Feature: Short Story - Flowers from the Gift Shop

By Sarah Schiavoni

He loved the suddenness of spring—closing his tired eyes on grey and brown and opening them to shades of cool green hovering just outside his window. Spring always seemed to arrive overnight, but really it arrived by steady ascent, with hardly a soul taking notice. While the skeletal trees cast shadows on dry grass and brown earth, spring slowly brewed in their roots and branches, ready to arrive in spurts of crisp green and soft yellow. Spring woke everything from a cold, winter slumber—the unfurled leaves yawned on trees, the flower buds stretched out on their stems.

He loved falling asleep seeing the twiggy crabapples outside his window and waking up to find them dotted with vibrant pink blooms. He loved to stand by the flaky brown tree trunks and splay his hands over the bark, feeling the gritty curls scrape against his fingers and palms. His kept his feet bare so he could feel the grass between his toes, wet with dew and springy in the early morning. He loved the fresh smells, the caress of sunlight, and the subtle calm, but mostly it was how spring arrived, so sudden and triumphant after such a long cold spell—it was life after death; a reawakening of the senses.

His mother had always loved the winter, even before she got ill. She loved the frost; loved to wake up and see its spiky fan over the windows, like iridescent lace. On winter mornings in the kitchen, while piling golden pancakes and steaming eggs onto plates, she’d ask her son if he’d seen “Jack’s paintings” on the windows that morning. She loved the crisp, glittering snow, white sun, and bare trees.

It seemed to suit her that her hospital room was always like winter—the bare wooden chair in the corner like a solitary tree and the white walls like sheets of shiny snow. The only color in the room came from a sparse grouping of smudgy Kinkade’s, their blurry cottage scenes a poor substitute for the spring season her son loved so much. Her room was a mix of cold metal, white plaster, and dry air. The starched, white sheets and itchy, vanilla-colored blanket on her hospital bed were synthetic and rough against her icy, translucent skin. He could have paid for her to be moved to a nicer room, but she always shook his head at the suggestion. He wanted her to feel at home in her room, but so long as she got hot tea in the morning and was able to watch the local evening news, she was content and needed nothing more.

He hated to sit with his mother there, watching her stare listlessly out into the hall at the passing nurses, her hands white with cold. She never looked at all the “Get Well Soon” cards she got, painstakingly arranged on the windowsill by him. Her wig rested in tangles on a stand in the bathroom; though her head was only dusted with feathery down, she felt no need to cover it up. He hated her apathy and the emptiness in her voice when they spoke during his visits.

“Mom, why don’t you let me bring some flowers in here?—Perk up the place?”
His mother shook her head and stared out the grubby windows.

“The gift shop girl told me she has red tulips…you like the color red, don’t you?”

Still staring out the window, his mother sighed and straightened out the covers by her waist. “The room is fine as it is. You know the pollen makes my nose itch.”

She looked tired and small. Her lips were chapped from the winter air drifting through the cracks in the window frame. Her hands were crawling with spidery, blue veins that disappeared under the skin of her wrists and elbows.

“How about Gerber daisies? She’s got every color under the sun down there.”

His mother groaned. “They look fake. Too bright. I don’t know how they get them to be those wild colors.”

“She’s got roses down there too. Remember how dad used to always get you a yellow rose on your birthday?”

She smiled just a bit at the memory, but quickly pushed the thought aside. Her husband had died the year before. Heart attack. She’d just found out the month before that she had cancer and was making plans for chemo. They’d spent hours browsing online wig stores during that month, laughing at the ridiculous hairstyles and colors that were offered.

“I don’t need the clutter. I’ve already got enough junk on my nightstand—those nurses keep bringing me these silly gardening and cooking magazines. And I don’t have space on the windowsill with all those cards filling it up.”

Her son frowned at her as she gestured at the table by her bed, pointing out the little pile she called “clutter.”

He wanted to bring a little color and life to her room. Every time he visited, he stopped by the gift shop and perused their small flower selection in the grimy, chilled container in the back. The shop mostly stocked generic, seasonal flowers, but occasionally they received prettier flowers, like star gazer lilies or purple irises. When he got to her room, shuffling slowly on the newly-waxed linoleum, he’d tell her about the flower selection and they’d argue over whether or not to put some in a vase in the room. Sometimes, his mother relented, too tired to grouse about flowers agitating her allergies or messing up her nightstand. Most times, his mother started to ignore him after the third or fourth flower suggestion, choosing instead to turn on the TV and tune him out.

When he did succeed in bringing her flowers, she’d complain to him—the flowers were too bright, they made her eyes water, they cost too much. She never threw them out, but, inevitably, the nurses would forget to change the water in the vase, the flowers would lose their color, and eventually, the blooms shriveled up and fell from the stem.

She allowed flowers on her birthday, and he brought her yellow roses, hoping to conjure up happy memories of her times with his father; hoping to bring some life to her cloudy eyes. For once, she didn’t complain. When he set them by her bed, her eyes crinkled with happiness for a brief moment, but she didn’t thank him or smile when he and the nurses sang a quiet “Happy Birthday” to her after.

“Your father was a wonderful man” she said, her eyes rheumy.

He smiled at her, but she had a faraway look. She’d forgotten he was in the room.

She died a few days later, wrapped up in her itchy blanket with the tiniest of smiles on her face. The roses drooped in the vase by her bed, touched with the winter cold. Their petals were wrinkled, the edges brown and curled under. She hadn’t asked the nurses to put clean water in the vase or trim the ends of the stems. What water was left was a murky yellow-green and the stems were ragged and soft where they’d been left uncut. She liked her empty, cold room and itchy blankets. She preferred the white walls of the room and didn’t mind when the paintings got caked with dust and lost their color. Yellow roses were no substitute for the husband who had left her behind. The first blooms of spring had burst outside her hospital room window. She hadn’t even bothered to open the blinds.