sempervivum, agave, aeonium — buck & rimi / before

[fox]

❦

By mid-January, the factory is re-equipped with new automated machines. The machinists are trained. Units come off the CNCs in hundreds of boxes, delivered to assembly lines by the truckload. Buck still keeps an old manual lathe.

It snows, then melts. The sting of the cold thaws into muddiness. The cars pull into the boardroom, and he idles through some meetings with their aluminum broker for a higher tensile alloy. Then another meeting the next week, stacked folders slid across the table. And another. And another. The deal closes at the end of the month.

It snows again, and the flowers on Vern's grave have withered to nothing.

February, it rains on that Sunday. The flower shop is spring green in the sepia haze of late winter. He touches the name on the frozen headstone, the light shower chilling him from the fingertips, the scent of begonias heavy in dew. The headstock on the lathe in the workshop needs to be replaced. At night, he repairs a tang split on an old wood stock rifle from before the war, fingers along the grain of walnut, touching through the imperfections of the finish.

The house is quiet. Mourn's married, Sal's gone. He leaves the workshop when the sky is faintly blue in the early hours of morning.

It keeps raining, on and off, washing the soot off the buildings. Buck balances the books at the end of the month based on Mourn's reporting. It comes in a folder to the office, he doesn't see his brother.

Now they have to send in the new Aluminum price to the Capitol at close of the quarter. Now they can fit in the lost quota of unregistered guns, swirling somewhere on the black market. Strictly compliant. Business is bureaucracy. Crime is so mundane. This takes a week. The files go back into the paneled safe, waiting for next month.

March. Spring comes hostile. No soft, green breath of bloom in Nine. There's a kind of dirty, frantic pushing to the surface, hairline growth where the concrete finally gives. In April, there will be flowers again in the garden, and then Buck will only have to walk through the winding paths with a pair of scissors before he goes to visit Vern.

On the Sunday of March, Buck puts on his holster, slips in the suppressed 9mm pistol behind his back, then pulls on his coat. Leaves the house alone. Traveling light. Anonymity of being second down the line. Eighteen was a little marred by the new wound in Mourn.

He walks there, into town. The door chimes open. The florist is already at the front, in the middle of tying tulle around a clear vase of an arrangement. For two months, she gave him begonias, roses. The old florist used to set out white lilies.

Sometimes, there'll be another customer. Often, there isn't. How does a flowershop stay alive in Nine. How many flowers were there at Vern's funeral. What's the margin of a life.

The cost of it was nine thousand three hundred and sixty eight. He saw the statement the next month.

Just the flowers.

There is an old woman already at the counter today. The florist still looks up though, smiles at him, hands fiddling with the green bow. The lady pulls off her lined leather gloves to take the wallet out from her pocket. Buck waits, staring out of the storefront, between the foliage lined against the window pane.

Across the street, the twenty-hour hour diner's light is faint in the early afternoon. One table set outside, occupied, despite the tepid weather. People hurry past on the sidewalk, carrying bags of different goods. When was the last time he came to this part of town for something other than Vern's flowers? Sal must've been nine. Almost killed the Jones boy, and then Buck had taken him to the diner right there, sat in a booth, across from him with his elbows still scraped up.

The woman pays, door chiming again as she leaves. One minute, the florist says, it's just her today. She goes into the back of the store to pull out the bouquet from the storage.

The diner had been mostly empty, he remembers that. His brother drank through two milkshakes and then messed with the jukebox that only had about five songs, Capitol-approved. Buck kept giving him quarters.

It's stopped raining so much, but the air is still cool and damp. How strange.

Something grinds into him, like running a thumb over the old homemade guns during the war. Imperfections in the grooves.

Eventually, she comes back with the flowers in a water vase. Takes out the roll of paper and scissors to wrap the stems on the counter. He doesn't really look, but sees the little glare shadowing across the ceramic as someone approaches.

The door chimes.

Buck turns around at the same time.

There's that man who was sitting at that single table outside of the diner. And it's very quick, the draw of the gun.

The first shot grazes his bicep.

All Buck can think about is how incredibly stupid it is to choose him to kill.

The pistol's in his hand already. He's pulling the trigger. There's a little spray of blood that splatters on the wall, oozing between the man's eyes in a thick line, his mouth open in the shape of surprise. Then, his body falls into the pots, tilts dirt onto the ground. It grows a puddle, seeping in between the floorboards in rivers. Over in a few seconds.

Buck breathes out, arm dripping, puts a hand on the counter, and the begonias bloom at him. Death and flowers. Freshly churned soil. Smells like a funeral in here.