Episode 4. The Placement of the Rose

Over and over and over again, Jovina placed the rose in the snow-filled crack shaped like a keyhole in the rock called Keyhole Rock where she had waited and waited in the freezing cold evening and finally been stood up.

These were re-enactments of the imagination and accompanied by different emotions than she had originally felt. When she was there in the flesh she had been almost numb in her body from the exposure, even through her winter clothes, so the havoc in her heart had found itself somewhat kenneled and she had simply laid the rose upon the snow and left. At home and unconstrained, in her bed and warm and responsive, it was quite different.

At first she was simply wild, and thrashed the bedcovers and swore, and her imaginary placement of the rose was without any precision. She simply flung it at the keyhole and left.

Then she thought, in a break when her heart was beating hard but her mind was in a gap, that she might take more advantage of the situation. She had bought him a dozen roses but only ventured forth with one, intending to give him the rest later. She hesitated to admit to herself that later would have been that very evening, had he come, for she knew very well that she would have invited him home. So there the remaining eleven rested, lengthy stems and all, in a crystal vase on her kitchen table, with no one to receive them, with the thorns above the waterline that the florist had left untrimmed stabbing her in the heart every time she went in for a meal. But she could do something with them!

She would experiment.

She imagined herself placing the rose calmly and with deliberate disdain. He had behaved unlike a gentleman, yet she would behave like a lady, as his superior in the ways of humanity.

That accounted for a second of the unused flowers.

As for the rest, she exercised her repertoire of ways to feel and act. In a controlled anger she stabbed the rose stem first into the snow. In a loving tearful passion she melted a cradle in the snow with the heat of her hands and placed the rose there like her only child. In complete indifference she dropped her heart's-blood-colored offering like a used tissue into a trash can.

At the count of twelve, having worked herself into a sweat and feeling light-headed and empty, she stopped and said, to the vase after she had gone into the kitchen and made herself a bowl of oatmeal, "Well, you're all used up, and what is there to show?"

Spring was coming, she saw as she made her way down to the sea. She thought she could see the snow actually shrinking in its patches. She could feel it too. The eleven roses that she held, clasped to her bosom against her heavy wool coat, were as if still growing, with a future no one could imagine.

On a rocky promontory by the north Atlantic, she tossed them all into the waves that, on that calm afternoon with the sun and clouds playing a game of glory between them, were small and lapped the granite coast with only the subtlest of musics. And then she thought, looking out into the shining expanse, "Well, I will text him back then. That's the sane thing to do. Maybe he had an accident. Who knows what might have happened?"

She held that thought until it was drawn inexorably from her by the distant horizon, where the sea and the sky melted together and magnetized everything, and then she forgot who she was for a while and just stood there like a flower in a field.

17 March 2019
Texas Jim
Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca