After "White Tulips" (ca. 1920), by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

There is a woman I admire who never throws out dead flowers. “It breaks her heart,” her mother explained, “so I do it for her.” I brought The Admired Woman flowers so I could throw them away for her. Something about life cycles, acts of service. Something about being able to make sadness disappear felt so heroic.

Just before Easter, someone I loved and hoped to love for a long time died. I wasn’t thinking about anything but dust and dirt, the feral hadn’t even left my eyes, when a beloved friend dropped off white tulips. “Those were our flowers,” I told her, fighting tears on the phone. When she asked, I couldn’t remember why.

I arranged the flowers in a vase and backed away like a dog out of a haunted kitchen. I thought I could carry on with my sadness without their interruption, but the tulips whimpered that first night. They shook. They waned with the moon.

I woke with dawn and rushed them to the window. I poured my own water into their vase. Their opening was ceremonious, fanfare in hyperspeed. I asked them to slow down and enunciate, to imagine everyone in the room naked, if that helped. They were bone white like an extraction. Never mind the sun’s greedy steamrolling into another day. It was me and the dozen newborn lives I’d inherited. I had their long swan necks and their rolling leaves. The light was beside the point.

The next night, when they bent, I swore, they screamed. They stood there, filling the air with something dark purple, and wept. I wanted to take their sadness away. I thought I would never fall asleep, but morning didn’t mind if I was well rested. Resurrection felt vulgar and my head buzzed with the obnoxious birdsong of hope. I did not want to feel optimistic.

I wanted to stay in the warm, wet soil and in lieu of living, begin decomposition. I rushed the skeletal remains of the tulips to the trash behind my building in a white nightgown. A trail of petals fell on the musty hall carpet. I was a ghost haunting an angel, a madwoman locked away, a magician’s assistant, the groundskeeper of my own longing. I was a brokenhearted woman in her pajamas next to a heap of trash on Easter day.

—Erika Veurink

Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Entropy, Hobart, Tiny Molecules, and x-r-a-y.