Wishflowers

One day I didn’t want to play.  I didn’t want to talk about fighting the girl who’d called me ‘foreigner’ and said she wished my mother died from her cancer.  I brushed off his question and headed for our front door, books heavy in my arms. 

“What happened?” he’d asked.

I’d stopped and stared at the grass and then shook my head, my braid whipping across my back. I yearned for a hug, but fifth grade was the year I decided to stop acting like a baby. 

I felt a tug on my braid. “Here.”  

I turned and saw my father offering me one of his hands. “Make a wish,” he said, and held out a wish-flower even though I hadn’t followed any of our rules.

I imagined how my breath might release the feather-like pods to gallop into the air and travel a chaotic path away. But I felt too old to fall for these tricks anymore. I forced the spines of my textbooks to dig bruises into my arms. “This is stupid.”

 “Okay. Try this.” He brought out his other hand. 

Air caught in my throat. He held the largest bouquet of wish-flowers I’d ever seen, inches from my face.  Dozens of globes hung together by the barest of connections and blotted out the rest of the world. Each stalk contained potential, hundreds of seeds ready to tornado into the sky and then blanket the yard, maybe land on Mrs. Harrit’s grass and anger her when they sprouted in a week. 

I took a deep breath. 

Before I exhaled, my father used all his strength to blow. 

A rushing wall of pods plunged into the air around me. Feathery tails twirled across my cheeks, eyebrows, into my open mouth. I smelled the oranges my father loved.  

He blew again, hard enough to snuff out fifty birthday candles, his cheeks puffed into a pair of red balloons and I couldn’t prevent my smile or the giggle that materialized deep in my throat, because yes, he’d gotten me, was getting me and oh what a good trick! 

I dropped my books and searched the grass. Broken stalks poked from the yard like bent drinking straws. I laughed while brushing seeds out of my mouth. “Did you pick them all?” 

He waved his hands at the pods still floating in the air. “Just about.”

The seeds settled into a white carpet on the grass and did not pay attention to property lines. I couldn’t wait for the look of horror on Mrs. Harrit’s face once hundreds of wish-flowers grew up in her perfect lawn.  Then I saw it—a scraggly stalk with half the seeds already blown off the flower head, hiding in the crack where the house met grass—it was enough. “Mrs. Harrit is going to be mad,” I said.

 He looked toward Mrs. Harrit’s front door. “Promise you won’t tell on me?”

“Okay.” I picked the flower and hid it behind my back.  “But only if you get my books.”

“Done.”

I crept closer and readied my attack stance. I blew at the wish-flower as he turned, but he blew at the same time. The seeds twirled as if caught in a hurricane, some going this way, some going that way.  

My father laughed.  I giggled as a couple of seeds caught in his eyebrows and disappeared into his gray-streaked hair. 

“I think your father wins this round.”

We froze at the sound of my mother’s voice. It came out of nowhere, reminding me we were still three, though no one knew how much longer that might last. 

She leaned against the door post. I noticed she wore sweats, not a bathrobe. One of her good days. 

“You both look like you’re wearing very silly white hats,” she said.  

I ran fingers through my hair, pulled out a handful of white tufts and stuffed the seeds into my pockets for my collection. 

My father stepped onto the porch and kissed my mother’s cheek. “Did I tell you how,” he said, turning back to where I stood in the grass, “when we first moved here, your mother returned to her old neighborhood to pick some wish-flowers? She couldn’t find a single one growing on the whole block here. To your mother, this was a travesty.” He lowered his voice and glanced toward Mrs. Harrit’s house. “So your mother walked the neighborhood, under the cover of night, and blew an entire flower’s head of seeds into each front yard, for five houses down, in both directions and both sides of the street.”

“But I didn’t plant anything!” My mother laughed. “I was like a strong breeze, nothing more.” 

“I don’t think the neighbors would agree.” He winked at me.

She replied, “Well, too bad—” 

Something pounded on the door and police lights pulsed bright against my closed eyelids, interrupting. Though there was no emergency, in spite of what they wished me to believe, they did not cease running their engines on the sidewalk of my neighborhood, sending fumes into the air, combusting gas for no reason, hiding behind uniforms and logos and notices. They turned my house into something foreign, something to fear, something that would never be the same.

Before I scrambled for the paperwork and the pictures and the boxes, before I hurried to the neighbor’s house, before I stoically watched them trample mud on a carpet no longer my own, I searched for the small cardboard envelope left out by chance on a side table after analyzing and packing and selling. I hadn’t known then if I should place it in the Stay or the Go pile. The envelope’s edges were worn from age. Only faintly doodled flowers remained as a label from when I had packed away the seeds in wait for my own home.  

I stepped out my front door. I walked past the police to the sidewalk and ignored the flashing lights, and my neighbors, the one’s who had come to watch but avoid eye contact. 

I tore a corner of the cardboard envelope, and then pinched out a portion of the seeds and flung them away. The police approached and their hands hovered over their unhooked holsters. The tufted pods wavered, unsure if they belonged, then ignored wooden fences, imaginary property lines, made-up zoning codes.  Each seed followed a separate cork-screw path and parachuted into the grass, planting themselves deep. 

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I hope you liked it! If you enjoyed this story and want to support my future work, you can purchase this and my other titles on Amazon.com and other retailers. If you would like to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or other retailers, even just a sentence or two, that's also a big help!

Here are descriptions of two of my novels. The first one, A Feast of Weeds, is related to Wishflowers. The second blurb, Rhinoceros Summer, is a novel I published September 2013!! Anyway, drop me a comment and let me know what you think!

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A FEAST OF WEEDS

An apocalyptic romance novel by Jamie Thornton, available summer 2014

Which one should I talk about first, death or love? Or are they the same? I don’t know how it was with anyone else. Dylan and I were holding hands on the sofa when those people came. I said to him I loved him. But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea how much--

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RHINOCEROS SUMMER

A novel by Jamie Thornton, available for purchase in ebook and trade paperback

Lethal Ambition

A rare rhinoceros on the brink of extinction. A trophy hunter on the verge of bankruptcy. A young photographer desperate for fame.

Seventeen–year–old Lydia Gibb has no business setting foot in Tanzania, but a fluke opportunity provides a chance to leave her boring life, to capture beauty with her camera—to mean something. But nothing is what it seems, and Lydia becomes ensnared in the bloody, male-dominated world of showdown hunting. She uses her camera as a shield, but the horrors mount, and so do her feelings for Caleb, a rugged, earnest game officer on a mission of his own—until Lydia captures his sights.

Lydia’s pictures surpass her wildest ambitions, but then fall into the wrong hands. Unless she and Caleb team up and race to take back the camera, her work will drive both her and a rare rhino into extinction.