Suadade: A Short Story Collection

Sunflowers and Golden Retrievers

Both the sunflower and the golden retriever are some of the first to go when the end of their time grows near. The sunflower fades faster than the rest of the bouquet, the thin yellow petals begin to brown, the seeds begin to crumble, and the stem starts to wilt while the others stand as strong and vivid as ever. The golden retriever's fur grows white in the face far before the other dogs, the golden barely surviving to the age of 11 and suffers with arthritis while the miniature poodle survives past 15 suffering only with bad breath. They know us for their whole lives, but they only take up a portion of ours. They are loved, they are lost. The sunflower and the golden retriever. Sunflower and goldens. Sun and gold. Sun, gold.

The golden sun shocks my body and jolts me back to life. My body heaves as my lungs fight to inhale a new breath. Revived. My body shivers as the cold sweat drips from my skin. No, not sweat. The water on my body is frozen, no drops fall. How did I get here? I can't move. I've been paralized. Paralized by fear, by the cold. How did I get here? The world is silent as my brain screams at me to stand.

My fingers push through the ice, breaking the cast that binds them to their lifeless prison. I wiggle my pinky finger; not paralized. I will my undead body to rise from the grass, the concrete, the ground. Where am I? It is in this moment I realize I am naked. The cast of the frozen water is the only thing that covers my bare skin, the most translucent clothing a person could put on. My nipples are hard due to the cold and I'm pretty sure my feet are an unseemly blue. I'm sure my lips are too. I use all of my strength to break through my icy cell and force myself into a sitting position.

From what I can make out through my half opened eyes, I'm sitting on the bank of a river which has frozen over. There's a crack in the ice just wide enough for a person to squeeze through. The splintering of the frozen water expands past the void of the hole, the cover of the water now thinner and delicate. My body came from there. I brush back some of the snow at my side to reveal a wilting blade of brown. I'm laying in what used to be grass and is now a frozen wasteland. There are no trees in my view, no sense that anything could be alive out here. No people, no animals. A blanket of snow tampers down any greenery. The world is white. Who am I? I don't remember. Visions of sunflowers and yellow dogs float through my vision. A woman is there. She's coming towards me.

The sunflower and the Golden Retriever have always been my favorites, they've never failed to make me smile. The other flowers in a bouquet don't seem to compare to the radiant sunflower; the roses too ordinary, the peonies too generic, the foliage just used to fill the empty space. Maybe it's the multi-use of the seeds: a tasty snack on the sidelines of a baseball game you don't want to be at or to make emergency flour in the middle of an unforeseen apocalypse. Maybe it's the fact that when I was really little my mom would sing "You are my sunshine" to me to help me fall asleep, and the daydreaming child in me would hum along, you are my sunflower. The fact that I could have the sun on a strong, neon stem in a blood red vase dying on the counter of a hospital room; left by a griever, forgotten. The memory sweeter than the scent of any flower. But a memory grows bitter now that my mother is in the ground, the nutrient dirt cannot revive the dead and make her grow. Make her come back to me.

I shake my head. I need to get up. I need to find help. I need something that I won't be able to find, though I am unsure what it is. I don't even know if I can stand up. I don't even know how I'm not dead. My body rocks back and forth, trying to create warmth and motion. I need to will away the frost that still holds down my legs and makes them heavy. My arms are weak. I can feel the ice nipping at my nose. There has to be a mild icicle forming there. There's one on my cheek as well. I taste the ice on my lips, not hydrating as water, but instead salty.

My body feels lighter now as if my bones have fled my body, burying within themselves to hide from the cold. I take this opportunity to shake the ice from my legs and stand, the snow crunching under my feet. I look over where I was laying and I see my body. I watch smoke, steam, water come out of my mouth. There is no more. I see myself, and I am no longer alive. I observe the hands and feet of the corpse. The lips, in fact, blue. The hair is frozen to their back as if they had dragged themself halfway up the bank then collapsed onto it. The legs were pale and pink, fighting to work until the end. The stomach sucked in, empty. The ribs are defined under the skin. I was small. I wanted to cry, but my body felt like ice. Was this real? I couldn't really be gone. I glanced behind me at the river.