Amarillis

Bought the bulb as a gift, boxed with soil, pot, all it needed to grow and watched the flicker of time's lapse lengthen its green shadow, a scratch in a leaf like a wink and a smile, daily tracked its shoots swelling thick, the shape of the crack for the eventual blood red bud You in shock each day it stretched to bloom, velvet, vermillion, keeping us rapt as if it would suddenly speak, a silence you broke when you knocked it to drop from the counter, the flower snapped, the remainder placed in a mock decanter. A week later, white mold frosting it's tips, we closed the book on that flower, our lives once caught in it's grip, but now released.