The echoes multiply each footstep into an army as I make my way down the empty sidewalk. Almost empty. I’m here, in body at least, like it or not. The frosted wind won’t let me forget that.

This part of town is almost completely deserted, dotted with a few shops, cheap faux-foreign restaurants, and corner stores, that are rarely ever trafficked, but I know there are a few artisans and specialty shops too, around here.

I promised myself I was really going to try today, to find something really special for Kattar, to fulfill my promise, with more than the bare minimum. Though he’s forever willing to praise even my lamest achievements, he deserves more than the odds and ends I can see from my doorstep.

With this in mind, I follow my feet into the florist’s shop. It beckons to me almost audibly, with the resonance of the fragrant, yellow faces pressed against the window like eager children waiting for their friends to arrive, or their parents to come home. 

The wind chimes over the door making a sparkly sound like fairy laughter, as I push my way in, drawing the attention of the young girl behind the counter, who smiles when her eyes meet mine. She looks like she’s a couple of years younger than me, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six years old. She’s dressed like I would expect a florist to dress, in shabby-chic, boho, hipster fusions. Everything about her skin and her hair and her eyes is a toasty, nutty brown, without being redundant. Something about this combination makes me think of a dryad.

I smile, realizing it’s the first sincere smile - full, real smile - that I’ve smiled since the accident. The nymph smiles wider, in response.

“Let me know if you need help with anything,” she says, and I shrug-nod my agreement, not daring to speak.

The building is misty with electric light, though it’s midday. Every inch of the window is hidden by a wealth of fan-like leaves, from speckled ferns and other blue-green “filler foliage.”

I study the geraniums, turning my back on the table of roses, trying to pretend I don’t see them, laughing at me. Still, I imagine I feel their gaze burning into the back of my head, and I almost let myself frown, but then the girl would ask what was wrong.

Nothing’s wrong.

I know it’s stupid to put so much weight on something as ludicrous as a flower, but all the same, I wish there weren’t so many roses here.

My eyes stray from the geraniums to the peonies by the counter, standing with their pink faces turned upward toward heaven. Or where heaven would be - if it weren’t blocked by the concrete and two layers of less than holy yellow-white paint.

The sign over the counter says that the shop does deliveries, and I decide on a whim to buy a dozen of them for Kattar and have them delivered to his hotel room as a surprise. 

It would be infinitely better than a picture, especially given my overbearing lack of photography prowess, and the peonies are so sweet, I know that nothing less than the real thing could do them justice.

I tried painting peonies once, at Kattar’s request, as a mural on his bedroom wall. To say it didn’t turn out very well would be a gross understatement. We were twenty then, and I’ve never put a lot of time into drawing flowers, most of my still-lifes revolved around trees and fruit. Out of all flowers, peonies are probably the most complicated if you’re shooting for any sort of realism, like pretty, blushing onions, full of layers and delicate depth. The mural ended up more like a cross between roses and marigolds than peonies, but back then I could laugh at things like that. 

I told Kattar to paint over it and let me try something I’m good at, but he claims he’s keeping the picture for black mail, though the sort of smear campaign you can stem from a dozen ugly peonies is beyond me. 

Still, that was years ago, and I kind of wonder…if I could do them justice now. 

Possessed by some enchanting perfection in the blushing blooms, I finger the fragile petals and find myself curiously tempted to try again, just to see…

I turn to the girl at the counter and find her smiling in my direction.

“Would you like those?” She asks, and I hear myself ask “Could I get two bouquets? One to take home, and another to have delivered to a friend?”

She smiles sweetly, “You can’t buy them just as they are. We don’t sell peonies by themselves. They’re part of a special offer. You can make your own arrangement, for twelve dollars a bouquet.”

Reading my bewilderment, the nymph offers to help me, leading me over to a myriad of cut flowers, and clusters of lacy green wild carrots and green creepers frothing at the ends of their stems in long sprays of white and dandelion yellow.

The first “make your own” she makes for me, and it’s so pretty I know I have to buy it, though it kind of defeats the whole point of the sale. Kattar’s bouquet, however, I insist on making myself, trying awkwardly to replicate the steps the girl showed me while taking care to put Kattar’s personal preferences into account. Nothing less than blindingly vivid would suit him, I know. Maybe it’s because boys see colors less clearly than girls do, as scientists say. I use too many shades of pink, but Kattar would swim in pink if he could. 

I’m doing it wrong, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t care, feeling the counter girl's good-natured smile as I present my less-than-professional-looking bouquet. 

“It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,” I promise myself.

In twenty minutes I find my shivering frame back on the sidewalk, sheltering the bouquet against the biting cold, and grateful that the walk back to my house is a short one. I still beat yesterday's record by fifty percent.

*

I check my phone as I enter the front door, hesitating as my calendar flips down its gentle reminder. 

I only have about two hours before I agreed to meet up with Kattar’s mom to help her go clean his apartment.

I’m not ready…

I force myself to breathe slowly, feeling the tissue wrapping on the bouquet rustle against my jacket as my chest rises and falls. Then with a brisk motion, I set to work.

Propping the vivid bundle against one of many dirty collectible glasses spread across the coffee table, swimming with flecks of ancient paint behind their scratched-out cartoon eyes, I take the phone in my left hand and select one peony from amongst the rest. 

Contorting it this way and that at an arm's length, I manage to find a fairly clear angle, and snap the picture, texting it to Kattar quickly, with some brief lie about this being his ‘something beautiful’ for the day, so he’ll still be surprised when the bouquet arrives.

Then just for the heck of it, I pull out my paints and find a clean canvas.

Washing the crusted acrylic from my palette, I make reds and whites, the teeniest dash of blue, into a little pool, squoozed, with some effort, from the disused tubes, and blend them together with the end of my paintbrush. The medley churns under the wood into a creamy, almost chalky shade, reminiscent of cherry yogurt and strawberry ice cream. I stir in a little more red and make a dab at the blank space.

For a moment, some slumbering part of my soul stirs deep inside me, as if waking from a bad dream, and basks in the sensation - the way the colors spread on the surface, their pristine depth, and consistency, the feeling of their smooth lines gliding effortlessly across the white. 

I dare to continue…just to see how it’ll turn out. 

*

The leaves are always my favorite part of any botanical still life. I feel the blood beat at the ends of my fingertips and hands - obsessed with the complex, the process of mortality pressed into 2D - every detail of the veins, endlessly interweaving through the mass in fragile branches, connecting the whole being into one living network.

There’s something merry, almost laughing, about the structure of peonies. So innocent and soft, growing in gumballs and miniature globes on stalks, like fairy wands.

Icing the empty spaces on the canvas with one smooth stroke of whipped bubblegum, watching it blossom under my hand into a petal face, surrounded in a baby’s bonnet, a snowflake mane, I let the flowers run over the edge and decapitate themselves off the side of the canvas. The paintbrush licks the easel’s frame, but it all adds to the vibrance, making the whole painted being feel breathing and alive-

“Alicia?” a voice says.

And just like that, I fall back down from the moon.