Late Bloomer

My father agreed to pay the thousand dollar ticket to Indonesia. When I told him it was a one-way, he didn’t frown or mumble. He just looked towards Bromo or Krakatoa, any number of one of those behemoths waiting to erupt on villages who still believed in gods.

He said he got his rose when he was thirteen. Whenever he removed his hat, and rubbed his squat, tired fingers, on his head, I would take a peek at it. It was bruised in certain placed, and he applied bright red food coloring so it would be vermillion, not the bright pink that was the signature of the roses in our family. The other kids at school had just started growing their tiny, fragile flowers. On days where the winds were especially strong, their hats would fly off and orchids, dandelions, even big awkward sunflowers would appear as the children would shyly cup them in the palms of their hands while looking for their hats. I always liked the way the flowers looked; even the sunflowers that sprouted out of the tip of the larger children’s heads, peeking out of the side of their caps, looked wonderful. I didn’t know why they were so embarrassed to hide them.

I was already seventeen when my flower started budding. Late one night, when it finally took form, I cried when the corpse flower sprouted from the top of my head. It was larger than a sunflower, with one unsightly petal desperately trying to cover a single long shaft protruding from the center of my scalp. The smell was where it got its name from, flies and beetles cover it on especially humid nights. My mother even made a bug-net, although I think she did it to keep bugs away from the rest of the house. We went to the hat store, my father and I, but the man was perplexed, and gave him the number of many specialty stores around the state. When we got to Zuckerman’s Wiz-Bang Correctional and Orthopedic Hats, and we still couldn’t find something to hide my distended growth, he told me I wasn’t allowed out of the house anymore.

The corpse flowers sits on my head unfettered. Onlookers get one hard glimpse at it before it leaves the country. It is stouter and grander than a normal flower, like some prehistoric wonder that fell asleep and woke up too late. Sometimes, when a camera flashes in the airport lobby, I feel ashamed, sometimes cold and lonely, sometimes pride. I didn’t feel pride at all while I was under my father’s eye. Yet, with each passing stare, I know that I am somehow irreplaceable in the minds of all these people, and while they hide their commonplace flowers under hats, and fedoras, and turbans, I cannot be veiled. And I have already begun to smile when I think of the legends they tell in Indonesia, about white-skinned gods, with majestic plumage rising from their bodies.