The Dream Flower

The bell went, just as every other day, at the exact same time. Eva had clocked it to a tee on her sports watch. 3:26, the key time to get out of her teen jail cell the adults called a “math classroom”. How she droned through class, staring out the dust covered, aged windows; twisting her auburn locks around her slender fingers, occasionally humming to herself if she had a song stuck in her head.

No one completely understood Eva, even when she was a toddler. She had always been naive and unfocused to her parents and older brother, yet she was completely swallowed in her imagination.

To Eva, the ordinary things were extravagant. The tacky lawn chairs on the mossy soil of the usual Summerside back yard were thrones to the King and Queen of Arachnidia. Watching the daddy long legs creep slowly over the lacquered plastic was like watching the Royal Family escalate the red-carpeted stairs to their palace.

That was, of course, nonsense to her parents who just got upset with her for dirtying her Sunday dress; but oh, how she loved to daydream.

As Eva grew older, her daydreams became gossip about cooties from boys, complaints about too much homework and tears shed after every breakup.

Dreams had slipped away by the time she was in that math classroom; Eva was still suffering from her last breakup. The clean, crisp sound of the bell went, ringing in her mind long after it stopped. Eva had never thought it’d get this far. Her grades were slipping, she didn’t fit into her skinny jeans anymore, and worst of all she was single, not to mention her family was getting broken up by her parent’s divorce. This was the only way out.

Eva gathered her books and ran out of the school with tears welling in her eyes. She kept running, down the paved streets, not noticing the rain beating down on her frail structure.

She stopped at the abandoned pier, leaning on the rusty rail attempting to catch her breath. Still panting, she stepped to the edge of the dock, ready to jump into the frigid Atlantic waters and jagged rocks below. The east wind whipped her now blonde curls around her oval face, splashing specks of salt water up, gently wiping away her cover-up and revealing her long lost freckles.

Eva looked down at her feet momentarily, catching a glance of a small, bright blue flower struggling its way through the broken up concrete. A single tear rolled off Eva’s cheek and onto the bright green leaflet of the tiny flower. Humbled by the little flower, she knelt down on the cold ground and plucked it. “If this flower can live and prosper here, in the worst of places, so can I.” thought Eva to herself, remembering a poem she had read a long time ago called Dreams. She turned her back on the pier, feeling the sunshine warming her heart as she walked away and back home, taking her time through the park like she used to when she was little; letting her long forgotten dreams rush back.

She arrived home some hours later; the rich red color of the sunset coating the sky, her parents both nagging at her for her muddy clothes. But she didn’t care much. She just went into the garden, and planted her dream flower.