Vignette #27 “The Last Bouquet”

It was something I knew I wouldn’t see…. for a long while at least.

Everywhere around me the world was moving. I could see the registers flying as item after item slide down the conveyor belt. I could see carts hustling through the aisles all lost in some maze that only had one way out. I could see the workers with their faces set in stone and their fingers moving miles a minute. In a modern day grocery store this is what panic looked like.

I wanted to cry.

Instead, I focused on the stems in my hand. Red like the shade of the sun as it rises in the summer, like harvest apples waiting to fall from the tree, like the feathers’ of a cardinal sitting on a branch. Red, the color of the petals of the roses in my trembling fingers. After today, there would be no more flowers. They needed room for other things. Things that were running off the shelves like scared little mice when the cat’s around. Things like paper towels, toilet paper, water bottles, bread…. things that I was sure we had enough of before.

But no more flowers. In times like today, there was no more space for beautiful fragile things. Right then though, I felt like us humans were the most fragile things of all.