“Arboretum” by Joy Deng
The flowers of the rosy dipelta are small, white, and pink. Five rounded lobes, one for each month of marriage. The uneven petals are nearly violet on the outside, but inside the trumpet throat a bright orange path draws him in. He leans forward, the way she used to, dipping her nose into the petals. As if falling into an eardrum, he follows the orange capillaries until he hears her voice, sees her wrist dotted with bruises where they couldn’t find the veins. His fingers tighten around the bracts at the base of a flower. Off snaps the flower, gone is her voice, and in his palm is a shieldless dipelta that smells like honey tea.
Slowly he moves, along the edge of the grassy knoll. Closing his fist around the lone dipelta, he looks onto a row of Tibetan peonies, folds upon folds of white silky petals. A dark bleeding purple cossets the yellow powdery pistils. Dahlias were her favorites, but peonies she preferred to touch. Now he grazes his cheek against the flower and feels the taffeta of a wedding dress. He wanted children, as many as they could handle. Let’s have two, she said. There are more petals than he can count, and he could tear them, one by one, to discover the ends, the days they had together, the number of mornings promised.
A small girl appears beside him, the shuffling of her shoes on the sundried grass. Her skirt blazes like dandelions, sunbursts sprouting through the ground. A blue dolphin helmet shields her thick dark curls and, in her hand, a red metallic scooter swings dangerously close to his leg. Off snaps a peony, not the bleeding taffeta but a bud folded in fetal softness.
The child’s father arrives, picks her up, and scolds her. No scootering in the cemetery. “Dad?” says the girl, lifting a marigold to the man’s face. “Can I put this in your hair?”
At this he turns to hide his rupture, drops the bud of the peony onto the grass, and walks swiftly down the path. But the girl’s voice has pierced his cheeks, his eardrums, his nose. In a jerking move he opens his mouth and jams the dipelta into his throat. Gone are the colors, the sounds of flowers. But he can taste her, and he tastes and tastes, swallowing the bitter tea.
Born in China, Joy Deng grew up in the U.S., Switzerland, and Canada. She has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel, Harvard Review, and Developmental Biology. She lives outside Boston.