Spring Tulips

She was the sort who gathered her hair around her head in two long braids, living with a clay-colored hearing aid, she died among her tulips.
I remember because I was the sort who noticed these details-- the paper said she died "In the garden," but I knew an angel had taken her amid the tulips. No other place had been so dear to her poor little heart, and she she had always looked foward to their bloom through the whole year until Easter, when they exploded into raspberry pink-red. They stood upright, fallic and flushed with passion. She told me once, when I was seperating bulbs, and about two inches of dirt crusted over my arms. She said, that this was the time when birds come back. I remember her smile, so big, so endearing. She rarely smiled, except Easters, So I assumed this spring would be better for us all. I hastily returned to my bulbs while she raked old leaves off the ground. "One Day, I'll be like the leaves," She must have thought, because when I looked up again, she had been staring intently at the small pile of leaves she had amassed in the hour or so that we had been out in the beds, and I thought it strange. I called her name, and she snapped out of her daze, and I was glad of it; seeing her in it scared me. We worked the rest of the afternoon that January until the blood-red sky turned to grey. Then we put the muddy tools into the shed and I drove my Impala home.
She had always demanded me to be at her house on time, directly after school. I never dwelled much on the fact that I wasn't with the other fellows, at the burger joint or home on the computer, talking to my friends. I did what I had to do, and I drove an Impala, and that was what I dwelled on.
At her receiving, the town descended like flies on the three-room funeral home, and the crowds squeezed in so tight that before they knew it, noone could get out, and noone could get in; all while the outer limits of the mass grew impatient with their watches.
After the family left the funeral home, the well-wishers moved through the parking lot until midnight, when Mr. Lockwood shooed the last of them and slammed the door. We had to lie and hold a secret, private funeral for family and close friends, in fear of the crushing masses. I was neither family nor friend, but invited none-the-less. At the ceremony, I noticed there were no flowers. When I asked about it, some stranger said they had been trampled by crowds.
I smiled when I saw the casket, considering it was open for the first and last time. The old woman's daughter kissed her cheek, and after several members of the family had gone, and it was my turn, I was afraid. I stood, my hands gripping the insides of my pockets and their seams as if I was hanging over a canyon of darkness. Her hair had been all curled and laid gently over her shoulders, the shoulders swathed in a purple dress. I couldn't help but snicker, because she told me this is what they would do. She would've preferred her white men's oxford shirt and old wranglers, and her hair pulled up into two simple braids, hidden by her straw hat.
I took my hands out of my pockets, and reached into my coat to pull out the now-limp tulip I had gathered that morning. With a smile of sadness I leaned over her body to place it on her chest, hoping that somehow she could smell it's pungent pollens and feel it's soft stem and fleshy petals.
I then noticed her hands, folded over one another, fingernails strangely polluted with dirt still; and as I leaned in even closer, hoping to hide my disbelief from the family sobbing behind me, I could faintly see marks of red lines around her neck. When I examined closer, the make-up failed to conceal them any longer and for the first time, I really saw the dark beneath her eyes. There were rope burns where she had hung herself from the tree that draped it's budding branches over the tulips.
I felt a chill as her lips gathered into a smirk in the corner, and I left that place without seeing her buried that day.