ka_verse Prompt 27, 'Carnation'
'Picking Wildflowers'
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Prompt 27, Carnation
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If you've never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom,
maybe your soul has never been in bloom.
-Terri Guillemets
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Tobias never once brought Rachel roses.
They never officially went to a single school dance “together”; instead the six of them gravitated into always going as a group, so there were never any before home coming staged photographs in front of fireplaces with parents hovering around, no half-awkward, half-romantic dinners, and there were no roses artfully arranged into corsages or boutonniere in suspiciously coordinating colors to be carefully saved afterward.
Sometimes, however, wildflowers showed up laying on Rachel’s dresser or cushioned on her pillow when she dragged herself home from another exhausting gymnastics practice she no longer had time for, but wasn’t willing to give up just yet. Tobias was never hanging around to claim credit and reap rewards in typical teenage boy fashion when she got to her room- the wind would beckon her out the still open window and into the sky after him in his stead.
And one not so random day in mid-February Rachel found a slightly battered carnation sticking shyly out of her locker. There was no written note, just a quick sketch of an aerial view of the edge of town she was quite familiar with from weekly trips through the skies.
Rachel found herself smiling at everyone she met for the rest of the day; the flower was pressed and kept inside a favorite book to be miraculously found by her sister in the carnage where their house once stood after the war.
Jordan kept it because the dried out, withered bloom had obviously meant something to her dead sister, even though she didn’t know what or why; glancing upward to the sky that the burnt out roof no longer kept out, Jordan could guess, though.