Image by Daniel Eliashevsky on Pexels.

Photo by Ирина Сороколетова: https://www.pexels.com/photo/girl-in-hat-sitting-on-pier-18447713/

Writing inspired by the following Sunday Writers’ Club prompt:

The Sunflower

Sunflowers are age-old symbols of happiness. The flower turns its head to follow the sun across the sky. In recent years they’ve come to represent resistance, unity and hope. Write a story of a poem which includes a sunflower.

The Sunflower

by Connie Phlipot

Exhaust fumes seeped through the rusty edges of the car’s floorboards. It was a western model, Audi or something less posh, but not the Lada or Moskvich Bella had expected. Once a nice car, an enviable one in fact, but the years of pothole-dappled roads had destroyed the undercarriage, damaged the muffler, not to mention the state of the wheels and door frames. And all that had undoubtedly happened before the war.

Bella’s head throbbed from the fumes and nausea inducing bouncy ride that turned the view from the side window into a funhouse picture of tilted houses, collapsed roofs, sad-eyed cows. Or maybe that was the actual, undistorted reality. She could not read in the car and her phone had no connectivity; she closed her eyes and leaned against the torn leather seat back.

“I used to live near here,” the driver startled her. He had been cooly polite when she hired him, insisted she sit in the back, although she preferred to sit up front, handed her a sweaty plastic bottle of ice-cold water, and said not another word for an hour.

“Really? How long ago?” She appreciated the distraction, although she struggled to understand his Russian, liberally sprinkled with English and Ukrainian words.

“A decade ago, or maybe longer. Can’t really remember. The war, you know, shatters your sense of time. Like a puzzle, what do you call them, with the pieces?”

“Jigsaw puzzle.”

“Yah, that’s it. You pick up a piece thinking it must go here.” He lifted his hand from the steering wheel to illustrate. “But, no, not there at all. And you wonder, maybe it belongs to another puzzle, to another person’s life. You know what I mean?”

Her closest experience was COVID. She knew if something happened before or after lock-down, but the events in the middle were a jumble of ill-fitting puzzle pieces. But COVD was only a few years, not eight or ten, like the war.

“And what was it like here? What did you do?” She turned her head toward the window. A broken nest in an abandoned chimney. Even the storks had left the villages. Winged refugees, settling somewhere in the east. Suddenly she was gripped with a desire to see this place as it once was.

“I was a locksmith, photographer and local historian on the side. Sometimes, I took tourists, mostly Americans on their “heritage” tours.” He used the English phrase, the “H’ pronounced hard and gutturally. “Good experience. Learned English, got a chance to see lots of things, meet different kind of people.”

“Did they find the traces of their family?”

“Not so many. Communism was good at erasing the past. But I have a good imagination.”

“You mean you made up stories?”

“Let’s say, I expanded on the truth. It made them happy. If I just said, this might have been your great-great grandmother’s village, but I’m not sure. They’d be sad and feel they wasted their money. But if I told them it was their village, and that their relative lived at the corner of this and that street, they’d get excited and ask me if there were any documents or maybe someone in the village knew their relatives. I’d make my face very sad and say the village documents were lost in a fire and no one still lived there from those days. I’d hand them a handkerchief, then pause for a moment and say as if I’d just remembered something… My grandmother had friends in their village. She used to tell me about them. I could hear them gasp with excitement. I’ll call granny. Maybe she knows the name. She’s very old, of course, her memory not so good, but let’s see. I’d phone my wife or a friend who knew my game. I’d speak rapidly in Ukrainian and then report back to the Americans. Yes, yes, granny’s friend was the niece of your great grandmother. She was the nicest woman and made the best pickled beets in the village, but unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, she died before the war. They’d sniffle a little, then thank me so much and give me a good tip.”

“But it was a lie.”

“So? What good would the truth do. The truth being in every case that all is forgotten and their relatives lost to history.”

Bella nodded although it went against the truth-seeking grain of her journalistic soul.

“Anyway, that was a long time ago. Maybe now I’d act different. More truthful, even if it hurt. I wouldn’t want someone to lie to me about the war or make up stories for my relatives about me when I’m dead. Anyway after that, I went west, Germany, Poland, Holland — a little time here, there, then came back when it looked like peace was coming, then back again until it was really over. Now, I’m in the city. But I miss the village.”

“Why do you miss it?”

He didn’t answer until he had slowed down and turned off onto an unpaved road. Bella’s stomach twisted with each jolt of the car over a rut. “Better I show you.” He continued until the road ended at the edge of a war-scarred forest. “We have to walk a few minutes.” He helped her out of the car and they entered a small path through the grove of damaged trees.

Yellow gold blazed through the opening in the woods. He took her hand and led her into a wondrous field of sunflowers. Each flower brimming with the promise of fat, luscious seeds, ringed by a crown of gold. Each head gazing above towards the sun now reaching high noon.

“This area was bombed, mined, burnt, but this field has bloomed, every year more brilliantly than the last.”