Sunflower Suzie's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

A week passed, and George brought Suzie inside the house wrapped in sunflower petals. He set her pot by the bedroom mirror. Every morning she woke facing the glass. Every morning she wished she had not. The mirror showed a thick green stalk and a wide yellow face. It did not show the woman George had married. Suzie turned her face away from her own reflection and let the dirt catch her shame. George noticed. He always noticed. One morning he knelt beside the pot and studied her drooping petals. "You won't look at yourself," he said. "I've watched you do it for days." He did not scold her. He only rubbed his gray beard and thought. Then he stood. "Harold and I have an idea. Stay there." He smiled at his own joke. She could not go anywhere. Harold ducked through the doorway. He was tall and careful, the way he always was around breakable things. He held a small folded paper in one long hand. "We found this in the drawer," he said. "The letter you wrote George, back when you two first met." He unfolded it with great care. The red heart seal had cracked, but the words held. Harold read them aloud. They were Suzie's own words, about loving George for his gentle heart, not his face. George set the letter in front of the mirror, propped against the glass. "You wrote this," he said. "You meant it. So did I." Then he lifted something from his pocket. It was a necklace strung with pale pearls and tiny bright drops. "This was yours before. It's still yours." He draped it over her petals, where it caught the morning light and shimmered. Suzie looked at the mirror again. This time she did not only see the stalk and the yellow face. She saw her own loving words resting against the glass. She saw the pearls she had worn as a woman, now resting on a flower. The same heart wore both. Harold crouched beside George, his tired eyes bright. "That's the Suzie I know," he said. "Right there." Suzie leaned her stalk toward the mirror, slow and sure. She let herself look. The sadness that had gripped her each morning loosened its hold. She was not ruined. She was changed. The beauty she feared she had lost had never lived in her face. It lived in the words on that paper and in the two men kneeling beside her. From that morning on, Suzie faced the mirror without flinching. But looking at herself was not the same as changing back. She had made peace with the flower. Now she wanted her hands again, to hold the letter herself, to clasp the necklace herself. Her shame was gone. In its place rose a sharper need. She had to find a way to break the spell.