Such a Sweet Girl


I know a girl (she is not someone you know), who will give you a flower. If you take the flower from her, you will think how sweet she is (and rightly so). She will call up a cloud of butterflies to stir the winds of promise and change and dreams to come, and you will see her innocence (you think). The sun comes to shine with her call. The warmth is a warmth of a hundred woolen blankets on the coldest winter night. She is the promise of all things good. Those we deserve, and those we can never deserve. You wonder if this is just a dream.
Your head spins with the world you've never known, but as you revel in this wonder a little voice is whispering in your ear. You take the flower she has given you. You breathe in its sweet and pungent offering. The spinning stops. A door stands before you. The whisper in your ear gets louder. Your eyes fall to the bloody doorknob. The whisper (though now it seems almost a shout) dares you to open the door, look further. The flower drops from your hand and shatters. You recognize this door, but how could it be here? You thought you had closed and left it behind long ago. On second look you notice the markings, though close, are not the same.
The gaze of the butterflies lances through your soul. They question everything they find there. They flock around you like beautiful mosquitoes. The gentle flapping of their wings turns your stomach. Your head spins, not with joy now, but with delirium. You feel your balance fail. Turn, run back. The barren fields of yesterday call to you in old familiar trills.

You turn and run....
At last you find your ground. You stand and look about. The sun is not so bright here (but bright enough). The flowers not so sweet (no matter). Here is not the fairy-tale land that only the naive can stand. Here is reality, not a candy-coated land of wonder. You make yourself at home again, and wonder how you could have been so taken in by a shallow dream of sweetness. You start to laugh. What starts as a small, low laugh, rises. This is reality, you think to yourself (you hear your laughter echoed in your head). This is the good and the bad (the laugh gets louder, ringing in your ears). This is where you belong (the laugh seems to fill your head, fill the air around you). Sudden convulsions of laughter overtake your body, and you look down at your bloody palm.

© J. Simon

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