It is summer and all my friends are dying.
Usually, summer is when we come to life, reborn from the roots of our ancestors. It is the time when we typically sway in the wind, embrace the sun, and drink from the pail of the old man who lives in the even older brick house. But this summer isn’t the same; we are dying, and the old man has yet to emerge from the withering wooden door at the top of the stairs. This man with his dusty gray hair and kind eyes. Who looked after my friends and me this past spring after the old lady died on the concrete path. Oh, and when she died, he kneeled over her and cried, and kicked little Tulip in the head.
The old lady fell on the ninth day of spring. She lost her footing on a protruding weathered plank. The watering can tumbled out of her grasp and clanged against the concrete path. She lay there, eyes vacant, beside our exsanguinating pail. Sap the color of Rose’s head covered the ground, leaking like sun rays from underneath her skull. The old man ran outside, his heavy footsteps resounding on the old wooden porch, and, for the first time in my life, he stepped into the dirt without a care in the world. Tulip lost her petals, and two of her sisters’ spines snapped under his foot. Yet, he cried for the woman instead of the lives he had just taken.
Strangers took the little old lady who cared for us away in a big white car that blocked out the sun. She never came back. From then on, the old man who loved her would fill her pail with water and shower us from above. He would tread carefully on his tiptoes, ensuring he gave us each the water we deserved. He would cry as he watered us; his salty tears sunk to our roots and shriveled them dry.
But it has been almost three weeks since we have seen him, and we cannot take much more. Zinnia’s head is falling; Tulip’s getting weaker every day; Rose looks as if she’ll go bald with a large gust of wind; and I don’t think I can support myself for much longer.
Where did he go? The man with the glasses on the edge of his nose. The one who would sit just beyond the speckled window in a weathered leather chair with the paper in his wrinkled old hands.
“Daisy?” Tulip calls out to me, her voice sounding weaker than ever before.
“Yes, love?”
“What do we do?”
I watch as everyone turns to look at me with anxious and tired eyes—those who hadn’t already fallen, at least. And I looked to the sky, a bright, vibrant blue, clearer than ever before, without a cloud in sight.
“All we can do, my dear, is hope for rain to come.”