live or tell

A Study in Californian Flowers

Oh, suddenly it’s nothing to see on the way and it’s nothing when I get there, and I’m in a coffee-house, listening to a woman talk who’s wearing more clothes than I have money in the world.

She is adorned in yellow and jewellery and a language that I cannot understand. She is talking about something that is of no importance, insisting on it. I can tell all this because the man who is with her will buy none of it, and stares absent-mindedly at the universe.

The man has not spoken a word since they sat down here with cups of espresso coffee accompanying them like small black dogs. Perhaps he does not care any more. I think he is her husband.

Suddenly she breaks into English. She says, ‘He should know. They’re his flowers,’ in the only language I understand and there’s no reply echoing all the way back to the beginning where nothing could ever have been any different.

I was born forever to chronicle this: I don’t know these people and they aren’t my flowers.

—Richard Brautigan