Huā Kāi Liǎng Duǒ: A Flower Blooms in Two Places.
The wind couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It whipped across the green with the indecision of early spring, flirting with the warmth of a coming summer one moment, then turning sharp with the winter's last crisp bite the next. The whole park moved with it: daffodils nodding their idiot heads, a discarded crisp packet tumbling end over end like the tiny gymnast. The new leaves on the plain tree were shivering in applause. Behind her, the painted paper brolly rocked on its prop. A central pole swayed in slow, deliberate arcs. The tip describing something against the soil - not a letter, not quite, but the intention of one. Like the flow of yùnbǐ, the wind's thought written into the earth before it could be read. The painted peonies on the oil-paper skin trembled with each pass, their petals blurring. She did not turn to watch the pole's calligraphy. She watched its shadow instead, the dark circle of it wobbling on the grass like something trying to remember how to be still.
The grass tickled her ankles where she sat, the blades needling up through the weave of the picnic blanket. It had been cut recently. She could smell it: that sharp, green wound smell, the scent of a mower's slowly stroking back and forth across the morning. It was a smile that went straight to the back of the throat and poured something with it. Memories. Or the shape of them. Knee-grass memories. The sting of a graze after a tumble. The hot huff of breath through gritted teeth. The other girls circling. Their names were gone now, but she remembered their socks. White ankle socks with lace trim, all the same. A uniform of belonging. She'd worn them too, even when her mother had frowned at the cost. Tài guì le for such a little scrap of cotton. But she had wanted to match. She had wanted, with a want that had no English word, to be the same as everyone else, just for those few hours before the street lamps flickered on. And then the long walk home, the kitchen light yellow and waiting. Her mother's voice already shaped into its familiar scold: "Look at the state of you, like a wild thing. What will the neighbours think?" Her mother always said it twice: once in English for the neighbours, once in the mother tongue for the heart.
She stretched her legs out and watched the sun make a slow study of her skin. It pooled in the dip of her collarbone, traced the fine hairs on her forearms, settled into the folds of her summer dress like a guest who had been expected once but had arrived on the wrong day. Her skin held her youth in soft waves, like the pond bō guāng lín lín. She was what, 19, 20? How old was she again? Numbers had always drifted beyond her reach, a leaf on the current of a stream she could see but not touch. It didn't matter right now. She was young, that much was certain. The same way the sky was blue, the same way the parasol behind her was painted with painted flowers she had known the name of in her other language. Paeony. The word came in English first now. Then, after a pause, the other one arrived: Mǔdān. They didn't quite match. One was a flower. One was a memory of a flower on a scroll in her grandmother's flat. The paint cracked like old varnish. She wasn't sure which anymore. Perhaps they had always been the same thing, and she'd only just noticed.
She's sat straight or straight enough. There was a slight curve to her shoulders, a gentle rounding where the neck met the spine. At a glance, it could have been the slouch of a girl who'd spent too long bent towards a screen, scrolling through other people's lives, or it could be something more natural, the body remembering its eventual shape. Either way, she held it without complaint. This body, this not-quite-straightness, it was hers. The wind worried at a loose thread on her sleeve, and she let it. Her eyes were bright, the way a child's eyes are bright in the first warm week of the year. All that sun, all that green, and nowhere else to be but here. But the brightness pooled mostly in the centre at the corners, where the skin creased into little folded fans. Something else had settled. Not sadness, exactly. More like the knowledge of sadness. The way a room still holds the shape of a song after the singing has stopped. Her hair was blonde, a bronzed English blonde. The kind that darkened at the roots in winter and caught the light in summer. Today it was loose, lifting and falling with the wind's indecision, and threaded through the bronze were paler strands, white or near-white, that caught the sun on the crown of her head. They looked like platinum highlights, the sort a young woman might pay good money for in a salon. They looked deliberate.
She was humming something, a tune that rose and fell without any particular direction, like a bee that had forgotten which flower it was looking for. It was an old tune, a kitchen tune, one her mother had hummed while she worked, sleeves rolled, hands dusted with flour. The radio was playing something in Mandarin that neither of them understood any more, but both of them felt. She didn't remember learning it. It was simply there, stitched into the quiet, surfacing whenever her mouth had nothing else to do.
A shriek breaks her mourning. It cuts across the green. Not pain, not fear, just the high, bright sound of a child at the far edge of their own velocity, running faster than their legs could carry them. She turned her head towards it, slow as the sunflower following the light. There were children near the far trees, two or three of them chasing something she couldn't see. Maybe a ball, maybe each other, maybe nothing at all, just the joy of movement, of lungs burning with cold spring air. She watched them and felt the ghost of a memory rise: a playground, metal bars, the particular squeak of a swing that needed oiling. That was from the secondary school, wasn't it? The one on the hill where she'd sat on the low wall with her friends, drinking something she probably should not be drinking from a shared bottle. Their skirts rolled up at the waist to show more knee. They'd laughed about something: a boy, probably, a teacher's unfortunate haircut. A granny had her cart set up. A pot of something bubbling, the sweet scent of maltose thickening in the air like mì táng, curling around the chip butties, drowned in vinegar and salt. The girls didn't notice the stall that was always set up by the tarmac, where it gave way to a scrubby patch of grass the boys played footy on. They never did. But still, the smell was there, all the same, threading through their laughter like a second language.
The swing kept squeaking, but the one behind the secondary school had been missing a seat, the third from the left, and the one that remained was a chunky black rubber thing baked brittle by too many summers, crumbling at the edges where the sun had got in. This swing was whole. Its seat was a flat circle of red plastic, sun bleached to a gentle coral at its centre, and the frame stood bright in a yellow that had once been bold, the sort of yellow that belonged in a children's drawing of the sun. The metal joints were greased. They moved without complaint. The whole thing looked cared for.
Behind it, a low fence painted in peeling stripes of pink and turquoise, colours that didn't know English grey. Her father was there, pushing her on this red swing that was not the black swing, her voice giggling: "gāo yī diǎn, gāo yī diǎn". His rough hands on her back. The stripes of the fence blurred as she rose and fell, pink and turquoise bleeding into the sky.
She blinked.
The children near the trees had stopped running. They were bent over something in the grass. A ladybird, perhaps, or a lost coin, or maybe a buttercup? The squeaking swing was gone, the maltose was gone, but there was smoke drifting across the green from a small huddle of figures with a portable grill. Charcoal and fat, and cumin in it. Five spice! The smell of a night market in a city she half-remembered. Or had she been there? The smoke stung her eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand. Didn't know if she was crying from the smoke, or from the gap between the two hungers.
The light began to change, not dramatically. There was no sudden cloud, no dimming of the sun, but something in the quality of it shifted. The green, which had been all bright openness, grew longer. The shadows of the plain trees stretched towards her across the grass like dark fingers, slow and unhurried. Her paper parasol, still swaying on its prop, cast a shadow that had grown thinner and paler, as if the day was wearing it out.
She had noticed none of this. She was still somewhere else, somewhere trapped between the vinegar-sharp chip butty and the maltose cart, between the black swing and the red one. The gap had widened into something vast and quiet, and she sat in it, her hands loose in her lap, her humming having stopped without her noticing. The children had gone; she didn't know when they'd left. The barbecue smoke still rose from the far side of the green, but the figures around it had blurred into silhouettes. The wind had softened too, no longer whipping but stroking, a slow hand across the grass. Everything had gone gentle; even their daffodils had stopped their nodding and stood still, little yellow centuries waiting for something. The parasol's calligraphy had stopped; the bamboo pole no longer wrote the wind's intent into the earth. It was simply still, as if the lesson was over.
A shadow fell across her, not the long shadow of a tree, but something closer, something with weight. It pulled on the edge of her picnic blanket and then crept up over her knees, her hands, her chest until they had covered her entirely. She didn't startle. She looked up slowly, the way you look up at something you've been waiting for without knowing you were waiting.
He was old, that much she could tell, even with the sun behind him making a halo of his white hair. His face was in shadow, but she could see the shape of him: a little stooped, a little narrow in the shoulders, the way men go when the years have winnowed them down. He wore a coat that seemed too heavy for the season, a wool thing in a grey that had forgotten what colour it used to be. His hands were in his pockets. He stood there looking down at her, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was familiar. It had the shape of something worn smooth by repetition.
“Lovely spot,” he said. “His voice was soft, a little rasped at the edges. Reminds me of a park I knew once, years ago. There was a girl there, sat just like you are now. Pretty young thing. Had a parasol much like that one.” He nodded towards the painted paper swaying behind her.
“I asked for her hand, before I even told her my name. My friends thought I'd gone soft in the head. Laughed themselves sick.” He smiled, and the smile reached up into the creases around his eyes. “She said yes though, eventually.”
She listened. The words settled over her like the shadow had, gently, without demand. Something in the story felt close, felt warm, like a coat held open.
“Are you ready to leave, dear?” he said. “They're waiting.” She looked at him, at the parasol, at the green, at the distant smudge of the barbecue smoke, then back at him. Something moved behind her eyes, a flicker of recognition that couldn't quite catch, a word on the tip of the tongue that wouldn't fall. She tilted her head, the way a child might or a bird.
“Have we met before?”
Huā Kāi Liǎng Duǒ: A Flower Blooms in Two Places. – A Fiction Short Story by Rebecca Faithful – Reedsy Prompts
