Her Bouquet

Fate left her cube that afternoon, and I finished an entire day's work in four hours in between decanting all of my writing onto my personal USB drive and cleaning my desk. I've been carrying it ever since I started going to The Pollen and The Sting, even though I rarely carry a laptop. It has a few things that would remind me how to get home even if I couldn't get to the car or the apartment, a few things that Dad had shown me just before I left, on the day he told me about the War of the Garden. I don't know how I would access it without the laptop, but I don't really believe that I'll need to. As long as Fate has given me room to clear out on my own time, I'll take as much as I can.

It's not yet five when I leave, but I don't want to risk spending an extra few minutes in anyone's office and it's obvious that I've stuffed my purse and lunch satchel full of knick-knacks. My desk is clean and dusted and the files are neat and ordered. Apparently I needed a warning that working with others could land me in trouble--the same way it had my Mom, years ago. She's the one who told me that I should work in a large place where they never really learned your name properly.

An abandoned storefront surrounded by weeds tall as my hips yields a handful of garish yellow faces interspersed with tiny blue flowers with fine petals and a puff of yellow in the center, a flower I associated with baby dresses and children's posies. The yellow faces surrounded the blue bunch, while white flowers from random cracks hid surrounded the blue. It wasn't balanced and there was no pink, no orange, no deep red of a shop's waxy offering; nor where there any wild neon mums and daisies guaranteed to match the cheapest neon designs--these were just the flowers I saw every day as I walked to my apartment. There were no insects to watch as I yanked their heads from their bodies, none to cheer or shudder as I brought violence to the tiny Edens of neglect.

I tied the stems together with an old scarf and have changed into something unlike my work clothes. I look, in fact, like a child going to an unfamiliar relative's home.