A Mouth Filled with White

FICTION

by Emmanuel Nwafor

          You bought a cluster of jasmines from the old florist who has a flower fixed eternally in his hair. The florist on Michael Okpara Road. Flower pots with polka dots of water outside a shade; many flowers with colored petals and fat bulbs on a table, a pair of green garden shears. The jasmines were wrapped in last week’s newspaper. I unwrapped the paper already creased where you held them and smiled at the muddled print. I brought the flowers to my face. The petals were white and warm and slightly disheveled because your car windows are always down. I kept smiling at the jasmines; I would keep them in the blue vase with daisies around the lip.
         I called you after I had filled the vase with water and vinegar and dipped the flowers there. I wished the vase were clear so I could see the stalks crisscrossed and naked in the water, slender like your legs under our pool in Jos. I took a picture and sent it to you. You laughed with an emoji and I called you after. 
         ‘I don’t know what to do with these jasmines.’
         ‘The old man picked them for you. I love the vase you have put them in.’
         ‘They will die either way.’
         You sighed. I know you also pinched the bridge of your nose. 
         ‘Just leave them in water and let them be flowers.’

         My father believed flowers did not die because God watched over them. God sprinkled dew on them, gave them sun, and they in turn opened in gratitude to him. My father believed this about the ixora hedge he tended into a circle in the center of our house. Sometimes he held my hand and walked me away from it, up to the fence, to watch the flowers from there. He would say, pointing, ‘Don’t you see? From here, they look like burning stars! I swear, I would eat these flowers first before anything else can.’ And we would laugh. 
         My father loved his flowers. He believed nurturing them was the job God gave to him when nobody else would. 
         ‘God does not care about work experience. He gave them life, he just needs me to be careful and kind.’
         We went outside one evening to see how a sudden solar flare had burned a section of the hedge, and something formerly so concrete in my father’s face evaporated like mist. The leaves browned and crackled when we touched them. The flowers shriveled to thin threads in their stalks, like they had burned where they stood. They broke off and fell in one brown, dead piece when my father touched them.
         ‘But that was not the worst solar flare,’ said my father. 
         He no longer tended to the flowers after that. The flowers grew wild. Their branches mangled. Dangerous stalks jutted out and the circle he had made became something monstrous. 
         ‘Nna, come and cut these flowers nau,’ we begged him.
         ‘Leave them for God. They are his own.’
         God never came, but my mother’s machete came down on the ixoras. They whipped her skin in resistance. Many red flowers littered the ground like blood from a massacre. My father watched from the veranda and died in his sleep. 

         I look at the jasmines. To watch them in bloom, in fragile nakedness, waiting for their necks to drop and for petals to litter the floor, cannot be all I learned from my father. I move close to them and exhale; the petals ruffle like feathers. I pull them from the vase, they are still white and warm, and one by one, I fill my mouth with them.