Pressed Poppies
written by: Patricia Furstenberg
The carriage waited by the orchard, its yellow wheels catching the lazy morning light. He stood beside it, cloaked in black. As if mourning something he had claimed had never lived.
But I remember. The way his eyes lingered on mine. The way his lips trembled when he lied.
He said the carriage was for my convenience. I called it what it was: a dismissal, dressed in civility.
“You always twist things,” he said. “You make farewells into funerals.”
Maybe. But I saw the truth in the silence between us. The truth is that he didn’t try to stop me.
He never did.
I carried my trunk alone, stepping over the gravel where we once walked barefoot, laughing, wine-heavy and sun-warmed.
Behind me, his boots had scuffed the stones, always rushing off to duty, to war, to politics. While I was left behind. To tend the house, the books, the ghosts. To fold linen. To count days. To press flowers between unanswered letters.
He said I changed. That I’d become hard. Sharp.
He never asked why.
He never asked how it felt to lose our child while he toasted alliances. To sleep cold in a bed built for two. To speak into silence until even my voice abandoned me.
“You’ll find someone gentler,” he said, as though it were charity.
“I was gentle,” I told him. “You taught me otherwise.”
The world outside glowed golden with the last of May. The apple trees were blooming. It smelled of beginnings.
While I left.
I told myself it was a happy ending. It was sunlight. It was the yellow of new roads and open skies.
Once I had set a poppy free. It floated to the clouds, freed from Earth’s pull.
But yellow stings the eyes when it’s too bright.
And tears. They shine just the same.
So I wore yellow and blamed it on the light.
***
She wore yellow.
A cruel color. Bold. Unforgiving.
As if she hadn’t spent the last year unraveling us, thread by thread. She had folded herself into silence, turned warmth into logic, love into a ledger.
Now she says I let her go?
She was already gone for months before she left. Claiming I didn’t write. When I did. Leaving my words unopened.
The last letter I sent came back with no reply. Just a pressed poppy. A soldier’s bloom. A widow’s emblem.
She says I never asked how she felt. How do you ask a question when every answer cuts?
“I was alone,” she said. So was I.
The court is not the lawless dream she imagines. It’s masks and hunger dressed as conversation.
Drowning on duty for her. For us.
I bore exile like honor. I bore laughter like shame.
She carried her trunk alone, spine straight, with that same stubborn pride that once made me fall in love with her. I did not offer help. She would have refused it.
Gravel cracked beneath her steps, louder than it should have in the hush of morning. Behind her, my boots had scuffed the stones. I shifted my weight, uncertain whether to step forward or back. Once we walked there barefoot, laughing, drunk on wine and the illusion of permanence.
She paints me as the villain in sable. Cloaking herself in daffodil virtue.
She kissed me at the gate—lightly, like a habit. I wanted to hold her. Desperately. Her spine was already turned.
A woman gone. A poppy in the wind.
Wheels cried over gravel, yellow vanished down the lane.
I stayed.
A pressed poppy sits unopened in a drawer. Red, fragile, quiet. The color of memory.
Black, I told myself, is the name of goodbye. I had dressed in black, not for drama, but because yellow was hers, not mine. It clung to her like memory, like sunlight trying to stay on the skin even after dusk.
NOTE:
Based on the Prompt – The Color of Goodbye
- Pressed Poppies - May 31, 2025
- Silent Sentinels - February 24, 2025
- The Seagull - June 29, 2024
