Let the Dark Flower Blossom by Norah Labiner

the blackboard: Godnight! She told me after reading my lengthy attempt at a short story, “Shelly, never kill off the main character.” I recall that story. I did kill off the main character ( pro-tag-on-ist , she said, breaking up the syllables like lemon drops), but as, and I explained this to her; the pro-tag-on-ist returned as a ghost, it didn’t really count as killing him, did it?
3.
    Louie said, “Innocent.” Eloise told him that that was not what she meant; not what she meant at all. She said, “Is there a better word for ‘girl’?” He said perhaps they could go away in the spring, “Would you like that?” Would she like that? And then it was late. Not too late. Just late. He said that there was no better word for it than girl.
4.
    Roman Stone is dead.
    I write the sentence easily enough.
    It looks on the page like—
    A little pawn pushed out alone on the battlefield ahead of an army.
    What if I had not started this story with the moment that I met Ro?
    And yet now that it has begun: does it matter where it began? I could have started with my childhood. Dug up a first memory or two: sunlight on a windowpane; bread and butter; Mother with a knife in the jam; Father’s papers fluttering to the floor. I would if I could push-comes-to-shove the story relentlessly forward through the years—schoolbooks, lessons, silence broken by Mother’s laughter.Snow, sawdust; a hammer, nails; the stairs down to the cellar. El & Shel in the woods. She and me at the salt creek. Eloise and I riding bicycles; from under the apple tree we saw the locked door to the cellar workshop; where father worked on his designs, his puzzles, where he dug his grave ideas and built his great impossible knowledge.
    He knew everything. Is this possible?
    I seem to recall that he knew all that there was to know.
    Father had a sickness that we could not understand.
    Mother gave him his medicine.
    Eloise and I under the apple tree.
    Eloise and I arguing about infinity.
    I and El diagramming sentences.
    Me and she dividing one number into another.
    This is El and Shel. What the hell.
    When we were eighteen we went to college.
    On the Greyhound Bus.
    A little girl and her mother were sitting in the seats in front of us. The girl had her face pressed up against the window. She was licking the glass.
    I looked at El. And she at me.
    And the girl kept licking the window.
    Eloise looked sad, I guess. If that’s the word for it.
    On the way to Iowa.
    All that wheat and corn and wonder.
    All we had was each other.
    Until we met Ro.
5.
    Eloise in her silk nightdress. Louie in his striped pajamas. He said, “Tell me about the box.” She pulled the chain on the lamp. In bed. In the darkness. She waited. She waited. When she said, “Whatbox?” he was already asleep. Louie slept, but Eloise did not. She was thinking about a girl lost in the woods. She saw the shadows of trees against the wall. She heard, she seemed to hear the ticking of a clock. It must have been her own heart. She thought she heard, how could she explain this? the sound of a shovel digging in the hard frozen ground.
6.
    The day, or maybe it was night, that Ro met my sister, he told me that he was in love with her.
7.
    Eloise rose without waking her husband. In the kitchen she put on the teakettle. She was thinking of the house in which she had grown up; thinking of the tangled vines of the garden. Of Mother digging in the garden—pushing back with palm to forehead her dark curls. Of the white faces of moonflowers and lilies. Of Father. And the responsibilities that begin in dreams. Of Shelly cutting in half an apple with his penknife. Saying to her, telling her, El, it’s just us now .
    She turned off the flame on the burner. And poured the water from the kettle into her cup. She was thinking of dancing bears and dark birds. She was thinking of a modern Prometheus. Of signs and symbols: poor Susu! remember how