Boys Like Flowers Too

oatmeal and coir doormats

A flower blossoms
for its own joy.
Oscar Wilde

V
      OLIVER STEPPED OUT of the back of Daley's Flowers one bright Sunday morning in his signature brown boat shoes, a whimsical look whirling inside the vesicles of his eyes. On Sundays the shop opened at eleven, which left Oliver with the option to either sleep in late or soak up the mellow morning atmosphere of a local park or café. Even though it had already been four months since Oliver relocated to the city, there was still much of it he hadn't yet explored—he'd spent the majority of his days cultivating the permanence of his little flower business, like a bird foraging the forest floor for nesting prospects. As deceivingly well-kept as the rest of his shop may have been, the back-room of Daley's Flowers could only be described as a theatre of war; walnut floorboards speckled with smatterings of white paint like blood splatter and smears of fleshy, peach clay; leaf trimmings, alongside the decollated limbs of stalky verdure; and long, winding tracks of soil criss-crossing in every which way. Though Oliver could comfortably spend all of his hours in that room—which, admittedly, he mostly did—it still came as a refreshing shock to step outside for just a few moments every now and then. Locking the mossy green door behind him, Oliver resisted the urge to put his earphones in, for the air was brisk and agreeable and the birds were cheerful and chirping. He didn't want to miss that.

       The walls of the passage in which Oliver's backdoor was nestled was a Mediterranean-esque hue of gentle beige verging on satiny sunset. It was so narrow that sometimes he struggled to move his stock in and out. Oliver glanced up, as his father's advice (long ago, delivered to him under the archaic ceilings of a cathedral in Seville he once visited as a child) whispered to him; his father's words were engraved into his daily life now, inscribed onto the toes of his shoes—so as to never allow him hold his head down—*Always look up, Oliver. The best things in life are always Up.* Granted, his father was an architect, so perhaps he hadn't meant for those few words of wisdom to be taken so poetically, but they spurred Oliver's gaze upwards regardless. The waning, aureate glow of mid-morning tinted the parts of the backstreet that was on its tip-toes a warm, rosy blush. Sparrows danced across the sheep's-cotton-mottled sky, dipping and diving, wings tucked streamline into their silky brown bodies before fluttering open again like the lacey cotton of an oriental fan, seeing the small passerine birds pirouette into the sky once more. A single sparrow plunged daringly into the urban ravine in front of Oliver and then retreated heavenwards again.

       When he emerged onto the Main Street, Oliver felt the snappish wind immediately and mercilessly whisk away with it the thin layer of warmth previously trapped between his bare chest and blue crew-neck sweater, which he'd spent ages patiently incubating inside his apartment like a brooding mother hen. He yelped, chattered his teeth for all of five seconds then, remembering to test his Winter Theory, promptly convinced himself it wasn't that cold. His theory was, in essentiality, a practice of mind over matter. Each time he endeavoured to exercise it, he waged a willing war upon his psyche from behind the primitive walls of his own skin and the bows of his bones. It was a coup d'etat; he would draw resolve from the very keels of his body, have it wash upon his decks like a warm sea wave. He was his own usurper—Oliver liked this idea, it gave him a sense of child-like freedom—freedom only a child can experience—a way for him to prod at the netting of the ego. It worked for a minute or two. He even went as far as to embrace the blizzard, if only briefly, spreading his arms out wide and savouring the way the swift wind whistled and weaved through his goldfinch fingers and hair like the ochre feathers of the sparrows soaring above him, as free and sacrosanct as the very wind beneath their wings. Then he snapped his frail bird arms back into place around his shivering torso, the sliver of liberty these frivolous games of Oliver's evoked seeping back into the decking of his ribs to slosh indefinitely at the hull of his heart. While shop canopies fluttered wildly in the harsh weather, throwing shards of shattered sunlight upon the cobbled streets like tin foil trampolines, it crossed Oliver's mind to move his display indoors. All that served to do was remind him of the cornflower-eyed boy who'd entered his shop on that one occasion the same way a brusque gust of wind swings his door open on a stormy day.