The White Rose

She couldn’t have, but she did. She was tall, beautiful, green-eyed, and red-haired.

She was at work the day it happened, arranging a bouquet of yellow and white roses for a newlywed couple’s kitchen table. The couple would be picking up the bouquet the next day.

She was almost finished with the arrangement of cloudy white and sunny yellow buds when the tragedy occurred.

A door opened, then slammed, a shady figure slowly entering the peaceful shop, making it not as peaceful anymore. He had a bulging left pant pocket, a silver handle peeking out.

“Hello,” the sly man said. “I’m here to pick up an order I made last Monday.”

Immediately, with a smile, she started to say, “If I could have your name, I’ll be happy to get your order to you,” but she didn’t even get the first words out of her mouth before the man spoke again.

“Though, I didn’t call it in.” He smiled—no, not smiled, smirked—with an evil touch. “I only made a mental note of it—”

Right after the words jumped off his lips into the shockingly still air, he drew something out of his left pocket.

BANG!

She was dead.

“—to come and get you,” he finished with an sadistic grin on his face.

No one knew what happened from then on until the moment she, or at least her body, was found, by Carson River Road, almost in the river itself.

The new couple never did get the rose bouquet, if you wanted to know. I got it. To put with her in her grave, the last thing she ever touched while she was alive.

I saved one white rose, though, and it is sitting in a vase in my bedroom, all alone in life, like I am now. I call the flower by her name, now that she is truly gone.

But it seems like she’s in the room when I’m sleeping sometimes. And I thank God that her death was quick, not drawn-out and painful.

More pain was inflicted unto me than her, I guess. I will treasure the last thing she touched forever, and never let her spirit die. Yes, the flower will die eventually… But it is not the flower, or her, herself, which I will remember more. It is her soul.

Her heart may have stopped beating, but the beat always comes back.