Jeff Moss: YELLOW • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Jeffrey G. Moss
YELLOW

It is a late October afternoon, darkness coming on quick, and Phyllis DeLuna, one of three widowed sisters who live across the street, is standing on her front stoop waving me over.

“We’re putting the garden to bed,” she says. “These are the last of the autumn blooms. Come, make Mom happy.”

Standing on the steps to the DeLuna house, I think back to the long summer days that bled seamlessly into lingering dusk, Phyllis and Angie and Mary in faded housecoats and slippers, speaking Italian, deadheading, spraying for aphids, working coffee grounds and eggshells into the Brooklyn soil while Mom is perched, some evenings near paralyzed, in a folding beach chair on our cement porch. She sips Seagram’s, smokes Marlboro Reds, and seethes. She is thirty; Dad crushed their youthful promise like petals under boots when he went to work one morning four years ago and, as they agreed, he didn’t come home that night. Mom churns and agonizes and resents. She does her best to conceal the pain. I am ten now and beginning to recognize the incessant ember of pain smoldering in her heart.

“Hold them gentle, like a baby,” Phyllis says. “Careful of the thorns.”

Mom greets me in the foyer. I am cradling dozens of yellow roses. She leans over, inhales, sighs, draws deeper as if breathing in a newborn’s scalp.

The roses go into the cut glass vase two or three at a time; she sniffs the open ones. “Those DeLunas are too good,” she says. “Too good to me.”

When we are done, Mom dials the rotary phone. “You’re angels, Phyllis, you and your sisters,” she says. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I remember thinking that the yellow flowers are like the Earth’s sun, the only thing that can revitalize Superman when he’s had a near fatal encounter with kryptonite. Alcohol and opioids could not eliminate a lifetime of searing aches. Asters, daffodils, daisies, irises, chrysanthemums, and roses, however, I learned, could assuage it.

This October I am sixty, out walking my dogs. I don’t know if Mom knows. I don’t know if she knows her primary care physician called to inform me, her health proxy, that her body can no longer tolerate the daily bedside dialysis that has been sustaining her for months. I do not know if she knows that, despite her will to fight, despite her wishes to avoid end-of-life palliative care, it is time to let go. I am desperate to share the scene before me, the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the birch and sycamores on Prospect Lane, filtered as if through stained glass windows. I place the FaceTime call.

“Hey, Mom,” I start.

“Hi, baby,” she mutters.

“I wanted to show you where I am,” I say, and flip the camera to reveal the glowing, golden corridor. I hold it steady for a reverential moment.

“Oh!” she exclaims weakly. “How beautiful.” She draws from the cannula. “Reminds me of the DeLunas. Remember?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Angels, they were,” she says. “Three angels.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” One annunciated yes for each angelic sister.

“Look,” she says, turning her phone around. “The yellow roses you sent the other day. They’re open.” Another audible breath, cannula and roses. “They smell so sweet. You always knew.” I cleave onto her use of the past tense.

She turns her camera around, but her ruddy, drawn face is way too close to the lens, the device too heavy.

“So glad,” I say and blow a kiss.

A week after her passing, I am preparing our suburban yard for winter. I’ve raked, mulched, pulled up sunflower stalks, cut back coneflowers. When I look over to gauge the work needed for the shrubbery, I notice three orange-tinged yellow rosebuds. The last of the autumn blooms.

I clip and, careful of the thorns, as if holding a newborn, bring them inside, place them, one by one, in a small, black vase. I make a note to take the cut glass one from her place.

These buds will open, fill the room with subtle perfume, and wilt away soon enough. I will myself back outside; daylight is fading.

After thirty-two years guiding thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in crafting their worlds, Jeffrey G. Moss has finally started following some of his own writing advice. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain Review, Under the Gum Tree, and Hippocampus, among others. Find him, and his work, on IG @jeffgm.