Nikki Kriaski

W O R D S I D E A S N I K K I K R I A S K I

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

the middle of the crowd, I took Val’s hand and this time it was already cold. An eerie yet lively piano tune rang out, and all at once we were waltzing among dazzling streaks of ivory, pink, violet, indigo, sage, and charcoal, crunching dried stems and leaves beneath our feet, swirling amid luminous, misty figures, some with serpentine hairstyles wound as ornately as my own, others with wild and loose locks floating alongside them like ghosts that trailed off into another era.

Val swung me so hard that I bumped my hip into the bristly stalks beside me. I twirled back under his arm to find we were no longer in the field, but in a bright, open dance hall with lustrous yellow walls, lacquered blonde wood floors, and no roof so the blazing sun still shone upon us freely all the rest of the morning and all afternoon, washing over everything with a gleaming golden veil that rolled out in every direction.

“Look at what you’ve done!” I shouted, smiling in delight or possibly awe.

“Me? Oh, yes! But I was only trying to show you your death! It’s there, just there over your shoulder… but don’t worry, it’s a long way off. ”

We burst out laughing as he again spun me away and I twirled back under his arm while discreetly straining to peak at what lay ahead for me, but the image was gone, replaced or obscured by the magical walls that glowed under the sparkling sky.

Silk taffeta swish-swished all around us, all around the dance hall. Clicking wingtipped shoes tick-ticked softly on the wood floor in time with the rapid rhythms, the gentle footfalls sounding like distant crickets waking up beyond the walls of the radiant yellow room. As we danced, I followed Val’s eyes, his breathing, and his chippery laughter, never missing a step while his feet and posture guided me gracefully across the glossy floor. I floated alongside him without thinking a thought, without any worry of bumping into the couples who swirled near us as we swished by them. The couples who were there but weren’t. The glittering figures who spun around, over, and next to us then vanished again, dissipating into and reforming out of spectral mists with brilliant, living eyes as we waltzed and twirled and swung in the merciless heat of the undying sun.

We danced while wisps and streaks twisted and rose and whirled high above us in the open air like feathery threads of glimmering clouds. We danced until we became wisps shimmering in the air too. We danced until the giant globe sun that hung so faithfully high in the sky finally dipped under its own weight, and the crickets came out to sing fully in the rust-stained twilight. We danced while that vanishing sun finally slipped off the bottom of the sky altogether. We danced until the crickets themselves tired and returned to their cracks and shadows to sleep.

And as the world of sunflowers below us still swayed, nodded, leaned after the music, I grabbed Val’s hand and we ducked out through the dance hall door back into the field that was for a moment filled instead with rows and rows of dried shriveled dead seed smiles covered in hungry magpies and in another moment I was back on my door step standing on cold grey concrete in the middle of the night in the middle of the city just before dawn and the stark street lights above me flickered and fizzled like sickly neon beacons… and dogs barked from forever away, their howls floating under, around, through piano rifts lost in a meadow lost under a creeping pale mauve sky… and Val was not beside me holding my sunburnt hand and all at once I knew I had finally come closer to bringing him back with me

here.

Nikki Kriaski lives in Calgary, Canada, where she writes, edits, and walks whenever and wherever she can. Her fiction has appeared in Sooth Swarm Journal. She is online at nikkikriaski.ca and @nikkikriaski.