By William R. Crichton
From midnight to dawn the morning of Valentine’s Day, Angeline’s Flowers opens its doors for a special overnight shift, admitting anyone who casts no shadow, casts two shadows, or whose shadow doesn’t match their footsteps. I inherited the shop from my grandmother, who ran it for forty-one years and left me two instructions on an index card taped inside the register drawer: “Never overcharge a witch and never ask ghosts why they’re crying.”
I’ve kept both rules. Business is good. Grief doesn’t discount well.
By one in the morning, the buckets along the back wall are half empty. Roses go first, always. Then the sprigs of rosemary the local coven buys by the pound. I’ve stopped asking what they’re for. Every year, one customer walks in and the rest of the night stops mattering. I didn’t know which one it would be this year until the bell rang the second time.
***
A woman made of wisps of fog asks for flowers only living people can smell, and I sell her a bundle of hyacinth wrapped in wax paper, no charge, because she can’t hold currency any better than she can hold form. She thanks me in a voice like a radio between stations and drifts out.
Cupid comes in twelve minutes later, four foot ten and covered in glitter that won’t wash off until March. He’s not buying flowers. He wants coffee, black, and complains that Reykjavik ran three hours over, and he’s got eleven hundred arrows left in the quiver and forty minutes of dark to use them in. I pour him a cup from the pot I keep for exactly this. He drinks it standing, wings half-folded so they don’t knock the buckets over, and leaves without paying, same as every year.
Love runs the same everywhere. It just runs late for some of them.
***
The third time the bell rings, the shop goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with sound.
He’s not what people expect. No hood pulled low, no bone showing through cloth. A dark woolen coat over the robe. The scythe rests against his shoulder the way a commuter carries an umbrella, forgotten until it’s needed. He stands just inside the door and waits for me to notice him fully before he speaks, which is its own kind of courtesy.
“Which flowers say, ‘I’d like to have dinner with you, but only if you’re interested’?”
I’ve sold black roses to widows and white lilies to the recently deceased picking out their own arrangements. But I’ve never been asked that question by anyone, let alone by him.
He sits on the stool by the register while I pull stems and explain the parts of dating that nobody explains to you the first time. Because by the time you need to know them, everyone assumes you already do. Don’t bring the scythe. Don’t lead with anything involving the word eternal. Don’t talk about work, even if work is the only thing you’ve done for four billion years. Ask her what she likes. Then wait for the answer instead of already forming yours.
He writes this down. His handwriting is small and careful, the letters exact, like a man who has learned that mistakes cannot be undone.
“They’re always afraid of me before they know me,” he says, not looking up from the notebook. “It doesn’t get easier with practice.”
I tell him I’ve worked this shift eleven years and that every single customer who’s come through the door on this one night, human or not, alive or three centuries past it, wants the same three things. To be chosen. To be forgiven for taking up space. To not do it alone.
He closes the notebook.
He doesn’t pick the black roses, though I have three dozen, fresh that morning. He doesn’t pick the lilies either. His hand goes instead to the bucket of soft pink roses in the corner, the ones I usually can’t move because they read as mundane next to everything stranger in the shop.
“These,” he says, and pays in a coin I don’t recognize and don’t ask about, per the rule.
At the door he stops, coat collar up against a wind that isn’t blowing yet.
“People believe I arrive when love ends,” he says. “They rarely realize when I arrive that I have already seen how fiercely they loved.”
Then he’s gone, the way he came, and the bell doesn’t even move.
***
Dawn comes up gray through the front glass. I’m sweeping stems off the floor when Cupid staggers back in, quiver empty, glitter reduced to a dull film on his skin. He counts the buckets out of habit and stops on the pink roses.
“You’re short a dozen.”
I don’t answer. He doesn’t push it.
Every year since, on the morning after Valentine’s Day, someone leaves the first spring flowers of the season on the doorstep before the shop opens. No note, no name. I’ve never asked who sends them. I have a guess. I keep the guess to myself.
Some things bloom better unexplained.
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