The Yellow Flower Blues
“Have you ever really noticed—I mean really noticed—how yellow these flowers are?” Elisha asked his friend, Douglas, as they passed the small community garden.
Douglas shrugged. “What? They’re just flowers.”
“Sorry. I guess I’m being weird.”
Elisha and Douglas walked past the same garden every day after school. On this particular spring day, the small yellow flowers really stood out to Elisha as being unusually yellow. In fact, they were so yellow, that it seemed as if the color yellow was based off of these flowers, that every other yellow thing was an imitation of this original. Elisha didn’t know how to communicate this strange feeling to Douglas. As they walked away, past the garden, Elisha stared at the yellow flowers in the garden one last time, but it was gone. The feeling had passed.
The flowers looked as they always had.
The two boys parted ways: Douglas to his home and Elisha to his own. When Elisha walked through the front door, his mom was waiting there to greet him. “Honey, how was school?” Elisha groaned an unintelligible response. He climbed the stairs and secluded himself in his bedroom. He tossed his backpack on the empty desk chair and climbed into his bed. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t figure out what had been different today about those flowers.
Was it the sunshine? It was true that he didn’t live in a particularly sunny town. More than half of the year, the sky was covered in gray clouds. Perhaps they had looked different today because of the sun. Well, yes, they did look different because of the sun, but that wasn’t why Elisha had noticed them. The moment with the flowers wasn’t something that Elisha had seen, it was something that he had felt. Something about the flowers triggered something deep within himself, deeper than he knew was possible.
Elisha walked over to his bedroom window and drew the blinds. He looked outside at the blue, cloudless sky. A gathering of birds formed the letter “V” as they flew past the window. Below, Elisha could see the houses next door. They all looked identical. Each had a flat rooftop, a driveway, a fence, and a small garden. A tree grew in each backyard to provide shade during the summer. Elisha frequently read beneath the tree in his own backyard. Elisha had never really noticed how each house was a replica of the other. He imagined all of the bedrooms in the neighborhood, each with their own Elisha staring out of the window, staring out at the sameness in everything and seeing the same boy looking out with the same eyes.
Then, it happened again.
A bright red cardinal had landed among the many branches of the tree in his backyard. Elisha saw the bird: really saw it, and for a moment, he noticed the qualities of the cardinal and how they were so very… cardinal. There was no other way to explain it. Elisha’s brain could not find a proper word to describe the experience. In fact, Elisha thought to himself that he had experienced a lapse in mind, a break in his thinking, and for a moment, just before he recognized the feeling, he had lost the sense of who he was. In that fleeting moment, Elisha had not existed. He had become the red cardinal, had become the tiny bird feet gripping the oak bark, had become the veins of the tree leaves and the trunk of the tree, had become the very soil which nourished it.
But once Elisha had isolated the experience — once he had named it — everything drifted away, like a dreamer roused from sleep and into consciousness.
The boy didn’t understand the experience. As much as he could remember, he never learned about it in school or church. His parents never taught him about it. So Elisha sat down at his desk, frustrated, and started to work on his mathematics homework. In those numbers, he found only clarity, nothing like the sensation he had felt with the yellow flowers and red cardinal. Elisha completed his algebraic equations, found both “x” and “y,” and once he was done, he had felt smarter for it.
Elisha’s mother called his name from downstairs. Dinner was ready.
#
Elisha and his parents were seated at the dining room table. His mother had prepared her famous roast beef with mashed potatoes and glazed carrots on the side. Everyone ate. The silverware clacking and clinking against the ceramic plates was the only conversation to be heard. Elisha’s father finished first. He always wolfed down his food. He then took out his good tobacco pipe. Elisha’s mother shot him a disappointed stare.
It was Elisha who broke the silence.
“Mom, Dad? I have a question.”
“Yes, Elisha?” his mother responded.
“I’ve been having these weird feelings lately—”
“I think this one is for your father, dear.”
“No, listen,” Elisha said, his cheeks flushing red. He had already had that talk with Douglas and his friends. “Today I was walking past some flowers and then all of a sudden, I really noticed how yellow they were. How perfect they were, just blooming there and being so yellow. Does that make sense?”
“Flowers are quite beautiful, dear,” his mother said.
“Don’t be a pansy,” his father said.
“Harold!”
“I’m sorry,” his father said, blowing smoke. “A young man’s got to be interested in better things than some goddamn flowers, for chrissake.”
Elisha stood up. “But it wasn’t just the flowers. There was also the bird. A red cardinal. It was so red. It was a real, live bird, a bird in the flesh. And it was so… bird-like.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Elisha, please sit down,” his father insisted. “A damned bird? This is what you have to say to us? What’s so special about a goddamn cardigan?”
“Cardinal, Harold,” his mother corrected.
“Cardi-I-don’t-give-a-shit!”
“Look, right there!” Elisha yelled, pointing at the thin smoke hanging in the air from his father’s pipe. “Do you see it? Do you feel it?”
Just then, Elisha had felt it again.
That feeling that the smoke just… was, that it was inherently smoke, that nothing could change the way smoke was because it just was. It was so beautiful, so simple, and there was nothing else that needed to be said about it. All the answers to all the questions in the world could be found within that smoke, Elisha thought. If it would only stay around for a little while longer, if only it didn’t dissolve.
But no — even the dissolving of the smoke was essential to its strange nature. You couldn’t separate smoke from its physics. Smoke was supposed to thin out. That was just part of smoke, that was part of the grandness of it all. Elisha stared at the smoke, lost in a trance, until he started laughing about it all. Some bizarre joy had arisen from deep within him and he couldn’t help but laugh.
His mother looked blankly at the smoke idling near the chandelier crystals. She wondered what had been so funny about the smoke that had caused Elisha to burst out in laughter. She concentrated. Elisha had stopped laughing. He looked at his mother. For a moment, Elisha was sure that she had seen it. That she had felt it, that magical lapse. Then, his father blew another puff of smoke from his belly, and it pushed out into the air, shifting the old smoke into new patterns. His mother shook her head.
“Elisha, it’s just smoke,” she said. “Speaking of which, your father was supposed to quit weeks ago. It’s bad for his heart.”
Elisha noticed the way his mother spoke to his father without addressing him.
“Marianne, don’t worry about me,” his father said with another puff of smoke. “It’s old Eli you’ve got to worry about. You’d better take him to your shrink. Something ain’t right.”
“He’s just imaginative, dear,” his mother said.
“Just put on the damned television already,” his father said. And he left the kitchen table and plopped down onto the sofa. He had the remote in his hand and he stared at the large flat screen, which reflected the 7 o’clock news in his eyes.
“Honey, aren’t you going to finish eating?” his mother asked.
“I’m not hungry,” Elisha answered. His mother took his plate and ran off into the kitchen. Elisha went upstairs to his bedroom, worried that he might have to see a psychologist. Was there something wrong with him? Douglas hadn’t seen it. His mother hadn’t seen it. His father hadn’t seen it. It was just him. They were only a few moments. Maybe it was all just a mistake.
I’m not going to notice these things anymore, Elisha thought to himself. I’m not going to be the weird one anymore.
