Member-only story
Mary of the Flowers
Six short stories about death, #1.
When I was a girl, my mother told me God was in the flowers. She kept a garden like a zoo. She said that everything was God, and God was everything, and here we were, alive in God’s world. Our task was to look at it, and feel the love of God all around, and know that we were loved. The flowers were here to remind us. I wondered if God hadn’t put us here so the flowers could feel the love of God, too.
So I became a gardener. I’d water my roses every morning and sing to them at night. I sang them hymns and Christmas songs. In the winter, I put them inside, and in the spring, I reintroduced them to the sun. God was in all the pretty things, and God was in me, too.
The day they went for Vietnam, God was in the draft call. The day they shot Kennedy, God was in the gun. The day my son came home from Iraq, God was in the American flag draped over his coffin. God was in the banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” but His mission is never done. God is indiscriminate and everywhere, and no one seemed allowed to question all his choices. We thump our holy books and pray, and once we feel heard enough for the day, we stop listening to the rest of it.
I am an old woman now. My mother is gone now, too. I listened for God in her breathing tubes. God was in the cigarettes, you know. That’s…
