Evie snorted and wiped her nose with a scrunched tissue she found in her pocket, examining the spread of pink tinged mucus with some distaste and worry. Sniffing again, she pocketed the tissue. Picking the trowel from her counter, she sought briefly for a pot with a succession of chinks of terracotta on terracotta. Settling on a small, rotund and brightly painted pot, Evie proceeded to carefully dig up the peculiar blue plant. Evie lightly bit her tongue as she prised up the plant, laying bare the sinews of a few roots: she deposited the plant snuggly in the hollow of the pot. She looked at the plant, now comfortably sitting in the squat little pot, the blue bell of its flower drooping over and nodding slightly, like it was drowsing there. She noticed, gently stroking the cerulean petals with her fingertips, that, following the explosion of pink pollen in her face, the bloom appeared to have puckered itself up again, perhaps dropped back to sleep. Picking up her books again, she ascended the staircase again, sniffing.
Poring over an encyclopaedia of plants and trees, which had distracted her wholly from her, otherwise meticulously kept, account books, Evie, without lifting her bright eyes from the print, took a mouthful tea from a chipped white cup - making it milky and sweet, Evie sometimes thought she drank her own bodyweight in tea. Her eyes had flicked over the gloomy blue clusters of grape hyacinths, each little flower was plumped like the fabric of a skirt filled by a woman’s hips and legs: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
and floated like a bee over to the folds of skyflowers, yawning like parasols in some sunshot glade: http://crewlandtrust.files.wordpress.com...
From the sighing caps of bluebells, the ends curled like a sprite's shoes:
http://www.english-country-garden.com/a/...
She turned further and considered the blue leaves, oddly reminiscent of frozen shards of foxglove, of catlin’s giant:
http://www.nzplantpics.com/pics_ground_c...
but wandering on to the fanned petals of a galaxy spring starflowers, each winking with a sort geometric loveliness:
http://springstarflower.com/images/img00...
At this moment, cheeks still ballooned with warm tea, she was reading about Lithodora diffusa, sometimes called Grace Ward. http://plantality.com/upload/wikiplantph...
This plant, indigenous to the alpine regions, was, certainly in this particular photo, a starlike array of blue petals, arranged around a centre of pink bases to those petals and, extending from the flower’s heart, pink stamen. Apparently, the name Lithodora meant something like ‘stone gift’, because of its residence among the scree of alpine slopes, and the name diffusa referred to the ‘spreading’ growth of the plant. Swallowing her tea, Evie, though the colours were approaching correct in places, did not think that this was the plant now sitting on her windowsill in the bright morning light - though its hirsute, green leaves reminded her that she really ought to shave her legs ahead of the night out. Evie rifled the pages and was about to begin reading about bog sage, when her phone, which she had set on the wooden table, buzzed.
Breaking with the pages, Evie checked her phone while taking another mouthful of tea: Hazel was meeting with Violet and they would walk over together. She set her phone down again and as she closed the encyclopaedia she ran her fingers over the ornate blue signature - C. Bloom. She flicked the hard cover over and, crossing her arms over it and leaning forward, stared purposelessly at the pale sky beyond the blue bell of the flower’s blossom. She could see, through the pane, the various dark and serried peaks of roofs against the sky, with the bell-shaped bud seeming to rise up and loom over the rooftops. Evie fancied, as she watched the bloom sway ever so gently in the faint breeze, which drifted in through the slightly ajar window, that the stalk of the flower would look, to people on the street, like a great spire rising from the ground, a magic beanstalk if ever there existed any such thing, while the bulbous, blue cupola of the flower itself appeared to watch the street, looking down at the little people, like aphids, thronging about below it.
Drumming her fingers on the book, she remembered that she really ought to visit her dad soon - although she was normally a very attentive daughter in this respect, she had lapsed a little, but still phoned fairly regularly. He always kept her bed made over there, although she stayed more often above the shop, with her childhood teddies arranged with the high fidelity that she associated with her father. Felix Bloom was the son of Jewish immigrants, from what was then Czechoslovakia (although Evie’s paternal grandmother’s family had hailed from Hungary originally), had been born in Dublin and had trained as an architect. His family had changed their name from Květ to a rough English equivalent, which had lead to a debate between he and his wife over naming their youngest daughter Květa, although he had eventually to settle for this to stand as her middle name - Evelyn Květa Bloom. He pursued this occupation as a natural extension of a childhood love of precise drawing; to Evie her father drew as accurately as Da Vinci and his ability to draw things into life had fascinated her. Evie could recall floating around him and his desk like a wasp around jam as he drew and sketched in the afternoons; he seemed to her to permanently smell of pencil shavings and he would draw faint smiley faces in smears of shiny grey on her cheeks. In his leisure time his drawing not always limited to buildings, and Evie would commission him to draw for her all the landscapes and objects of her mind - which survived today in large sketchbooks he kept in the house.
Evie’s older sister, Aster, had never really been taken with art or flowers and had applied herself to studying accountancy at university: while Evie had swithered contrarily between fine art and botany, although her intentions to study had been waylaid by the car crash. Since the accident Evie seldom saw her sister: it wasn’t that her sister was callous, but she was busy and had become a little detached.
The pink pollen had left her feeling a touch groggy and tired, which she put down mostly to hayfever, which was not the most useful of things to suffer from while running a flower shop, because of the periodic streaming of her blue eyes and nose. Evie rubbed her eyes and sniffed. Her chair scraping on the floor, she pottered hither and thither, attempting to make something approaching preparations for the day. Turning on the radio, she set about putting together a picnic, which, although it might not be called for, she intended to have just in case. After this, and clicking the lid shut, she wandered through to get changed; on the way, she sneezed again. Wiping her nose with another scrunched tissue, she groaned.
In the warm, pale light of her room, she stripped herself until she was in her underwear - her bra was underwired and purple tartan, the smooth purple mounds hatched with various colours of green and blue. Matching this were her lilac knickers, fringed with powder blue, which extended up her hipline and was canvassed tightly across her hips and buttocks: so well-fitting that, when, as had happened now, her knicker’s rode up from their snugness, the lower portions of the white hemispheres of her backside were disclosed beneath the blue-fringed arcades of the kickers’ back, while from the arches at the side of the garments extended the pillars of her thick, white thighs. Furthermore, the soft flesh of her thighs and the cushiony melons of her buttocks, were the blue rim of the fabric marked the end of her knickers, bulged out again, like inflated white rubber, as if too large to be constricted. Placing the palm on the curve of her right haunch, meditatively running her hand over it and while looking in the mirror, Evie was slightly dismayed by the snugness of her lower underwear because, while she thought she might not have lost weight, it seemed apparent to her that she had gained weight. Putting a hand on the plushness of her stomach, she broke with the fear of suspected fattening, she dressed: first swinging on a light, white blouse, the front of which was adorned with a slight cluster of semi-transparent ruffles and second drawing on a pair of tights while lying supine on her bed - To this she added navy blue jean-shorts and a thin a thin blue cardigan.
Finishing her makeup in the a mirror she heard the girl’s letting themselves in downstairs. After wandering through to pick up the picnic box, she picked up her bag, her keys and, after slipping into her shoes, went to meet Hazel and Violet on the stairs.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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