purple

The woman with the purple orchid passes by the Buddhist cemetery. A dark cloud looms overhead. The man with the foreign clothes makes her uneasy, and she averts his gaze. She cannot imagine that beneath the mask he smiles warmly. Her mask, by coincidence, matches the color of the flower in her hand. Both purify the air around them. She is headed toward the bus stop, but that is not her destination.

Her flat is modest, average for this place, which means quite small. There is a pair of shoes sitting in the entry, neatly to the left and facing the door. Those are for the weekends. The right side of the hallway between the entry and the bedroom serves also as the kitchen. A single gas burner is the stove. Pots hang above the sink next to towels, one each for hands and dishes. Both are neatly folded, hanging on the rack as if unused. A small bag for food waste sits in the corner of the sink, a single egg shell and some onion skins inside. The refrigerator, last before the doorway to the room, is slim and shorter than she. It sits opposite the entrance to the wash room, a door on which a calendar hangs from a simple plastic hook. The hook came in a pack of three, and the remaining two are stored beneath the sink. It is April, and her mother’s birthday has been marked this Saturday, the eighteenth.