Will Harrison

So she just left the next morning with a devastating lack of drama.

Yes, it's actually going to be at, well, it's just one room, but there's some space.

The man got up from his stool and examined the blossoms more closely, running the tip of his finger under the leaves.

An outdoor funeral would be nice, he thought.

He and his wife had been married on a beach, and their anniversary tradition each year was to wade out to their knees into whatever the nearest ocean might be and see how much of their original vows they could recite.

And she wouldn't let them out of the water until they had muddled through the whole thing.

The flower woman stood gazing at the beach peas like they were a child, and it struck him that the wasps on her arm suddenly seemed more like honeybees.

They were fat enough.

So maybe that's what she and her lover had been missing, a child.

Another human being between them to keep them honest and alert.

The man could see now from the way she was smiling with just half of her mouth, her lips very red and balanced, that she might be waiting for her lover to return with the child they had adopted.

It would have been too much for both of them to go, and they already knew that the flower woman would be the more natural mother, so she stayed home, minding the store while her lover spent all that time on planes and in dirty passport and immigration offices holding on to the hot, sticky hand of their newly adopted four-year-old daughter.

It's good.

I like it.

So maybe the lemongrass, or no, it's wheatgrass, right, on the table where we'll have a guest book with candles, and then some of those peach roses and this beach stuff up near the screen.

I think there are going to be pictures.

He stood up to take his wallet from his back pocket.

The front of his shirt brushed her elbow.

She wrote out the order.

At this range, she smelled like sea salt, and he imagined the face of her newly adopted daughter buried in against her long neck, getting used to all the smells of a different country and to unfamiliar mothers and strange food.