Flowers and Funerals [Rum, Kneedles]

“Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly. Lavender’s green, dilly, dilly.” Bridey’s mother chuckled through her song, through the wheezing that made her enormous chest heave and reached out one large arm to adjust the sheet thrown over her daughter’s head. Bridey the Bride, draped with a thin, sour smelling piece of cloth, in jeans and a loose shirt, perched on the end of her mother’s bed. The smell of old cooked chicken carcasses rose hot and heavy from a pile of plates on the dresser and the bed rustled with the sound of rumpled candy wrappers, groaned with the weight pressing into the springs and everything seemed stale and used up but for the fresh new bouquet clutched in Bridey’s hands. She didn’t understand why people insisted on choosing lilies for their wedding decoration; they were funeral flowers to her, pure white and delicately unfurling like the last traces of ghosts, something unmistakeably melancholy in their fragility. Surely wedding bouquets were supposed to be filled with joy? The baby’s breath Bridey could just about understand-Gypsophila, meaning everlasting love in the language of the flowers- but it was an insubstantial filler flower, small and crumpled looking like a real newborn infant. How she longed to dress more bouquets will splashes of color. This latest creation though, held in her pale, slender fingers was as neat and as well put together as any of the other the bouquets the family made- she just wished once she’d be able to throw in a sunflower, a tulip, anything.

“When I am king, dilly, dilly, you will be queen.” They joined in the last part of the song together, grinning conspiratorially as though they were party to some amusing secret, some illicit act. And with her father downstairs, in the shop and in a foul mood, in a way simply singing and laughing with her Mom was an illicit act.

Burying her head into the bouquet, Bridey breathed deeply, curling her legs around herself so that she took up the smallest of fractions on the bed compared to the large woman sprawled across it. Bridey’s mother hated the summer; the stuffy heat and the harsh sunlight burning through the chinks in her curtain. Air conditioning was a luxury that small business owners could not afford so Birdey’s mom would rock to herself, hair stuck limply to her forehead with sweat, flicking a paper fan in front of her face in a foul mood. The singing was a good sign though and she was smiling, laughing as Bridey had entered the room holding her freshly made garland , stepping together slowly as though walking down the aisle before breaking into a strange, ungainly and mechanical waltz with nothing but the air. “Pretty as a picture,” Bridey’s mother giggled. “And me, mother of the bride lookin’ like a mess. Fetch me my lipstick from the bureau. The pink one, that’s right, darling.”

"You want me to do it?” said Bridey bouncing over to the drawer, still kept neat- draped with a lace doily, as fine and as delicate as gossamer, her mother’s makeup in a carved box with polished stones, bracelets and the fine shining earrings that she still liked to wear but that no one would ever see. Her mother hadn’t left the house in ten years, Bridey doubted she could even leave the bed now. Bridey supposed she could wear some of the jewellery, would hate to see it go to waste- but after spending so many years in that back brace to treat her scoliosis, the huge metal exoskeleton she wasn’t so keen to fix more metal to her body. Especially since they were still calling her The Tin Man at school. “Aha!” Her fingers found the pink lipstick tube, and rolling it out, Bridey began to line her own thin lips over and over, until it was way outside of the lines, extending her smile into the gaping grin of a clown. “I’ll do it real nice for ya!” Turning round to reveal herself an explosion of laughter from her mother turned into a painful sounding, thin cough like nails on a chalkboard.

“Don’t make me laugh, girl. It hurts!” She shifted and a ripple seemed to run through the great mass of her hidden under a sheet.

“Bridey!!” A sharp yell carried up the stairs, piercing through the moment and making the teenage girl roll her eyes at her mother. “BRIDEY!!”

“The warden calls,” she said with an apologetic shrug to her mom, “better go see what he wants.”

**

Downstairs, the shop smelled of a meadow in the middle of the city. Where everything else was synthetic, tinted with oil and rust and concrete, their shop exploded with new life. Flowers cut at the stems stood to attention like soldiers in primary coloured helmets in metal buckets lining the shop floor, while example bouquets and wreaths lined the counter, petals cupped within the plant like a pearl inside of an oyster, There were papers and ribbons in a whole spectrum of colours tucked into the walls and her father at the centre of it all, large and grey faced and mean as hell.

“What on earth is that?” he asked with a curl of his lip, eyes flickering over her. It took her a while to realise what he meant, before she remembered the sheet-veil and the lipstick smeared around her face, pulling the sheet off her head and casting her head to the ground, embarrassed. “And give me that.” The bouquet was ripped out of her hand as her father began to shake it in front of her face, in a way that shouldn’t have been threatening because it was just a bunch of flowers but totally was. “This is one hundred and seventy five dollars worth of bouquet, Bridey- not a toy. Stop being such a goddamn child.”

Flushing pink to match her lipstick, Bridey steeled her tongue and began to wipe her mouth with the back of her hand. "I'm sorry Daddy."It made Mom smile. Remember her? The woman you married but seem okay to leave locked away in a room on her own. “Did you want something then? Or were you just gonna yell at me more?” she couldn’t help but mutter.

“The register has no small change in it at all. It’s your job to check that before we open. Luckily the last customer left the difference as a tip but we could have lost a sale. Stop dropping the ball. ”

Bridey frowned, she had checked this morning. Hadn’t she? It seemed like so long ago and the august heat was stifling, stirring up her brain, putting a pressure behind her eyes. “I thought I-”

“I don’t know what is with you lately,” her father sighed, obviously still pissed that she’d been made to drop her final career training class simply by being virtue of being awful at physical activity. What was with her lately though was getting great grades in her academic classes now she wasn’t worried about breaking a tooth in anything else- not that her father cared about that. He wanted a career for a kid, not the tin man.

“Fix it. Go next door and see if they can break this fifty or something. You can manage that can’t you?”

“I’ll try my very hardest, Daddy,” she said with a nod taking the note in her hand. Of course she could manage that, turning with a flounce and trying to give her best ‘competent’ walk. Difficult to do with one leg longer than the other, but she did her best- remembering at the last minute to peer in the window again and make sure that her face was clear of pink smudges.

**

Bridey had passed the taxidermy shop next door every day on her way to school, she’d peered in the window and heard voices through the walls, but had never really had an excuse to go in before. Not that she wasn’t slightly, morbidly curious about it; the strange darkness, the imagined musty smell of decay and dead animals forced into stiff poses was a million miles away from Bridey’s home with its bright colours and life, like two different universes entirely on the same street, standing side by side. And now with the crumpled fifty clenched in her hand she finally had the excuse to step into this strange new world.

Inside it was musty, like she’d imagined, but strangely chemical smelling too. Another thing she hadn’t expected was how…alive some of the poses were; animals twisted into such lifelike shapes that she might have blinked and seen the whiskers on a kitty twitch. Bridey had never had a real pet before, they were too much work, too messy and might bother her Mom- but these pets were perfect. You didn’t have to feed them, walk them or clean up after them and you wouldn’t feel upset when they’d died because technically they were already dead and technically they would live forever. She didn’t notice the two proprietors at first, districted by everything around her, looking and looking- drinking it all in before she’d have to go, back to real life, back to her world.

Running her pale white hand along the counters, Bridey found herself drawn to a rabbit model. He was set up on his haunches, as though scanning for danger, his eyes beedy and unseeing, buck teeth on display and his nose just waiting to twitch. His fur was a little matted and he wasn’t perfect, but he still felt soft to the touch as she delicately stroked the coarse chestnut coloured hairs on his muzzle, smiling a little to herself.