Rose Petals

It was raining again. It always seemed to be raining here. The droplets thudded against Olivia's umbrella, and the wind carried them to wet her black coat and red hair as her feet crunched in the gravel road. Every so often a heavier drop rolled off the black umbrella, falling to splatter on the ground, its path delayed by her intrusion. The rain darkened the brown of the rough wood fence along the road, darkened the grass baked by summer in the fields on the other side, darkened the dying leaves of the maples that ran along the horizon. Interspersed in all that brown were the evergreens, stately and out of place against the gray sky.

It had been raining the day she left this place, Olivia remembered. Jake had carried the last of her boxes to the car for her, and she had tried to hold the umbrella over both of their heads. They ended up soaked. "Well," he had said, holding his hands up to the sky. Water dripped off his dark hair and across his flushed cheeks. "I needed a shower anyway."

It had made her laugh. He always made her laugh. 

Now water soaked into Olivia's shoe. She had not brought rain-boots. Back home in SoCal the early Fall weather was warmer than it was here in the height of summer. She shook her foot, but the water slipped down and soaked her pink socks. She wrinkled her nose in displeasure. 

Jake always wore pink socks when he was feeling ill. She remembered how he would flop on the floor of her bedroom when they were in high school, hooking one leg across his knee, his pink socks peeking out from the end of his jeans. "Nothing ever happens in life," he had said once. He had a rose he had picked on his way over next to him. He always had flowers with him then. 

"That's not true," Olivia said, cross-legged on her bed. "Prom's in a few months, then we'll be off to college." She would major in nursing. He was going to play football. Life seemed long then.

"No," Jake said, sitting up. "Nothing interesting. In stories something interesting always happens, like wizards or long-lost rich relatives dying and leaving an incredible inheritance or something." 

"I'd prefer no one to die, thank you," Olivia said. She jotted down notes on the biology textbook in a lined notebook. "Besides, life's safer this way."

"Safety's boring," Jake said. "What's the point of living if you don't do anything?"

She had not been able to think of how to respond to that. She had thrown a pencil at his head instead. He threw the rose at hers. A petal fell off and landed on her bed. She had held it between her fingers, red velvet against her skin.

She held a rose now. She had bought it before her flight, clutching it in a whitened fist. Now brown crept into the red of the petals. One pulled away from the bud, like it might join the rain in its journey into the mud. She had meant to do this days ago when she first arrived.

"Don't rush it," her mother had said, squeezing her arm gently. "Go in your own timing." Olivia had set the rose in a vase by the window, walked back into her old bedroom, still arranged as it had been when she was a child, and sat on the bed. Tomorrow, she had told herself. Each day the same. I'll go tomorrow. Now it was raining, and her socks were wet. 

She thought about turning around. She looked down the road behind her. The fence stretched on as far as she could see. She was closer to her destination now than she was to her old house, the white-shingled farmhouse that seemed out of place this close to the city. Besides, if she turned back the rose would die. She walked on.

She had often thought of visiting home again after college, but chose not to. The rain, the cold had kept her away. Jake had laughed at her over the phone when they called. He was home again, then, due to poor health. "It's not that bad," he said. "Someday you'll look at this place as pure happiness."

"I doubt that," Olivia said. "What does it have for me anyway?"

"It's got me," he said.

"Maybe that," Olivia conceded. Still, she hadn't visited.

She reached a break in the fence and cut across the field. The overgrown grass soaked the bottom of her jeans, sticking them to her socks. The rain pounded harder, streams of water plummeting from her umbrella. 

The wind picked up, biting her through her coat. She stopped. The ground before her lacked the grass of the ground around it, the dirt broken up by recent digging. It soaked to mud now, puddles of water standing around the tall stone before it. She placed the rose on top of the smooth marble, white and gray in the rain. Her hand lingered. The stone was cold against her fingers. Rain pounded the rose's drab petals. 

"How long ago?" she had asked when she received the call, three weeks and a lifetime ago. 

"Two days," Jake's brother had said. His mother made him call. She could not do it herself. "We thought we would have more time…"

"There's never enough time."

She should have visited. This place would have him forever now. She let go of the rose. Turning around, she walked away into the ever-pounding rain. 

I wrote this story for my creative writing class this last college quarter. It ended up coming really easy to me for some reason. I think there is something we all relate to with grief and letting go, whether that is of people around us or stages of our lives. Even though this story is short, I hope it pushes you to think about what matters in the short life that we have.