Two Pieces
T. Lee
Eyes of Iris
A commotion at the front door stirred the wife awake. It was five in the morning on a weekday. She had enough. She didn’t leave the porch light on so he wouldn't trip. When her husband tumbled about, she irritably came out. She smelt foul, yeasty drunkenness on him.
He had once professed his love to her avidly. Swore he’d always be faithful and put her above all. The only thing he was loyal to was his drinking buddies. Any suggestion that he could be a henpecked husband and he would be off with them to do as they wanted to any hour.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked as the shoes tumbled off the disturbed shoe rack.
He hollered incoherently.
“What?”
“Head! A head!” he screamed at the walls. “Bloody head staring at me.”
She looked to the decorations on the wall. He saw irises in the ornamental iris. “It’s just the fake flowers. Quiet. You’ll wake your son.”
The head followed the drunk’s every move. It dared him at his reflection in its deep-set eyes. “Liar. You’re calling me an idiot?” He swiped at the living room table. The mug his son painted for Father’s Day was flung against the decapitated head on the wall. It shattered into a thousand petal-shaped pieces. “Turn on the damn lights. Did you bring home a guy? Is that what you’re hiding? Is that him?”
She wanted to know, too. Who’d take her away from this man? But she couldn’t leave while those they knew and those they knew with still breathed. The things they’d say of her! The things they’d say to her son. She retreated to her room, locking the door and keeping silent so the boy could sleep.
The storm would pass and they could pretend all was normal the following day. She calmly set an alarm to rise before the rest to clean the mess. She hoped Florence was young enough to forget. Hoped he wouldn’t ask about his art project. Hope he’d still believe in all forms of love.
She had loved greatly once. The yearning past was like her fading iris fragrance that drew her husband to her, buzzing. Pollen exhausted, her flower was used up. She envied the unscented felt and plastic flower, never fragrant in the first place.
Her older brother, who introduced her and her husband, was the same person who gave them the iris. He told them it was a magical plant people had carried around and placed in cash registers for financial luck. Each year, they only grew poorer. Each year, the iris acquired more dust and lost more luster.
She searched online once to see if it was some bull he’d made up. Turns out he had forgotten to mention iris leaves and roots are poisonous. She blamed the flower for being cursed seeds of misery. It was easier that way.
Red Roses and Green Daffodils
What the heck? The reborn baby wanted to cry out. His eyes blurred. His once gruff voice came out as a cry. It was the high vein-bursting cry of an infant. In an instant, he’d become a weedling with his intact past memories swathed around him like a thousand and one storied vines.
A low table had been pushed to the side to make room for the birth. The sliding paper doors failed to shield the sounds of early spring wailing. The silk sheets on the ground bled red. The white clothes of the woman who birthed him did, too. Stains of bright rose.
With the infant’s cries came the cries of others. “Ma’am! Ma’am!”
How cruel that the ornamental white daffodils were just starting to bud by the window. Florent wept confusing tears. Her blood and sweat and his tears percolated through him. They seeped into his pores and coated his open mouth. His tiny arm reached out towards the only familiar thing in this foreign setting – the flowers of fortune and prosperity.
“Here. Take him, Rose.”
They handed him over to someone small.
A child?
She cradled him, trying to soothe him the best that a child could. Wrapped in green cloth, he quickly molded himself to this new caretaker, wrapping around her. Poor baby, the servant child thought. He was soon to be an orphan, and still, his eyes only saw the yellow flower he hadn’t stopped reaching for. Although daffodils were medicinal, they couldn’t save his mother now.
Seeing his arm still oddly stretched out, she plucked the flower for him. “Here, Daffodil.” She gave him this new budding identity, hoping it would bless him with the good fortune it had eluded his family. The flower was placed close to his heart and swaddled with him.
***
In his pure white smooth cassocks, the visiting Priest stood appalled by the baby’s abnormally veiny and creased palm. The blood vessels were swelling, swirling river forks on the weathered hands of an elderly person. Grimacing, the Priest vigorously spat on them.
“Well?” The two other men in the room came closer.
“This is a cursed one from another world who brought over too much water with him. He will be presented with a cornucopia of flowers and cause the death of them all, overwatering them with his tears. His life will be as lined as his hands,” was the holy one’s verdict.
The man whom the boy would go on to call Uncle also spat on the ground. “Surely you are mistaken,” he said.
The Elder, the boy’s grandfather, rose gripping his bare rosewood cane. “How dare you doubt the Priest when he has graced us with his presence. Have you ever known those of the Wind Temple to be wrong?” He looked upon his sole male grandchild with a face twisted and dried as his cane. What a thorn this foul extrusion had proven itself to be.
Nevertheless, the Elder asked, “What must we do to cure this curse?” as he walked the Priest out without giving instructions for the boy’s name.
“Young Master, what should we call the baby?” the wet nurse asked.
I already have a name though! The baby cried.
“Shush, Daffodil,” Rose, her daughter, soothed the boy fussing over the saliva on his hand.
“He’ll be Daffodil for now,” the uncle decided. “May this floral name protect him against spirits that have claimed those before him and release him from his fate.”
Aspiring author T. Lee is a proudly queer Asian American who is living broke abroad. She majored in East Asian literature, if that explains it. Her work has been published during university, but there’s no need to look up those embarrassing early works. You can (please) follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @authort_lee.