Free Let the Dark Flower Blossom by Norah Labiner

book. The girl sighed, her hand on the scissors—and said that she was just so tired of bright young men. She preferred the classics. The girl had violet hair, and Eloise felt a bit envious. So she had the book wrapped, for the sake of not disappointing—or courting the displeasure of—this girl whom she wished she knew; a girl who seemed so much like the girls whom Eloise had long ago known and the girl whom she herself used to be, but was no longer.
    Mrs. Sarasine thanked the girl, looked at her watch, and then took her shopping bag out the revolving door into the cold afternoon.
    She was in luck. She caught a taxi just at the curb.
    She got in and directed the driver to take her to the Parliament Hotel.
6.
    The day after the night that I met Pru, I went back to look at her house, in the sunlight. In the diffuse damp autumn afternoon. I waited at a distance. Then the door to the house opened. Pru stood in the doorway. She didn’t see me. She got on her bicycle. I watched her ride off down the street. I had an image of her. I was already collecting pieces of her. So that if she were broken, I could put her back together. If she were shattered, I could reassemble and save her.
7.
    Eloise—gray lamb’s wool coat, black boots—strode through the lobby of the Parliament Hotel.
    The letter had led her here. The letter contained so few words that it barely seemed to exist. Meet me at the bar of the Parliament Hotel . It wasn’t signed. Only the hour and date of the proposed assignation. Once she had been called by its sender: almost beautiful . What about now? And now? She was walking through the lobby, upon the carpet patterned with crushed roses, into another world:an underworld; the darkness of the elegant old bar. She went to her fate. She could not stop herself. She went to Zigouiller.
8.
    Pru and I lived in a house on a street called Valhalla. She took the sunny back room as her studio. I used to get such an odd feeling—an uneasiness, then a sudden rush of familiarity—to see her bicycle left, unlocked, lying on the grass before our doorstep.
    It was July 1989. I was teaching an evening course of Intro to Poetry,—when I came home to find Pru sitting on the front steps with Roman. I hadn’t seen him in years. I should have been surprised. And yet I was not. His magical appearances did not astonish me, but I still might marvel at the deftness of his disappearances. Roman was talking. Pru had her face tipped toward him, listening. As I approached, I couldn’t hear what he was telling her. Pru was laughing. The hot night. In her thin dress. A strap had slipped down over one shoulder.
    Ro was on his way to the Mayo Clinic. His father was there; Milton Stone was dying, but Ro wasn’t too broken up about it. “Something’s wrong with the old man’s heart. That’s funny, isn’t it? He always thought he’d be murdered,” he said. “Milton Stone in the library with the great silver sewing shears,” he said. He might not have said heart . He might have said ticker . He might not have said shears . He might have said scissors . Pru thought that he was being brave. I knew that he was just being Ro. And we sat outside drinking Grain Belt in the darkness. Ro and Shelly and Pru as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
    Pru with pink hair.
    She sat listening to Ro.
    Ro reached over—
    Between one word and the next—
    And fixed the fallen strap of Pru’s dress.
    Yeah, Ro kept us laughing.
    Telling his stories.
    Stories of ghosts and gods and girls.
    Pru in the moonlight shivered.
    Ro touched her bare arm.
    It grew late.
    And then it was late.
    Not too late.
    Just late.
    Pru held her face in her hand.
    And looked up at the stars.
    Did she mind?
    If we went on without her?
    Ro had so much to tell me.
    Ro and I left Pru behind and we walked to a campus bar.
    Ro was the same as ever.
    He had put on a bit of fat.
    Rather than