There she was, Flower Bae in her brand-new Honda Accord, swerving around me and my pothole as she always did on her way home from work. Clearly, work had worked her nerves, but that didn't stop her from sparing me, a wilted sunflower in the middle of the road. Flower Bae whipped the car around me and the pothole I lived in, sparing her wheels but mostly myself, before speeding off. Flower Bae, that beauty whose braids were numerous as vines, was my only light.
Many others swerved around me, too, but mostly due to the nuisance of the pothole. Nobody cared for a sunflower in a city like this, a dusty haven of bad air and pollutants. A thickening coat of gray stuck to my petals, dulling out my natural color. People often complained about roadwork and city repairs—but never without mentioning how broke, cheap, and stingy the city was. I agreed; there was no light, no grass, no rain, and not even a soul who'd stop and talk to a flower. The city held its blessings tighter than the asphalt encasing me, which was oddly to my benefit, because while the tall lip of the pothole blocked all sunshine, all nutrients, its depth was my only defense against death by motorist.
Day in, day out, I witnessed the blue-gray sky, the thin toxic film of the city dimming the potency of the sun. It didn't seem fair that I was down here, afforded a meager glimpse of life. But I was still here, somehow. The pothole protected me. The birds fertilized me. Gnats buzzed around my webby leaves. Ants crawled about my base in the same daily formation as they nipped at my leaves before returning to their underground nest beyond my roots. There was community down here, kind of, a way to live out of the hard, miserly pothole. Fortunes were minute but present.
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One day Flower Bae parked at the edge of the hole. She exited the car and bent over me. Her braids danced around my crinkled petals.
"Rough day, little guy?" she said.
"Average enough," I wanted to say. If I had a throat, a voice, a cough would've scraped it raw.
"Let's water you."
Water. The word shined like real UV.
She stood, her braids bobbing upwards, out-of-reach, and I missed her. She left to her car but quickly returned. She clutched a large bottle of water in her small hands and carefully poured, aiming into the crack of the asphalt containing my soil, my hemmed-in roots. She moistened my head with a steady drip, her aquatic caress gentle against my petals. Beyond the pothole, she must've had flowers to tend, had learned that water and light were the root of all kindness.
"Drink up, sprout. You're cute, but you can do better." Her smile opened like sunned petals.
Suddenly, I sensed the wilt fade throughout the length of my stem; new strength surged upwards through my fibrous roots, and the pothole began to appear differently, lesser somehow, and as the limp whole of my flower transformed from the newfound rigor, I knew that finally I was rising up—beyond the world of asphalt and ants, beyond the treacherous shade of my habitat, and for the first time ever I gazed beyond the lip of the pothole. The world was there for me to drink in, its bad air, its crab grass, its smog-blotted sun, but the radiance of a still-brighter world touched me.
Flower Bae's steady drip continued—no garden hose could feel better—and I drank in the blessings of flowered living. The gray film washed off me and my yellows shown through. My flower head stretched toward the light, my petals opened in pinwheel fashion, and under Flower Bae's blessed drip, my seeds began to spill.