I much prefer dead flowers to fresh-cut ones. There’s something so vividly grotesque about fresh-cut flowers. It is, perhaps, that they are so colorful, so alive looking, but not, after all, alive. I have heard that working girls are superstitious about fresh-cut flowers, beauty cut down in its prime, but, no, I am not superstitious. I just don’t particularly like them. It has been suggested that I have expensive tastes in many things and I suppose that might be true, but not, it happens, in flowers. My favorite fresh-cut flower, if I must kill a beautiful thing to enjoy it, is the carnation.

But I still prefer dead flowers. A freshly cut flower is too much like clown makeup on a corpse. And besides all of that, common. The dead flower, without the garish illusion of life, is more beautiful. Wrinkled, fragile, brittle, a dead flower is the beauty of tragedy. A dead flower also has a story.

This dead flower, meanwhile, must keep its story. I found it under the bench outside my building.

SS