WORDS • IDEAS: NIKKI KRIASKI
Sunflower Day by Nikki Kriaski
One unseasonably hot autumn morning when the sun was already super high up in the sky, I stepped outside my door onto the pavement, but the pavement and grey buildings and all of the shimmering, glassy city were gone. Instead, my door opened into a whole field of wild sunflowers six, seven, ten feet tall, bending and bowing majestically, heavy heads nodding in the breeze. I ducked back inside, slipped on my daffodil-yellow sundress—the kind that floats and swings wherever you go, however you move—my wooden sandals, and piled my flower child-long hair upon my head as intricately and tightly as a heap of nesting snakes, then I dashed out the door to meet Val. The sky was crystal clear lapis blue, like the deepest water. I followed a path covered with trampled, dried flower stalks for what could have been minutes or hours that led to a clearing hidden within the sunflower field where marvelous creatures hummed and crept and flitted in the sunlight. The sunflowers themselves beamed with magnificent, grinning faces, unearthly and sublime, and they must have run on for miles and miles before they raced right over the edge of the earth. Faint barking from faraway dogs drifted between the towering plants, and the sun had now swelled into a great, saffron globe filling up most of the sky and shone so proudly that I swore it planned to settle in and spend the rest of its days way up there. Val arrived with dozens of other couples who flooded the clearing with shiny ballgowns, silk suits, and busy chatter. We fell into conversation naturally, smiling and chatting ourselves, picking up where we left off, his company so comfortable and familiar it was as though we had never been apart. As we worked our way to to
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