight Oliver."

"Goodnight Cillian."