She Used To Say It As Her Shibboleth (Doot)

"Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
All dressed in black, black, black—"

       She dreamt of flowers, fields full of blooming flowers of every species known to man, of an endless expanse of innumerable colours meeting the sky at the horizon line in an indistinguishable haze of unearthly, incandescent light. In her dreams, the sun was a sunflower, ironically, and the moon, a white rose, hung on a stem of stars like daffodil seeds. A world of flowers, her dreams.

"With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
All down her back, back, back—"

       Flowers, as she knew, were delicate, temporary things. If you trimmed them from their roots, they would soon die. Even if you kept them in water, even if you set them out in the sunlight, even if you loved them with all the ferocity of an English sonnet-writer, they would wilt, nonetheless. A flower is essentially dead the moment it becomes separated from its roots.

"They jumped so high, high, high,
They reached the sky, sky, sky—"

       People were, in her dreams, even constructed out of flowers. Her son was a daisy, albeit a bizarrely, literally personified daisy with his face surrounded by petals and arms and legs coming from his green stem. Every Sunday, she placed flowers on her first husband's grave, and, in her dreams, they all smiled back at her like he did, favouring the left side more than the right—a crooked smile for a crooked man, she used to joke. In her dreams, flowers wilted, too.

"And they didn't come back, back, back . . . "