It Came With Violets
by Sharmon Michelle Gazaway
I feel as insubstantial as these pressed violet petals that haunt like a pantoum. I tuck them back into the book of poetry I'd found while browsing a flea market--alone, of course. Sunlight streams through the tall window, twinned in the cheval mirror standing by the mantel. Tilted in its oval frame, the glass bounces the light around the room, plays across my retinas, light-blinding me for a moment.
I don't trust mirrors.
I riffle through the book's foxed pages, and a photograph flutters onto my desk as if on mothwings. Sepia-toned figures, a man and a woman gaze out from some ambered moment. He's standing at her side, slightly behind, resting a hand on her shoulder. He, and she, a still-life; her Gibson Girl updo, his carefully pressed ribbon tie.
By their expressions, it's a solemn event. A funeral? A wedding, maybe? Her eyes avert from the camera lens, her gaze drawn to some unknowable thing. As they pose, I imagine they are being watched by a cluster of people. Onlookers who stare, as I am, and do not think of me.
The mutton-sleeve of her power overshadows the narrow nip of his waistcoat. They touch dryly, her strutted lace beggars the long black crease of his trousers. Their breaths held to prevent the flight of that captured moment, she clutches violets with gentle hurt.
A breeze whirls in through the window, and lifts a hurricane of papers from my desk. It sends them circling the tinkling chandelier, higher, to the lofty coffered ceiling. The room shifts. In the cheval mirror, my hand goes to my forehead against sudden dizziness. Papers drift down from the heights like new snow.
