fff#55

my flash fiction friday #55; starter-trigger:

the problem with flowers is they don’t actually eliminate smell, are at best merely a mask, and as olfactory ruse, weak. so in spite of the many roses you thought to bring, the scent is still like a velvet-cushioned bag of bricks to the head upon entry and sticks in your nostrils like an umbrella was inserted+opened behind it. roses still sweet+earthy as ever, but playing accessory to the crime starring the scent of dead; in their current supporting-cast context, synecdoche for your entire garden, carefully cultivated for nobody to appreciate. your mind thought it was prepared. it was wrong. you were wrong.
roses grow into vines and spiral from the tangle clutched in your hands out+around your head, crown dethorned as you plucked them, the most time you had ever spent attending to individual plants, using the time to gather yourself for the scene you knew you would enter.
the roses keep growing, crown creeping back down to your shoulderblades and planting itself, then spreading upward+outward, feathers of petals whispering at your shoulders and beyond them, attar fanning into the airwaves over your love as your new-formed wings rustle, then stretch, then beat gently, once, twice, 3times, and lift you easily up+away from the end of the one person you ever thought loved you.

walk good.