The First Door

(First Installment of "Rooms I've Lived In")

There’s a bell over the door, and it rattles, brassy and violent, more so after dark when the cutout of Saint Anthony’s looms, windowless and threatening, through the plate glass window of the flower shop.

The scent of carnations and gladiolus, and their incremental decay, defies the permanence their present bloom feigns. Flowers have always reminded me of the dirt and caskets they are laid upon, the wreaths that hover over the dead, a final show of love sullied in grief. Ephemeral as the life turned sorrow, they adorn.

Abuela is blunting rose stems, as the radio tosses out beats and rhythms saturated with sex and abandon. I hear the blade click as his throat clears. I fumble with the knobs of the tiny TV in the back room where I sit and dream and color, the pages of my Strawberry Shortcake picture book.

In a fracture of a moment, I see his familiar face come into shape. He licks his lips while staring into my freckled face. A door opens inside my chest, and I climb through. I’m free, feet sinking into a butter-yellow frame of light. Behind me, the register clicks, and there’s a shot, “you bitch,” was the last thing I heard before I ascended down a path hand-in-hand with a sweet-smelling doll come to life in a pink bonnet.