The Chrysanthemum Phenomenon

Very first attempt at story telling in High School, with no formal training or experience. Its success was influential in my career choice early on, but it is not indicative of how I write now after 6 years college training and as much professional writing experience.

The Chrysanthemum Phenomenon

M. Hurley

A squirrel approached me the other day in a collected demeanor that made me question my usual sound masculine confidence. Its eyes never left mine, my inquisitive expression mirrored grotesquely in the solid depths of its fixed stare. The squirrel exuded such manly potency that the testosterone saturated my nostrils, singeing the sensitive hairs therein. Barely had my brain processed these new feelings of inequity when the assertive saunter of the squirrel ceased abruptly. Truly, if the rodent moved at all, the minuteness of its stirrings escaped the attention of my mortal eyes. Just as assuredly as the satisfied smirk melted from its furry face, the squirrel’s neck protruded from its shoulders in concentrated alertness, a twitch of its whiskers confirming its quiet contemplation. Without warning, its eyelids fired apart and its features contorted into a retarded version of its former self-confidence. The squirrel tucked its paw close to its chest in a sort of squirrel fist as it keeled over and squealed, “My kingdom for an acorn!” before it plummeted from its perch on the lower branches of a tree overhanging the street. Gravity was the eventual downfall of the starving squirrel.

Barophobia. My father had an acute fear of gravity. “Son,” he used to warn me, “gravity… it’s always there.” I had to agree with him: never had I experienced a reprieve from the force that was ever beneath my feet, the force that was my father’s bane. He would warn me of the dangers of gravity like any other father would insist upon the use of condoms, or filters on your camels, on which filters definitely do not belong. Some mornings I would awake to screams emanating from the bathroom due to the sheer vertical distance from my father’s eyes to the toilet, into which he was taking his morning piss. We would find him curled on the floor of the bathroom, fetal in the pool of urine covering the tiles.

            My father perished at an early age when he tripped over a kitchen chair and fell face first into a butter knife he was carrying. We buried him on a Tuesday, in a plot he had bought for himself and my mother a month-and-a-half before. For the wake I picked a single chrysanthemum and strategically placed it over his cheek by his left eye, to which the mortuary could do nothing to make it look presentable. My mother found that appropriate. She said it was because it complimented the beauty of his disposition, but secretly I believed it was because mums were my mother’s favorite flowers and because she inwardly found my father rather plain. When they closed the casket to lower it into the ground, my mother insisted they leave the chrysanthemum there. Before the final burial, she sprinkled petals of the same flower into the hole as opposed to the traditional dirt.

Long sleeves were made for wearing in the summer, if only for the sake of being contrary. As the sun fell warm upon the back of my neck, I approached the disoriented squirrel in the name of half-interested scientific curiosity. I remember thinking how stylish I must seem in my long sleeve shirt, totally contradictory to the suffocating heat of the season. It had a tribal pattern on the right sleeve and the emblem of a fashionable designer on the back. The squirrel, by this time, was regaining its senses and returning to its feet on the pavement, preparing to climb the tree once again. It never made more than a few precarious steps toward the side of the road before its skittering locomotion was interrupted by a Taurus striking its fragile body.

I had a lover once whose mind was so wrought with soap opera drama and teenage anxieties that her emotional fragility was as visible as an open sore in the middle of her forehead. She was beautiful in her timidity, with hunched shoulders, curly, pudding-brown hair, and eyes so shallow her tears leaked from the almost constantly. She always moved very quickly, whether it was performing everyday procedures or forever changing her opinion on everything, her rationale for this being that if she did not keep one up on life it would surely shatter her. She was wearing black the day she finally succumbed to the first subtle throws of insanity. She sat at my kitchen table with a mug of green tea that had Chrysanthemum petal crushed into it. She used to say the petal gave the tea an aromatic consistency that not only alleviated one’s aching senses but also enhanced the taste quality, even though I secretly believed it tasted like shit.

            She sat and she sipped and she worried aloud whether she ought to repaint the walls in her own kitchen while I stood by and made sure she had access to only blunt objects. However, the conversation took a startling turn when she changed her mind, mid-sentence, about her feelings for me. Her face took on a disturbing Alec Guinness (circa Lady Killers) expression and her voice became course with Tourette-like profanity. “You bastard!” she hollered into the silence of my otherwise empty apartment. She then proceeded to defend this bold accusation with such a well thought out presentation that I would not be surprised had she whipped out a macabre flip chart written in the emotional blood I must have spilled in the long months of abuse I’d apparently inflicted. I was blamed for everything but the knots in her hair, but by the sound of things she might have made a good argument for that as well. Her largest issue was my acquisition of her innocence. She likened her virginity to a tomato that she trusted me to love and cherish and instead I palmed it and crushed it like so many bugs caught in one of those electric can openers my grandmother used to have. Her descent was rapid from there, like everything else she did, and I could do nothing to stop the terrible bouts of dementia that were prevalent in the following years. I tell you this in monotone disconnectedness for the sake of accurate storytelling, but I can assure you her condition affected me deeply. “I would love you,” I told her, “but I can’t keep up with you.”

            I approached the now motionless squirrel sprawling awkwardly on the hot pavement. I bent a stick of wintergreen gum in half and slid it into my mouth as I began my examination. Its back was snapped in what looked like two places and its right leg lay two and half feet from the rest of its body. Tire marks were permanently carved into the squirrel’s pliable flesh, and the weight of the car had forcibly pushed half of its brain out through its open mouth. I wondered to my self what interested me so terribly about the squirrel’s malformed carcass.

When I was a child I used to daydream that I was a vulture. I would hover above an imaginary desert, flapping my immense wings and looking down on my little sister’s Barbies, which I would place on the rug in such a way that they appeared to be beautiful heroines, close to death. Sometimes I would decapitate the plastic dolls in an effort to make the callous scene more believable, and to justify my consumption of the deceased. Then, when I wasn’t in the mood for imaginative entertainment that involved me as a main character, I would have my own GI Joes enslave the naked, headless Barbies and turn them into synthetic love puppets.

            Afterward, inevitably, my uncle would chide me for playing with my sister’s dolls and invite me to involve myself in some more masculine activities, such as getting him another Molson from the refrigerator. When I returned with his beer, my uncle would teach me to say dirty words and phrases, assuring me that the adults enjoying dessert in the kitchen would find it cute to hear me saying them. Elated beyond comprehension, I would run into the kitchen, my new light up Nikes squeaking on the clean hardwood floor. I would leap with spider-mannish agility from an unoccupied chair to the tabletop, where I would tear the bouquet of chrysanthemums from their glass vase and present them ceremoniously to my grandmother. By this time, the giggles and coos from the assembled women should have cued the expected adorable display. I would clear my throat, put on my best Tom Cruise smile, and declare for the entire kitchen, “This place smells like rotten vagina!” I took the stunned silences to mean that my aunts were speechless, my mother was mute with pride, and my grandmother was quietly assessing dying happily knowing her grandson was so gosh-darned charming. Every time something like that would happen, there would be weeks where I wasn’t allowed to see my uncle.

            The grotesque daVinci lay at my feet unmoving, a broken, bleeding testament to my shattered life. I knew that the corpse of the poor squirrel would remain smeared across the width of my street for a week or more if I were to do nothing about it. I’ve seen road kill stay longer than that. I considered my options and chewed my gum. I glanced at the houses around me where my neighbors lived. I could have removed the body from the middle of the street and saved the neighborhood an eyesore and a bad summertime stench. Then I realized that not only was I too lazy, but that I had no inclination to do anything so uninteresting as providing janitorial service to the nearby residents. I looked at the dead squirrel again, and stood for a good twenty minutes, fingering the acorn in my pocket.