Emily Vance Brown

The shop smells like cut stems and lemon-scented Lysol. It’s one of the few places in the city that stays the same, year after year, even as the lifespan of its patrons shortens and the yellowish haze outside grows thicker.

“Six pink carnations, six white daisies,” she says to the florist, hesitates a moment, then adds: “And some green, if you have it.”

With the middle-aged woman distracted, she browses the half-empty rows of overpriced plants. She detaches the arm of a miniature succulent and pinches a yellow pothos stem from the vine with her fingernails. A scrawny lemon tree grows in a too-small pot in the corner, and she picks one of its shriveled green fruits, stashes the measly prizes in her shoulder bag. She watches the passersby through the dirty shop window as she waits and wonders if her gait looks as defeated as the people trudging by outside. 

The florist returns with the requested flowers, wilted, but no worse than she expected, and rings up her order; the price has nearly doubled from the year before, just as it did the year before that. One hundred and fifty in stolen cash in exchange for an eased conscience. 

She begins the long trek to the Island. Past the former subway entrances boarded up and plastered with sun-bleached caution tape, past the crowds of the unhoused assembling another make-shift village in Central Park. The doomsdayers on 55th pull at her shirt sleeves and beg her to take their homemade pamphlets declaring the end of the world. 

“Jesus is coming!” an old man pleads. 

“His mistake,” she responds. 

The glassless windows of skyscraper shells watch as the infected and the addicts break bread with those who have given up entirely. She had considered joining them, for a while. It would be so much easier to feel nothing. Avoiding their yellowing eyes and sunken cheeks, she focuses on the bouquet in her hand and thinks of her childhood. She remembers walking these streets with her father, back when the businessmen in their thousand-dollar suits hailed yellow chauffers as they yelled to the disembodied voices on the other end of their cellphones. Those men were the first to succumb to the despair. 

She glimpses the reflection of light on water through the dilapidated buildings and quickens her footsteps. There is always a risk the ferry won’t be running, if the operator is out sick or otherwise decides not to show up, but he’s waiting on the dock when she arrives. She pays him with a bag of canned groceries, the only currency that consistently carries weight. He holds her flowers as she steps onto the boat. 

“Nice color. Must be for someone important,” he says, handing the bouquet back to her and starting the engine. 

“My sister,” she says. “Pink was her favorite.” This isn’t true. Jordan hated the color pink. Everyone knows that the flowers are for the living. 

The operator watches her patiently, as if expecting her to say more.

“How long ago?” he asks once they’re out on open water. 

“About six years. It was towards the beginning.”

He nods. “My sister died around then, too. Couple years before my daughter—she was about your age.” They return to an uneasy silence, listening to the waves splash up the sides of the boat.

“Disease or suicide?” he asks.  

“Neither,” she says, and they do not speak again. 

The Island had once been a reprieve from the bustle of the city, housing parks and food trucks and a few upper-class neighborhoods, but no one is left to remember that now. When its inhabitants dropped dead in the early weeks of the disease, it became a convenient place to burn their dead. A wall of placards marks the names of the deceased. 

She sits down in front of the monument, cradling the flowers like a child. 

“You’re still Mama’s favorite,” she says to Jordan’s nameplate. 

She sits in silence for a while, listening to the chatter of a family picnicking at their loved ones’ memorials. 

“I have something to tell you this time, Jojo,” she whispers. “I won’t be back here again.”  

She clears her throat. “I know I can never undo what I’ve done. After Daddy left and Mama stopped getting out of bed…” She shakes her head and starts over. 

“You were so small, and so weak, but you deserved a chance. Nothing I say will make up for that. But I have to move on.” She gets to her feet. A single tear drops from her cheek onto the flowers at her feet. 

“So I won’t be back. I hope you understand.” 

She leaves the flowers at the base of Jordan’s spot on the wall and walks away, then changes her mind and picks them back up. A few yards away, an old woman is leaning back against a blooming cherry blossom tree, crying.

“For you,” she says, and hands the old woman the flowers. The old woman smiles at her like she doesn’t quite remember how and grips the bouquet tightly in her wrinkled hands. 

On the ferry back to the city, the operator doesn’t try to speak to her. It’s pitch-black outside by the time they arrive and she begins the journey back to her provisional home in the basement of the abandoned Whole Foods. It’s been a long time since she was outside at night, and the city is quieter than she remembers. This would have frightened her, once, but this time it’s as if she gave her fear away with the carnations. 

Maybe she won’t go home tonight. Maybe she’ll walk, and keep walking, until the sidewalks cut off and the roads turn to gravel and the stars emerge from the smog. Maybe, if she walks long enough, she’ll sink into the ground like the root of the old oak tree she climbed as a child, before the rot took hold, and maybe, the dirt will cleanse her sins like blood, and by the time summer comes she’ll have risen like the weeds that grow in the pavement cracks, relentless and sturdy and blissfully unaware.