Yellow Water Roses
He knocked at the door without announcement, in the middle of a sentence. Said he came to note the amount of water that is used up in a year, in this house. I stood there, unsure what to do, where to find the figure. "The counter is in the cellar," he said. He walked down the steps, ahead of me. Yet the cellar was filled with things, making us search the way to find this counter. While he wrote the figures in a black book, I told him about a new measure installed to control the flow, to reduce it. "It doesn't make a difference," the water man explained. "It's no use making these efforts, they come to nothing." Then he left, without saying another word.
Later, I finished the letter, and went to post it. In the park next to the office, there were some youngsters, dressed in dark clothes that wouldn't fit. When I passed them, I noticed a boy who stood at the edge, pretending he was part of the game. Yet he wasn't. At least not in a playful way. Walking past, I picked some leaves and folded them away in my palm. Then I entered their game. They all stared at me. I appeared serious, but I was playing a game, too. "You", I said, pointing at him. "You forgot to deliver the flowers."
The words moved him away, while the others stared, unable to protest. The thing is, every one was aware of the games played, of the intentions underneath. But none would ever acknowledge the knowledge. It would be breaking the rules of the game.
On the way home, I saw the eyes of the boy in the corner again, and they reminded me of the rose bush in the garden, in front of the house I didn't live in any more. The first time the bush bloomed, it carried one single yellow blossom. There was a spider living in it. A year later, when it bloomed a second time, there were three blossoms unfolding after another. Like past present future. Like morning evening night. Sometimes, in the mornings, I stopped to touch them. They felt like satin, sitting out there in the chilling cold.
It was this memory that made me enter the flower shop a day later, to buy them. Yellow roses. But there were gone, leaving only red, pink and white. Thus I bought the red ones.
I was wrong. I knew it already when I walked out of the shop door. The feeling got confirmed when I put the roses in a vase, and filled it with water. The red wasn't deep enough, the petals felt like plastic. For a minute I thought of changing their colour, of painting them, of taking them back to the shop. Instead, I carried the vase in the room that isn't used an more. Yet their petals staid in my mind through the morning. I knew it was silly, for they were only roses. It was irritating that they had grown so important at all, as they would soon wither anyway. But then, that's true for everything. And the roses, they were only there for a short time.
I didn't see them again, by the way. The water man. And the boy in the park. I think they went with the roses.