Family Of Hyacinths

• Rachel Saunderson, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2022

The spring flowers bloomed early that morning, their silky petals still collecting morning dew. The sun was soft, a gentle light as it begins its climb up the grey-cloud horizon.
Leandro gently plucks a hyacinth from the earth. His calloused hands catch against the rough stems, and he idly rubs a thumb across the surface.
There's a rumble in the back of his mind, a gentle roll of thunder that caresses the pattering of rain. Leandro sighs, allowing the waves of melancholy and nostalgia to run over him. These feelings aren't his own. Not completely.
'We miss you,' the not-his-feelings say. Not in words, but Leandro understands all the same. 'I miss you.'
Leandro breath hitches, caught in his throat as his heartbeat thuds in his chest.
"Azure..." the name leaves him in no more than an exhale that is easily caught in the soft breeze.
"It was for the best. I wasn't—" wanted fights to leave his mouth, but he wrestles it back with a thick swallow. "Needed. I was holding back the team, y'know?"
A whine, from those not-his-feelings, comes from the back of Leandro's mind. He ignores it, instead sitting himself on the plush dewed grass, leaning back on his elbow with the hyacinth to his nose.
Leandro tenses as the storm within him turns into a tempest. The rumble changes to a lion’s roar of deep thunder and crackling winds, echoing throughout the boy’s mind. 'Not true, not true!'
His shoulders hunch up to his ears and he grips the hyacinth with white knuckles.
'I wanted you, I needed you.'
"Then why did you leave me?" He snaps. "You abandoned me without so much as a goodbye. Did you even fight for me? Argue that I was yours and you were mine?”
"Did I mean nothing to you?" His voice cracks, and tears flow warm down his face. The morning breeze cools them instantly, leaving the boy with biting cheeks as he sobs into his hands. The hyacinth sits loose in his grip, wavering alongside him.
His lungs burn with the freezing air tainting his lungs; his voice broken, shattered like hail against concrete. “I know you didn’t want to keep me, but you could’ve—I don’t know! Maybe said something to me.”
'My soul—'
“Don’t,” he says quietly, a barely there noise that’s carried away by the breeze as soon as it escapes his lips.
The voice falls silent, and Leandro relishes in the brief lull of his mind.
'...I'm sorry.' A soft sound, coddling his mind like ocean waves caress the shore. Gentle in its sound and in the way it prods at his mind, beckoning him to walk to the ocean and forgive. Or at least test the waters of trust, of the ebb and flow of this relationship, once more.
Leandro shakes his head, blocking out the voice with a dam. Locking those not-his-feelings away within their own river separate from his own.
He stands up, leaving the hyacinth broken on the ground with its stem bent and twisted, flourished petals splayed out and picked off.