Flower-Holder
Rachel Prokap
You barely remember the day you lost yourself. You know it was Sunday because the rampant letters about your mom’s old estate aren’t spilling out the flag-down mailbox. You know it was sunny, because your shoulders itched under your overambitious sweater. Must’ve been noon, the way you squinted through the window at Lenny standing all tall, beer-in-hand, straight-faced like American Gothic.
You forgot to velcro the trash shut after rolling it to the curb Friday. Two whole days it was out there, and there are scratch marks all around. Lenny’s neighborhood has these crazy rituals you’re still learning. An old couple at the farmer’s markets makes a whole living out of designing velcro harnesses for the trash cans so the Bandits can’t get in. Lenny is not happy. You haven’t been sculpting lately, so he’s incessant that you do more around the house.
“Do you get it now?” He gestures with his leg to a scratch beneath the whirring fridge. “Do you see it now?” He points with his nose to a gash through the bottom of the drip-dripping dishwasher. “What happens when you don’t pay attention?” He swings around, pointing hysterically, rotating like he’s chasing himself.
Lenny’s strong and fast and tall and fit. He’s the man of men, and he yells like one too. But everything’s so clear in every boom, and you’re so focused on the misshapen forms his rough lips mimic that you don’t see how close his hands are waving to your MFA project.
Like it was regular–like the waterfall of all waterfalls–the tourist’s haven beneath Niagra–the spouts cascade to the ground–like ritual or routine–like they fall every passing day. The ceramic crashes against cheap, faux hardwood, and Lenny walks away. He says he doesn’t want to lose his cool. He says that he’ll stop at cheap vases.
“What a mess,” he says, looking straight at you. It’s nothing to him. He never saw the sketches and prompts and critiques and rejection and rejection and rejection and rejection and rejection. It’s nothing to him but a vase in a room of vases. Even then, you’re surrounded by vases–vases that took you more time–vases that you tell him were more labor.
“Oh, that was one of yours?” he asks, as if any of the others aren’t. The earnestness in his voice weighs heavier than any pointedness could have.
Flower-Holder was special. It was your degree, and it held a pride. That was the most responsible vase there was, and that responsibility came with fragility.
“I’ll buy you a new one to replace it,” he continues.
Lenny looks eye-to-eye with the grossly realistic ceramic pig-head with glazed eyes. That vase is large and ornamental, boring a dark shadow beneath it. It stares out at each side like prey. Its mouth is devoid of flowers, instead overflowing with makeshift ceramic pearls. That, still, is more beautiful to him. No matter how grotesque or misshapen, it has weight. It means something to him. Lenny is obsessed with meaning.
“I didn’t realize,” he prods, hoping you’ll offer him something in return. “I’m sorry,” he says. He regains his composure by slicking back the hair behind his left ear. “It’s nothing,” you reply, and he’s satisfied enough with that.
Exit stage, dim the blood lights, and you’ve a spotlight with no audience to soliloquy. Lenny walks away because he knows you’ll stoop down to clean the pieces. He’ll apologize again later, and that’s the routine of things. That house clicked those routines into place, day after day, like the gears of a watch. Business is business, even at home. That’s what he’d say. You’d never met a businessman more self-proclaimed.
Bending to a kneel, you plant yourself on the kitchen floor and begin to set things back to their proper place. You scratch your fingers along the rough shards, and there’s a bitter complacency in the ritual. There’s a satisfaction to the monotony of things that droops down and hangs low like the heavy pendulum of a grandfather clock.
Lenny’s the kind of guy that wants a world of guarantees. He lines up his tchotchkes like they’re Oscars and talks about your future children like heirs. He talks about the ways he’ll outlive your marriage, and he talks about you like you won’t. He talks about going to Heaven like going to the grocery store, but you’d be surprised to see him in either place.
Flower-Holder’s shards find their way into your scrap bin, clanking as they fall through the ceramic pile of could-be art.
Then, as natural as any other ritual, you make your way across the hazy threshold between the kitchen and your replica-size studio. You sit yourself down before a blank canvas and mechanically reach for your brush and pigment.
You paint when you’re mad. That’s how Lenny jokes about it with his friends. That’s mostly true. You paint after every fight, so you paint almost every day. You paint to know more than just vases. You paint because you like to feel the tension at the ridge where the factory-strung horsehair meets the canvas. You paint to feel the rough wood your college roommate embellished with a pocket-knife. You paint because you can hear the echo of a soft clap from your mother and the hum of approval from the gallery owners in the back. You paint portrait after portrait to make the face before you more familiar. You paint mirrors.
With every stroke, you can sense the small impossible smudges of paint on your knuckles. They’re too light for you to feel–and you’ll never block your focus to check–but you know they’re there as proof of your labor. You’re as certain of them as you were of the finger-paint casting your hands when you found your first love. You were grounded from the stains you left in the cheap sink and the crayon-portraits you crafted after school. One gifted portrait was enough to reduce your sentence to the past. From there, you learned to speak for yourself. Your art is the only way you know the world and the mode through which you choose to be known. Art is your condition.
You settle in your sculpted stool and feel a sunbeam caress your left side. The studio half of your kitchen is silent aside from distant hums, a harmony of ventilation units and faraway car tires. Your hand itches toward reds so subtle and grays so bold that the unreading eye would find your portrait monochromatic. Your brush dives down and swatches fine color, as precise as a surgeon selecting the tools for the operation. Your mind drops back to make room for your heart, and you feel a bloom of uncanny warmth in your chest. There is nothing more natural than this moment.
In a series of entangled-dove paintings and kissing vases, you used to say love is the most natural part of the human condition–but Lenny proved you wrong for once. He would say that you can love anything. He said, for example, he loves the rain, but that’s hardly human. You dislike rain, and you’re as human as him, or even less, he joked. He says loves rain, but you know he’s lying. Love is in the heart. It’s in the chest that can only be unlocked from the outside and locked from the inside. He doesn’t love rain. He loves staring at his collection or reading to the cicada chorus of excuses not to leave the house. Lenny therefore can’t love the rain. He loves the proof of it.
But at the same time, you loved Lenny, and that humanity was something you wanted to deny. You deny it as you push your grievances through your gentle fingertip and into each brushstroke–each brushstroke–each brushstroke.
Yet, as you paint, you can’t make the shape of your face. Your eyebrows are much too thick and pale, and your nose is too low and dark. Your ears are too small, and every effort to remedy that proportion edges them higher and higher until they seem to be on top of your head. Your neck is too thick, and the edges blur into a fuzzy light. The red that you craved appears as a muted brown beneath the grays. The more you try to correct the painting, the more distorted the portrait becomes, until it’s impossible to recognize any semblance of yourself within the figure. The more you press on, the more it loses its familiarity as even a human–but you remain steady. You trust in the reflection, even as the backlight distorts into fur and the highlights morph into whiskers. Your brush drops down to its bed on the palette, and you see an unmistakable Bandit locking eyes with you.
You don’t know what else to do. Your painting is done and you’re still clenching the brush, firm as a fist but as delicate as an IV drip. You move out and up to the bedroom floor, and every step up the stairs spills the drip-drip-drip over and into a hollow, heavy well in your chest.
Lenny’s sitting with an old showy newspaper and his ankles crossed along the bed. The lights are dimmed to set the room a dull beige.
You take a careful step forward to not disrupt him, careful not to stare too close or move too suddenly. You hunch and crouch more and more as you make your assigned side of the bed, until you’re crawling to the edge of the sheet, pulling it clean and rolling over to the end.
“You’re here,” he says. That’s his way of proving his cleverness–his observational tact. You turn your head over and see that he’s propped his old coin binder against the newspaper, tucked into the edges. He’s staring at his coins–quickly flipping through them–glazing over them like summer reading.
Beneath you, your MFA is rattling around in the scrap bin with the proof of your barely-scratched, transparently paint-stained hands–and he’s up here, staring at quarters. He’s calm, counting coins like wishes. He’s paying both you and the memory no mind. “You shouldn’t have done that. You should have paid attention,” you say.
“Hmmm?” he says, still not breaking eye contact with his quarter reflections. “You broke my MFA project. You broke Flower-Holder.”
“I already apologized.”
“Not well enough.”
“It’s just a vase,” he says. “And not even a good one. It only had room for two flowers.” “Flower-Holder,” you repeat. You don’t say any more–correcting him was already overstepping his comfort.
“Not important business, to say the least.” He grins an unevenly bleach-stripped smile. Lenny looks up at you, his eyes spinning shades of brown around and around like a pottery wheel. His mouth is wrinkled inward, his lips pursed like an angry cartoon–but his eyes slow down and droop downwards with unmistakable pity.
Your mind clouds with frustration. “Sure,” you resign. You forget what’s supposed to come next.
You sit beside him, feeling his unmistakably lurching body lean into you. He’s warm like a hot cigar or an old car engine or a rustic fireplace. You give him a smile and flutter your eyes like
the movies, enjoying how he falls back. You whisper: “Maybe you could teach me a thing or two.” There’s a pool in your chest sinking your lungs, but you persist. He meets your eyes for once and sees your face nearly pressed to his. He’s shaking slightly, with a weakness so palpable it flicks the scales like a child. The metal now swings in and out of balance. You should feel better. This is how these things should end, but the paint on your hands suddenly feels so, so present–as if it’s spreading up and out above your arms. The pressure persists with a twisted itch, like old vines crawling up an old building.
You shoot back into a slouch against the headboard, the beige wood slamming hard against your back. The force snaps you back beside him, releasing your bind. He settles back into his quarters.
He’s happy now, and he fiddles through his anecdotes, his thick fingers pressed to the plastic shielding his quarters. He tells you the story about how his favorite quarter is the one his mom found on the subway the day he watched his first baseball game. He tells you about this other quarter that he bought on auction at the last second. He’s very proud and says you should be too–he really negotiated well. He tells you about how this other quarter’s a little too smoothed than he’d like, but it’s so old it’s worth over ten times what it usually should be. All the while, the paint keeps spreading.
The next one, that one’s really special. He tells you all about how old and mint it is and how special–how truly, truly special he is for having this quarter. This quarter is the quarter of quarters, so he must be the man of men; further, he has the most important quarter of all the quarters, so he must be the greatest man of all the men. He attempts cheekiness, but his hollow head rattles around louder than any of his words. You hands grow more and more saturated until the paint drips straight from the fingers, and he begins talking about how he got into the quarter community and how respected–no, renowned–he is for the beauty and significance of this quarter, and you feel your hand lurch toward the page and leave a huge, dark, futile hand-print on his plastic sleeve.
He looks at you–his face empty of the satisfaction of anger–and provides you the smile he regifts to you from every other child who drew with crayons on the wall. “Ah, well… that’s immature,” he settles on, and closes his quarters. For some reason, the shut of that newspaper-wrapped binder feels like the cold latch of a cuff around your wrist. You can’t stand it.
You push forward for the binder and barely manage to knock the quarters from his hand. He lunges down, shoves you out of the way, and you grab for the binder again, barely latching onto a plastic sleeve. Lenny lurches forward, his face too close for comfort. He clenches the edges with his geometrical teeth, gnawing the binder from your grip–but not without a small victory: the plastic rips from the binder rings, warped and twisted from the force, and you’re stuck with 9 quarter-sleeves carefully nestled in a sheet between your slippery, paint-soaked hands. Lenny’s stuck with hundreds of quarters nested in mangled rings.
He won’t look away, but neither will you. You stare with a rage that slowly morphs into a curiosity of what he’ll do next. At the softening, he resigns.
He lowers his head in consignment, but his voice is clear: “It’s time for you to strap down the trash cans.” He motions to the window, dark aside from the light moonlight drifting in and dripping through the windowledge, flooding a light pool against the ground.
You punch your hand to the mattress, feeling nothing but its soft comfort against your force, then turn so your legs hang over the bed. You pull your inherited dress-pants up above the ankles and wade in the moonlight until your socks are soaked through, and you’re free of that dark room.
The hallway’s angled, so the moonlight echoes light down the stairs. Your socks are wet enough you can hardly feel the small pools on the floor. You follow the light down to the front door and emerge. You then take careful steps down the driveway, each step softer than the last. The trees are sparse but seem to interlock, forming an aisle down the pavement.
Every move away from Lenny feels like an undoing, even as you march toward his order. You can feel the veil of moonlight rest on your head and slick your hair down like oil. You feel the sleekness of the light hitting the sharp darkness of the pavement. You feel short strands of hair shoot out like sharp shards of glass jutting from a dropped mirror. You feel the desperation of wet denim clutching your legs. You feel a soft relief pressed against your calf, a gentle tap on your leg.
You lock eyes with a Bandit, staring up with large, deep black eyes, enveloped in a tight mask, soft in the wet moonlight. Your march begins to tremble as you walk slightly faster, away from the Bandit–but you hear the soft pit-pat of the Bandit’s rough shoes tapping on the pooling pavement behind you.
Then, the sound doubles to a pit-pat pit-pat that grows louder and more rhythmic, growing like a duet–then a quartet– then a symphony. You can’t help but let out a nervous, embarrassingly high-pitched laugh that layers above their rhythm like a soprano verse. Your singing grows louder as you give an Orpheus turn and stare at the blurred horde following behind you.
You feel the tap against your leg again, then a pressure, and you sharply wring your head around to see a Bandit clawing for your sheet of quarters. You raise the sheet high in the air to put it out of reach–then whip your head back around, anticipating needing to run, but the Bandit sits still. In your peripheral, you see the crowd follow suit. They’re all silent and waiting.
You can feel your nervous chest heave the weight of the moonlight with every labored breath. In your stillness, the light drips from you and falls on the sitting Bandit, tilting its head curiously. In the light, the dark fur around its eyes blur and melt down, dripping softly off its chin and flicking against the ground. You stare as the mask grows wider and lighter as the moonlight grows brighter and heavier–until your hair is heavy and soaked through. The pool is up to your ankles by now, but the Bandit remains sitting, head tilted, eyes affixed to either you or the quarters at any moment. By now, its mask has faded. By now, it hardly looks like a bandit at all.
You look back into the crowd, and the light has pooled enough now that you can see the shimmer on each individual face staring back at you. They’re all sitting, waiting, eyes-wide, begging for the quarters–now wide and spinning like stars, splitting the sky with their reflected light.
You look back at your bleak old home, sinking under the weight of the light. The roof is bending under the weight into a sad warp, though not enough to worry about anything happening to Lenny. And somehow, like every high-school essay intro and inspirational baseball story in the world, you get struck by some great pressure that churns and turns down from your mind to your heart and, somewhere–whether by course of gravity or that great assembly line–that pressure forms inspiration. You flick a quarter from the sleeve with the awkward suavity
of an amateur magician, and you pitch like a businessman with the arm of a sailor, shooting the quarter through the air. It shoots down the three-quarters of your driveway you’ve walked and through the window of your bedroom–where you swear you could hear the faintest swirl as it spins around and inevitably falls flat with a clink on the floor.
Swiftly, the Bandits run. The whole pack of them, one big moving machine, splashes toward the house, and the wind in their tails forces you with them. You run with a gaiety and speed you hadn’t felt since you were 10. The puddle splashes up to your thighs, but you can hardly feel it because you’re already soaked with moonlight. The house is heavy and creaks under the weight of you and the Bandits, flowing fast and strong, brushing gently against each corner and old pieces of furniture like they’re rocks in a current.
You run with them. You run up and through the house–through the stairs–through the doors–through the rooms–through the winding and impossible hallways–through and around each vase and sculpture and nameless furniture all indiscriminate in the chaos–each tumbling but still–each brushed but untouched.
You reach the room with your art and your pig, and you hardly see Lenny in the haze, swinging at the Bandits with a tall vase. The kitchen and the studio have blended into one beneath the crowd. The Bandits begin to dance around Lenny like children playing tag.
You laugh and you run alongside them, spreading your arms wide behind you and sprinting with no direction in mind. As far as each eye can see, the Bandits run from every corner of and crevice, every spout, every should-have-been flower boxed window to tear and scratch and bite at every crumbling piece of that lonely house. They pay Lenny no mind–that monolith of a man–and run over and around him as they chipped and tore from each rotten painting and spoiled statue.
“What’s wrong with you?” he snaps.
Lenny’s eyes are wide and sharp with anger.
“You come into my house and make a mess day after day,” he continues. He looks at you like a dog off a leash, so you oblige.
“You’re not even going to say anything?”
You look at him like a dog.
In your defiance, you can finally feel the home beneath your feet and the cracking moonlight drying off your skin. You begin to ache and see the soft beauty in Lenny’s eyes, and your stomach knots and kneads and twists like a dishcloth until the moonlight begins drip-drip-dripping once again to its pit. You twirl the quarter between your fingers like the dancing ballerina on your childhood jewelry box.
“You’re a dog,” he says, but you knew it was coming. You smile at the catharsis of it all–the relief of the wet smile and the aching eyes. The inner light feels oppressive now, and the walls feel heavy, as though your roots, grounded in the floorboards, are all that’s holding that room up.
“Goodbye, Lenny,” you say, but he’s too angry to hear you or to continue to ask to fight. He’s too busy swatting at the Bandits–now calmer in your periphery–to notice you grab your packed suitcase–his least favorite performance piece–from the sculpture garden.
He could never believe that you’d leave. He unbelieves and unbelieves with such urgency that he doesn’t even see you go.
Dogs come with the condition of missing–they’re the acceptance of outliving. They are the bind of being held close when they leave you behind.
You stop for a second in the doorway. Pinching that perfectly polished quarter sheet between your nails, you take a reckless, blurry, poorly-framed squint to force a memory in its reflection. You drag your suitcase from your studio, and stoop down to balance your scrap-box in your other hand. With a nod goodbye to your hundred mirrors, you leave Lenny and the Bandits to their business.
Rachael Prokap is graduating with a comparative literature and information technology and informatics double-major in May 2026. She is currently a technical writer at Tanium. She spends most of her free time writing, baking, or with her cat Anubis and dog Mochi.