Flowers for Esma by Christopher Ananias

In a war-torn region of the Balkans. Esma weaved around the fly-blown corpse, hand-flipped out. Like she was a model on the runway. The other hand carried a bouquet of blue and yellow wildflowers held up to her face. She breathed in the fragrance like perfumed death.

New tight heels clicked—too loud on the cafe’s sidewalk. Esma had looted her mourning clothes from a little shop called MIZ. The black skirt was too short, too sexy for the occasion. The green silky blouse showed too much cleavage. Her nipples were hard like the end of pencil erasers. Esma looked more like street meat than a mourner. She supposed all the women in town were street meat or dead meat now, no matter what they wore.

The shattered Cafe tables glinted like free diamonds and jagged glass daggers on the sidewalk. The last one was perfectly intact but covered in congealing sticky blood and the buzz of blow flies. The UN arrived in their powder blue clanking convoy of heavy diesel stinking trucks and armored troop carriers. They were supposed to make things safe. Esma knew she would never feel safe again. 

Kushnir’s blue helmet hung over the Cafe’s second-floor iron railing and he called out in English, which Esma couldn’t understand, but it was obvious. “Ooh-ooh-Baby!” Kushnir jumped back when a flush of gray pigeon wings lifted from under the stone balustrade toward the sun. Dust and feathers curled in the air. “Crazy damn birds! Hey look Mulder. She brought me flowers!” Kushnir put two fingers in his mouth under a heavy black mustache whistling the universal language of the catcall and said something like “Mamma Mia” in Turkish.

Esma felt an involuntary and perverse thrill surge through her, red lips—too red, curled up, showing a beautiful smile, so incongruous with her errand, and her hips responded in the black skirt. They responded like a woman. She couldn’t walk any other way. Her traitorous female form and hormones brought too much attention, but she reminded herself. See the blue UN helmet—that means I’m safe.

“Forget, Kushnir. Damaged good.” said a thick Dutch accent, Mulder, the other UN soldier. The supposed peacekeeper, Mulder laughed, flipping ashes over the railing. He almost dumped the half bottle of Metaxa Greek Ouzo they looted from the cafe, sitting it under the rail. The morning sun shone onto it making a bright gleaming circle on the glass nozzle. His breath smelled like black licorice and alcohol. He donned his blue helmet over a blond crew-cut, which supposedly kept away sniper fire. Mulder picked up his camouflage green rifle that he constantly cleaned and dry fired, like he was going to war instead of keeping the peace, and clicked off the safety.

“Did you see! She smiled!” Kushnir turned and his gleaming teeth vanished. “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?”

“I put out misery. Give her NATO 7.62. She be good dog, then.” said Mulder in his lousy half-drunk English. The gun lazily tracked her. His form was loose and unsteady, aiming at something insignificant like a beer can. Deep acne scars dotted his ugly face especially thick under his ear and down his scabby pink neck. His jaw tightened, and his left eyelid slid down over a sleepy red-tinged blue eye, but his shooter’s eye came alive and blazed with a thrill! The convulsing hot blood of an erection bumping his combat trouser zipper outward. He loved killing women, and “Making the dog” as he liked to say, to their dead corpses. Something about a silent-silent face staring at nothing, objecting to nothing—made him nearly…

Esma felt the gun on her, and her legs were shaking like they didn’t know how to work. She looked up and saw him sighting on her. The big blonde one that never whistled. Her feet felt like they weighed a thousand pounds. She looked at the beautiful blue and yellow wildflowers. Her time on the Earth all came to this thin sun-shiny moment. Like she had been born into it—carrying her own funeral flowers. She thought about the man her mother called, “Mr. Flowers.”

 It shocked everyone when Mr. Sobieski brought Esma flowers. Usually, undertakers receive flowers, or at least the funeral home does. Esma thought they were for Mirjana, her older sister. Who all the boys and men were after. Papa, a loud, large man, who supervised men at the brickworks, grabbed the skinny undertaker by the scruff of his suit, nearly dragging him off the porch steps to the side of their modest Chardaklia and roughly explained to him that Esma was only twelve. Esma didn’t understand the loud voices. The pleading undertaker, crying almost yelping like an animal. She never heard a man cry. An awful sound and her father laughing rounding the corner—seemed worse. Showing them his bloody knuckles with his shiny silver spoon ring glistening in the sun.

She watched the undertaker limping down the same brick street, where she stood paralyzed, blood dribbling from his bloody face. Papa said, smiling in pure happiness. “I knocked the hell out of that dumb bastard, undertaker.” Esma was terrified of the hulking man that was so quick to beat people in the street and sometimes her mother. Four years later the soldiers came, and now Esma was Sweet Sixteen. She learned there were other big men in the world.

Mr. Sobeiski buried her father, but he seemed afraid that the hulking corpse with a hole in his chest might rise and beat him again.

“Get that gun off her! Come on Mulder, don’t do it.”

“Fuck you Turk this my war. Target in sights.” A shot rang out echoing over the street. The first one of the day. Like christening the air for the daily death march. The bullet whined over Esma’s shoulder. Red dust puffed off the brick street and the bullet zinged and ricocheted in a deadly scream! “Next through head.”

Esma couldn’t move. All she wanted was to put flowers on her father’s grave. She thought, maybe I deserve to die, dressed like a whore. The moment stretched out and urine ran down her leg yellowing her new white Bobby sock. Another gunshot rang out! She turned and saw the big blonde UN Peacekeeper falling from the balcony. She fled down the street.

Kneeling in the fresh dirt. Esma laid the flowers down on Papa’s grave and asked God to forgive her violent father. She studied the homemade cross and its upside down shadow. A sparrow landed on the cross. Its glittering black eyes were so innocent it made her want to cry. What did a little sparrow know about war? Today felt like the longest of all the days that ever existed.

Esma thought about her mother and sister. She would have to put flowers by their burned-out house, then find something to eat. She might go back to the cafe. The dark-haired UN soldier saved her life, or did a sniper kill him? He might help her. He might make her do things, too. Voices startled her.

She crept up behind a huge mossy mausoleum and looked over the hill. The skinny undertaker Mr. Sobieski dug a grave, while soldiers sat in an army truck pointing their guns at him. He started begging and crying. The soldiers laughed like they were in the best of times. The same cruel laughter of her father’s. It felt like Déjà vu. She could see her father’s triumphant face and bloody knuckles.

They saw her all at once, a squad of ethnic cleansers, like how a pride of lions sees a baby gazelle taking its first steps. Then the shelling started, again.

Christopher Ananias

Image by dae jeung kim from Pixabay. A small bunch of blue flowers with yellow centres growing wild.