Jenny doesn’t remember when she quit listening to Ana, smiling now and then as Ana recalls another of her nude dreams. In her flannel PJs she leans against the cupboard door, never dropping a syllable. Like a bird’s nest, her grayish-blonde hair is sprigged when she wakes. Last Christmas Jenny gave her a satin pillowcase, but Ana rarely uses it.
“Did you listen to what I just told you?” she asks.
Jenny smiles. “Definitely,” and she hands her two glasses of filtered water. “Would you put these on the table?” The sun cuts through the kitchen window, warming Jenny’s pale shoulders beneath the red and black plaid bathrobe. After five years, she has learned how to appear engaged when Ana goes on about her dreams. Every morning a new narrative that must be spoken before anything else.
Jenny hears the rise and fall of Ana’s voice. The changes in volume, the shift in tone. The way she lisps where an s and z sound like th in thunder, her tongue catching between her teeth. Cute, even sexy, when they first met at a yard sale. Ana chattered about Sienna Dinnerware on the lawn—salad plates and saucers fringed in green, camouflaged by blades of crabgrass. But now? Her words are mostly white noise.
Jenny takes her cereal to the table while Ana spreads peanut butter on an English muffin. They sit across from each other, a pink moth orchid in the center.
“She looks sad,” Jenny says, reaching out to the lowest bloom, rubbing a petal between her right index finger and thumb. Gently to avoid damage.
“It’s just a flower,” Ana says.
Jenny remembers how her mother tossed a plant as soon as the bloom was off. When she was thirteen, her mother sent her to Miss Howard’s School for Girls in Waycross, Georgia.
“She’s been with us as long as we’ve been together,” Jenny says, poking her finger in the soil to see if she were dry and pouring just enough water into the clay pot to humidify the roots.
“So has the couch,” Ana says, wiping peanut butter from her lips.
“I never liked that couch,” Jenny says.
“I’ve never been good with flowers,” Ana says
Sliding her hand around the sides of the cool pot, Jenny knows the orchid and how easily she can be traumatized if left untended. Mealy bugs spread their cottony mass over her buds and stems and suck her sap, leaving a sticky path in the wake. Jenny lifts the plant.
Ana takes their plates to the sink. “Orchids are too much trouble,” she says.
Jenny listens to the retreat of Ana’s footsteps and moves the orchid near the window so morning sun can shine through the blooms, turning them into a spectacle of light.
Blossoms fall to the dusty floor.
Originally published as “The Orchid” in oranges journal.
Chella Courington was born and raised in Southern Appalachia in a storytelling family who taught her how to value the word. Courington’s creative publications include one novel, one novella, several chapbooks of poetry and fiction, and innumerable poems and stories in journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Pushcart as well as awarded individual prizes. With teaching as her livelihood, she moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Santa Barbara, California, twenty years ago, giving her the space and distance to understand her past.