There’s a map of the life the storyteller lived littered across his grave.
Forget-me-nots begged him to return. Half-bloomed and plucked carelessly, plucked before they stood a chance of surviving, wilted, frozen, dead on the stone. Maybe he would have loved them. Maybe he would have pressed them between the pages of a journal, and wrote the story of the woman who loved them so, enough to kill them in her haste to gift them to a lover she met on a snowy evening, and spent decades yearning for… even when he married someone else. He might have told the story of her longing, and the garden she planted because of him, because flowers were his favorite sign of life—and he might’ve told how forget-me-nots were the flower he loved most dearly, and she never forgot that small detail, even though no one ever cares what a man’s favorite flower is.
Photographs with names and dates scrawled on the back commemorated their time together. He would have laughed at the photos chosen. Half-nude, with beer cans in either hand, and a tiara atop his head that named him Queen of the New Year. He would have wept for others; his wedding day, wife cradled in his arms while they beamed, victorious, and looked at each other instead of the lens pointed at them. And still others would’ve caused an exquisite pain to rip through him… evidence of his mother’s death. Arms around his brothers’ shoulders at her funeral, in suits too big for them.
And a single cigarette burned to nothing, half invisible in the snow, promised someone still cared.
The storyteller’s plain headstone, and his settled grave, did not look interesting from afar.
But even in death, the storyteller promised a tale.
Through flowers, photos, and dead flames and smoke.