Flynn

My favourite colour was yellow.

I'd decided that today, as we thinned out bright, happy sunflowers from the garden beds bordering the nursery I worked at to make space for the stragglers that were still growing in. We made oversized bouquets of them, wrapped in butcher's paper, and handed them out to every customer who passed through.

Ethan would have said he was a plant guy, not a people guy, but I thought he was pretty clever about this stuff. When I sent away an excited toddler and her dad with a big bunch of flowers for Mum, I knew I’d be seeing them again. And all for the price of a bag of bird seed.

At least twice a week, Rue’d have to herd me away from Ethan because I wanted to watch everything he did and pester him to teach me stuff, and I wasn’t so great at realising when he’d had enough. And maybe, if I was honest, I didn’t do so well at stopping even when I did kind of know. But sometimes he’d had enough before I even got started!

That was just how he was, though. For some people it seemed to work like that—like there was a balancing system where every strength had to be paid for with an equal weakness. That was a hell of a lot better than what I had going on, where I was just kind of every type of dumb with nothing really going for me to make up for it. 

Well, mentally, anyway. I was big and I was strong. That was my thing.

When my shift was up, I left work with a bundle of sunflowers of my own. Well, really it was only two. I’d picked out the ones that had branched out at the top into half a dozen different flowers. Everyone else seemed to think a single big flower was what a sunflower should be, but I liked the life and enthusiasm of mine. When they died, I was gonna let the seeds dry out and then scatter them around the garden. The whole thing was hopelessly overgrown, but maybe next year it would be hopelessly overgrown with sunflowers as well. That’d be cool.

Carrying a bundle of ridiculously large flowers made my run slower than normal, which meant I ended up eating the meat pie I bought from the petrol station across the street from the bus stop in a rush. They were a bit messy and left my hand smelling like tomato sauce and pie meat, but Ethan was always going on about how it was important to have variety in your diet, so I was trying not to just have the sausage rolls every day, lunch and dinner, like I used to. But I was splurging on the meal replacement shakes now for my breakfast, so it was probably fine. Plus there was always fruit or cereal knocking around work to snack on.

I managed to scarf the last of the meat pie down just as the bus approached and tossed the driver a fifty cent coin that probably smelled of pie meat from my fingers as I got on. I claimed my usual seat at the front and settled in for a nap. All the drivers on this route knew me and knew my stop, so I could trust them to wake me up.

I woke up stiff from curling my too-big body up against the bus seat, thanked the driver, and started the walk home.

I never ran. I ran most places, because there was no reason not to. It was good exercise and you got where you were going faster. But on the way home, I always walked. Maybe it was because there were no footpaths, just overgrown lawns crowded with old cars and other junk and a road that threatened to break ankles with its many potholes and shitty patch jobs.

Or maybe it was because there was always something to watch, like a couple having a noisy domestic in front of their house or someone casually throwing up on the grass.

But probably I just wasn't in too much of a rush to get there.

The wood on the front steps bent under my weight, the recent rain having added another bullet to the chamber of the game of Russian Roulette we played whenever someone went up or down them. I was a decently big guy, so my odds were worse than most, but I was pretty sure I could ninja myself to safety if the live round landed on me. 

Inside, the house smelled like rotting garbage, cigarette smoke, weed, and dampness. I always felt like my breathing got a little worse the longer I was there. It gave me a headache.

The garbage smell was even stronger in the kitchen. I didn’t normally go in there, but today I needed a cup for my sunflowers. I dug one out of the sink that always sat overflowing with unwashed dishes, disturbing the ecosystem as I sent a couple of cockroaches and one very large huntsman spider scurrying. I wished the spider happy hunting and headed upstairs with my cup.

The room I slept in was usually one of the better smelling places in the house, but today it smelled of sex. I got a glimpse of Tony’s bare ass, hips thrusting, and quickly pulled my gaze away as I crossed to the corner of the L-shaped room where it merged into a bathroom. This was the master bedroom and I guess the bathroom had been built into it so it’d be accessible to someone with limited mobility. That was fine for one person, or a couple, but I’d had to learn to be real comfortable with my own body to use the shower. At least the toilet was tucked into the L so you couldn’t see it from the bed, but I still wasn’t so keen on adopting the higher fibre diet Ethan thought was such a good idea. I liked only having to shit a couple times a week, thank you very much.

I washed out the plastic cup and filled it with water. When I turned back around, Tony was doing up his pants. It was hard to know where any of the shit I witnessed fell on the spectrum of consent, but I’d learnt early on that nobody would thank me for getting involved. I shared this room with Kelsey, and Tony was her boyfriend, pimp, and dealer. I really just had to accept that shit was fucked and deal with it. I’d see if Kelsey was awake after Tony left, and if she wasn’t, I’d check her pulse and breathing and roll her onto her side so that she didn’t choke on her own vomit if she threw up.

I kept my eyes straight ahead as I crossed the room and ducked behind the curtain (okay, blanket I’d hung up) that separated my space from the rest of the room. I slept in the walk in closet, on a single sized foam mattress I’d managed to cram into the small floor space. I didn’t really fit on it too great, but it was kind of cosy.

Speaking of things that didn’t fit: my sunflowers were absurdly large for the cup I’d put them in. I had to lean the whole thing against a shelf in the corner to stop it from immediately falling over.

Still, looking at them made me smile, and that’d been the main goal. Going into work, hanging out with Ethan and Rue and Connor, always felt like this weird alternate reality. Like I became a different person, sure, but so much more than that. It was like two different TV shows with the main character played by the same actor. It felt like one or the other must not actually be real, but I hadn’t figured out which yet.

I heard the bedroom door open and shut, so I got up to check on Kelsey. 

There was a part of me that went distant at the sight of bare skin these days, so it took me a second to realise that I wasn’t looking at what I’d expected to be looking at. Not Kelsey, with her bubblegum pink hair. Someone smaller, paler. I’d only crossed paths with her twice, only talked to her once. Only learnt three things: her name was Ruby, she was Kelsey’s sister, and she was fourteen years old.

My brain, normally chaotic and crowded with thoughts, had gone silent. I didn’t make any decision. I didn’t come up with a plan. I simply watched myself, like an observer to my own body, pull out my phone and enter three zeros.