Isabel Rogers

The parrot, Einstein of birds, who can count and reason calmly in our tongue while outliving us, disdains the ostrich. For all its sprint records, the ostrich will be remembered for hiding from the truth. You can’t outrun stupid. We the people hold some truths to be self-evident: our magnificent brain in a body that can’t flee, can’t smell fear, can’t hear death, can’t see straight. Even so, our retinas, with rods and cones as intricate as any telescope array, evolved to see a predator slide out of oblique shadow and give us time to bolt. We survey our closed dominion until we look up in August to find comet dust flaring in the night. This vastness, this vertiginous awareness mocking gravity on our speck of now, wakes us with a recalibrating jolt. But soon our familiar star will claw toward us in seven-league boots from the east, drawing its Valium thread across our planet as if to cloak a birdcage to muffle questions that blink through dark matter and would pour over us until we drowned, dreaming of amnesia.

Carnations are best. Or roses, tight, before they go blowsy. Daffodils last. Tulips are no good — go limp soon as you look at ’em. Lilies are OK, but mark us with rust you can’t shift. Mam asks too many questions. We leave the lilies. Doug and me — we’re quick. When the earth is fresh we circle in to harvest. This is our meadow. Stem first into plaggy bags we ribbon from our pockets, then off, running the back way to the village. To the florist, past wreaths and In Memoriam s, where the old lady will peer at our haul, sniff, mebbe give us change from her pouch. Her sleeve is more snot-streaked than mine. And nails blacker. Some days Mam says she don’t understand why I leave me tea but other times I’ve hollow legs. I shrug. Tongue the toffee in a back tooth.