THE ORCHID
by
Matthew Kirby
Copyright © 2002 All Rights Reserved
I had been in the hospital for a month and so I already had a lot of flowers. One day my nurse, Gertie, came into the room holding her nose. I thought maybe I had shit myself. I was wrong: she held her nose because of a very stinky black orchid sent to me by my nephew, Brian.
That fucker, everybody knows that black orchids mean death. I told Gertie to leave it at my bedside. I wanted to figure out if it naturally smelled that awful or if Brian had poisoned it somehow. I stared into its black orifice. I fell in love with it. I wanted to die.
When I was sure I was about to die, I had Gertie call Brian and hand me the telephone. "Brian, you fucker," I said, "this is probably your idea of some Buddhist lesson on death, but I tell you, I love this flower."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Kirby is a fiction writer, essayist, and frequent film interpreter at Metaphilm.com.
|
