Flowers
My yard has four distinguishing features. The first feature is our house. It has blue siding, orange shingles, and a brick chimney. The whole thing always seemed a bit off kilter, that's what Mama said when we moved in, but I quite like it. Second, the large colorful flowers wrapping around the perimeter of our blue house. They are all daisies of some classification, some larger than others. The third feature is a more current one, in the sense that is it new and likely will not stay long. A fat brown squirrel lying a few feet in front of me. It’s black eyes were open, staring aimlessly towards the sky. The thing loosely held a seed in it’s strange, clawed paws. There was a gash running from above it’s right eye down to the bottom of its neck. The fur surrounding it was dark and matted with blood, though the center still glistened with the last of the squirrel’s fresh blood trickling down onto the grass.
Papa called from across the yard to ask what I was staring at. Me standing still to observe was nothing new, though this one would probably be new territory to him. I simply pointed and waited for him to come see. When he did he quickly turned me around, pulling the rag out of his back pocket to wrap the squirrel. He crouched down beside me once it was covered, “It’s okay you know, he just had a fall. We’ll bury him by the flowers, that sound good?” His voice was dripping in honey coated concern, as though I might flee if what he said wasn’t palatable enough. I nodded, holding my hands out for the dirty rag. After a moment of hesitation, my eyes never straying from his as I stared him down in silent challenge, it was placed in my hands and I followed Papa to the garden, it was still warm. He began digging, but I tugged the tool away from him, gesturing to a smaller patch of flowers a few feet away.
“I think he would like it better over there.” This was what he expected, it sounded childish, so he complied. Papa liked it when I spoke like a child, said without saying that it was more fitting, more natural. He began to dig a shallow hole a few inches from where the green stems came up from dark earth. I watched as a small stain began to grow out around a corner of the already dirty rag. There were threads falling over my fingers with bits of dirt still clinging to them. A fitting shroud. Papa eventually finished his small hole, placing the package in it and smoothing the earth back into place with his hands.
“Not a bad place to rest, eh sport?” I never understood why he called me that; I abhor sports.
I looked unblinkingly into his eyes, “Pretty bad place to rest, not too bad as far as graves go though.” His face fell at this, and he looked down towards the small grave once more. He had hoped I wouldn’t realize the squirrel was dead. I think he was more bothered by it than I. Maybe I should have just gotten rid of it for him as soon as I found the poor thing. I never understood why he was bothered by these things, the little creatures served no purpose beyond randomly and accidentally planting trees, which we could do with much more accuracy and discretion.
The fourth defining feature of my yard is Charlie. He has been gone for almost three months now. Mama and Papa say they miss him, but now they get more sleep and I can read in peace. Papa goes out and puts up posters most days, and Mama stays in to console me when she is upset. She usually constricts me and drips tears onto my shirt. The entire ordeal is as a whole rather unpleasant.
The pictures Mama and Papa picked for the posters never seemed right to me. He’s pictured as clean and well groomed, smiling wider than he ever did, with every pearly white on display. More often than not I found him with his face screwed up, making some sort of unpleasant noise while drool and snot dripped from his face like a faulty faucet. I refused to touch him. When he wasn’t squalling, the smelly thing would amble around on all fours, all unfocused black eyes and clumsy fat limbs.
Mama and Papa tried to make us share a room once, roughly half a year after Charlie got here. They dragged a small caged cot into the corner of my room and made me put away my dangerous things. Honestly, if the smelly little thing couldn’t tell what objects belonged to it that wasn’t my fault. I put them away at first, eventually reverting back to my usual controlled chaos with the added feature of giving Charlie’s corner a wide berth. I tried telling him not to touch anything of mine, but he would just stare blankly and try to take whatever I had in my hand, and I was not letting that dirty smelly creature get its paws on my toys. It was a mutual understanding. I kept away from it, and it kept away from me.
Our mutual understanding came to a halt two days in. It was night, and I was reading with my window open to enjoy the feel of the cold air against my skin. Charlie was loudly voicing something that didn’t concern me. After a few minutes of this Mama and Papa came in. They rudely shut my window before picking up the little thing. How was I supposed to know the cold would bother him.
Within a week I began to notice the changes. Mama and Papa would move around a room with the same motivations as a catatonic sloth. They had bags around their eyes and would fail at menial tasks. They even made my lunch half an hour late one day. This creature was deteriorating them far too quickly for my liking.
At this point, given that I had lost at least some of the constant, unwanted attention Mama and Papa somehow seemed to enjoy doling out, I could divert my efforts and energy elsewhere. I began to try to train Charlie. It was difficult at first, I quickly found it was easier to get him to imitate me than to listen to me, but soon he learned to stop howling when he saw me and turn around when he got too close to my toy perimeter. It seemed like a solution was at hand. I was his pacifier. That was until Mama and Papa moved him into their room. On one hand, I didn’t have to keep a constant eye out for the germ riddled creature in my own territory. On the other, my parents apparently had not mastered training the little thing as I had and had far too much difficulty trying to quiet it throughout most nights.
I tried many times to train Charlie again, but apparently Mama and Papa had altered his response already. Instead of being quiet when he saw me, the annoying thing only cried out louder. Couldn’t he see I was on his side? I was doing what was best for him. For all of us.
Papa wanted me to go out for sports. I had never done a sport before. The idea sounded more unpleasant than most things he proposed. He settled for science courses and time in the yard to “observe” as he put it. As Mother’s Day approached, Papa said I should do something. “Plant more flowers” he said, as though she didn’t already have flowers. No, I was not a gardener. I would not toil away my days in the dirt like Charlie. In the end my hands still met soil, and my flowers grew higher than any others in the yard.
I went out in the middle of the night after a silent argument with Charlie. It was time to plant the last of the flowers Papa had bought. Everyone would find them so lovely in the morning. I wonder if Papa would stop putting up posters if he realized he almost chose the same patch of earth as I did for his little creature.