Uncle Stan's Garden

This came out WAY too feminine for my liking.

All my significant life events happen next to Uncle Stan's flowers. Mom always told me he kept them nice and big and purple because they always bloomed on my birthday in March, and they reminded him of his favorite nephew. Uncle Stan always told me not to breathe on them. Said they'll be worth more than my college tuition.

 

That never stopped me from growing up with the garden, of course. Those flowers were the first ever to hear my first ever first word ever. Snail. I saw the thing in the bed, with those curious feelers and that slimy skirt, and promptly cemented it to my forehead. With my cameramom's background giggles permanently captured in mono-channel glory, I tumbled over to Uncle's leg, gave it a businesslike tug, and declared my new adornment. Mom said it sounded beautiful. Uncle Stan said it sounded very articulate.

 

I remember that day from the video. It was so breezy and all the flowers moved like a bunch of purple ragdolls.

 

 A few years later I started school and got my first crush on Alison. In kindergarten, Mrs. Ross said her pigtails looked crazy once, under her breath, which made the class laugh. Mom said I should have her over and play Guess Who in Stan's flowers, before all the bees came in Spring. I did, and we played like sixteen games in the garden, on our stomachs so it would be softer. Allie won most of them, especially when she figured out I was always David. She had the same hair color.

 

When her mom pulled up in the afternoon with a big brown German Sheppard in the passenger's seat, I got scared and got low in the flowers next to her and squinted through the stems. She said I looked like a monkey, and gave me one of Uncle Stan's flowers before she skipped off.  I think that's when I started noticing those flowers.

 

The next time she came back, she got pricked by a bee, maybe, and didn't come over anymore.

 

Like every year, Spring slammed into the soil, the flowers got big on my birthday, I got presents, the flowers got the bees, and I forgot about my crushes in the wake of my new video games.  My birthday was the only time Stan cut any. He'd barge into my room early in the morning and command that I watch him use the clippers. Every year he told me I'd have to get a part-time job at the burger barn to pay off his copious investments in flowers.  But there were always purple flowers in the kitchen on my birthday weeks.

 

I found Alison again in high school. She was in a play about witches, and she had to perform a sort of somersault off the stage at the end. When she did it, the whole audience cheered harmoniously, which didn't actually fit in with the play at all and made me forget about anything that happened before or after. Uncle Stan was there too. He said it looked fake. Witches don't need to do goddamn somersaults, he said. I tried to find her around school during the next few days to say nice flip, but she was an elusive one. Spring break tore through the school at the end of the week though, and so I started to wait for Stan's flowers to bloom instead of Alison to appear on my doorstep.

 

On Monday, the day before my birthday, both happened simultaneously. She seemed right at home on those hot mornings, even with her unleveled visor and all those bees in the air. She called my name and if I still lived here, and I heard how raspy her voice got since we napped in the flowers. I squinted through the peephole inside, past her mature face to that same old truck, only unwashed and minus the German Sheppard.

 

I opened the door on impulse. It seemed like so much poetic justice when she spilled her story out, when she circled her arms around my neck in the flower garden. The tears had something to do with her parents splitting up or hitting her because of her report card or something. All I did was hold her in such way that she could feel my sways and nods. Allie was back in my life, she said, because I was the only one who ever listened. She said my house was still a little purple tack on the kindergarten map project where we drew our neighborhood and added happy pictures.

 

She stopped talking, I guess, when she ran out of problems. For such a hot day, her hair felt so crisply cold, the part the wasn't under her visor. If the bees were any indicator, it was creeping up on ninety. I looked for a second, and her eyes were glossed close. Alison would remember, I hoped, if I gave her a flower now. I took a hand off her back, and when she didn't stir, uprooted one of Uncle Stan's biggest flowers. One of his majesties, he'd called it.

 

I think he must have felt it, when the stem broke off from the roots. Like I amputated a limb of his using only a plastic fork and no sleepy gas.

 

When Allie got back to herself, she began to take a baby step back, turn her head to face my eyes, and slide her hands down my arms until they met at the secret flower I had waiting there. "For you," I told her. She thrust it in her face and glistened at me through the petals.

 

In the indeterminate instant that existed between the return of her tears and the moment I realized I was about to receive my first kiss, I decided to put off understanding girls for another life time. For the first time, on a bright hot day in that bee-filled purple garden, I closed my eyes. The kiss came, and it was pretty wet from all the tears. But it was still soft and reminded me of having a volcano in my chest. Immediately there was a lot of moaning, and I knew it wasn't from me. Her arms were still tight around me, so I decided to kiss her tighter, which made the squirming and yelping grow louder, which I thought was good. That was movie-star kissing.

 

I took a necessary breath of air, a horrid step back, and a terrible glance at my crush's face. Her eyes were full open and her visor had come off. I looked down. Blood, a little bit, dribbled out from the corner of her mouth. Then a bit more came out, and then a bee. Allie moved her eyes, slightly, too look at Stan's buzzing garden.  Then she fell down and made a humming noise for fifteen minutes, until she died.

 

Uncle Stan's head poked out of the screen door in front and said not to even think about breathing on the flowers. It went back inside, and slammed the screen behind him.

Author's Note

Please reveal this story for what it's truly worth: nary a dime.