"Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower?"
"Why yes."
Their exchange took place over a long table lined with five gallon buckets. One individual had flowers, the other person possessed money. Theirs was a literary engagement, a budding metaphor, the act of swapping one thing for the other. Surreptitiously, they also exchanged glances.
The buyer marveled at the seller's arrangement of lilies. Tall and slightly unfurled, petals the color of saffron tipped this way and that. They pointed toward the traffic, the long unswept crumbs of street life forever crunching underfoot, and the open.
The seller marveled too. The buyer had eyes the color of ice, hair two shades sharper than ginger, and lips that could have been painted their particular shade of red only by a factory worker in southern China. She watched as they moved under the weight of words, all the while feeling sunk, feeling pulled into the depths of an ocean whose intense pressure would have forced her apart. She recalled the stolidity of the curb and felt a wholeness of being creep up through the soles of her shoes. She remained transfixed by her patron yet anxiously present for this simple sale of flowers.
"Actually, if you don't mind, I'd like three," said the buyer. Their eyes met again over stalks and petals. The seller's mask thinned into a look of honest recognition. Her face didn't quite soften as much as it revealed her feelings of being there at that moment in the presence of another person.
"Which three would you like?" the seller asked with as much candor and ardor as fleeting encounters with living, breathing specimens of beauty that one desires into existence are ever allowed.
"Hmmmm. The lilly to to left of your littlest finger on your left hand."
"This one?"
She nodded.
"And?"
"This one," the buyer said smiling while holding her choice stem aloft. Without words the seller acknowledged the buyer's selection and again asked after the seller's desire. Her facade was clear, her brow unfurrowed, her eyes neutral.
"Perhaps you'll choose the third?" inquired the buyer. The seller lowered her gaze and reached inside her heart — "Here," she declared. The stem of thorns hung in the air between them poised only at the thumb and index finger of the seller, who appeared to be asking for more than the buyer's acceptance of a flowerless twig bearing a cascading helix of two inch needles.
The buyer accepted the hawthorn. "Thank you. I couldn't have chosen it without you. What do I owe you?" she innocently
asked, while also implying that she had received more than she bargained for and more than she alone, without her wallet, could reciprocate. She reckoned with her self, that self which was unable to reciprocate, albeit not typically before a stranger, selling flowers from a perch on a street corner.
As their encounter ebbed toward closure, each woman attempted to resist the entanglement. They strove to leave their wants behind or to mask them by supplementing their desires with a structure and economy of commodities.
"Thank you," said the buyer to the seller. Their eyes observed each other. With a subtly held glance, they each regained an awareness of social cues, a sense of time, and a capacity to leave meaning where it is made.
