Wendy's Cherry Farm

“I went and saw the tulips today.”

There was no moon tonight. The sky hung low, a damp sheet of gray, and the pond had swallowed its own reflections. No ripples, only sound—a wet, rhythmic hush, like someone turning pages in the dark.

“You told me the best time to go was in early May, but I waited too long. You were right. A lot of them had died.”

The seat feels cold. It is futile, she realizes, to pull her skirt over the backs of her upper thighs. The elastic material would just snap back to where it nestled originally, bunched under her behind. The bench’s iron curls bit into the exposed skin on her thighs, leaving marks she wouldn’t see but would feel tomorrow, a braille of absence—red, elongated streaks that are sharp and the ends curved at the edges. They would fade but would reappear every time she wore that skirt, no matter how she sat. Maybe the particles of her skirt and her skin molecules had a particular affinity for each other. Or perhaps it was all just a stupid, unforgettable coincidence. 

Splish. A fish, perhaps. Or maybe a frog. Maybe there was someone on the other side of the water, somewhere in the vast darkness ahead, that was skipping stones. Or maybe it wasn’t stones. Perhaps it was a woman, in a ritualistic way of letting go, deciding to throw her ex boyfriend’s “Return to Tiffany” necklace into the water. A good choice. The necklace is commercialized, corny, and overdone. 

I wonder if her neck is cold.

She gets up and crouches by the pond, using the glowing ripples as her guide light. In brief instances, when the light hit the water just right, the reflections in the pond mirrored shriveled tulip petals—deflated, irregular oblongs. For a moment, the blackness shimmered, revealing petals adrift like shipwrecked paper boats.

But don’t wilted tulips kind of look like orchids? 

His observation, not hers. From last year, when they’d come too late to this same garden. She’d been disappointed, but he’d taken her hand, pulled her down to kneel beside him, and showed her how the tulips transformed as they died—their stiff, perfect cups loosening, edges crinkling and curling like the ruffles of an orchid.

See? Your favorite flower was hiding in mine all along. You just have to know when to look.

She closes her eyes. His voice—rounded at the edges and slightly muffled. It felt like laying your head on a freshly washed pillow, words absorbed into cotton and returned as gentle vibrations against your cheek. Sometimes, when she missed him, she would bury her face into her own pillow and speak—mundane things, fragments of her day, questions without answers—just to feel her words disappear into the fabric. She never received a response, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the memory living in the sensation: the softness against her lips, the subtle dampness of breath returning, the way consonants blurred and vowels nestled in the threads.

She stands. The pond exhaled. The marks on her thighs itched, a phantom ledger of all the times she’d sat here waiting for nothing, or everything, or the next best thing to either.

The path back was lined with tulips, bowing like exhausted ballerinas—stems bent like spines under the weight of applause, petals loosening from their pins, edges frayed to gauze. 

The path back was lined with orchids—petals postured like the starched, lace stiff ruffs that framed the throats of regal women during Elizabethan England who’d learned to hold their chins high.

She touched one. It left a ghost of pollen on her fingertip—or was it dust?—before the wind lifted it away. By the time she reached the gate, her fingertips smelled of wilt and perfume, the way a mourning dress might after too long in a cedar chest. 

She doesn’t look back. Doesn’t say goodbye to the water. Doesn’t make wishes on invisible ripples. Doesn’t throw stones or necklaces. Behind her, the pond swallowed another petal, soundless. Behind her, the garden held its breath. The tulips did not bow.