Lily Of The Nile

• Iris Tuo, Grade 4
• Short Story
• 2022

Mr Cyclamen was a sorrowful man, the wear and tear of solitude having eroded him. Plants were the only lights in his stygian black life, bearers of bouquets of bliss.
His sunken, hollow eyes would often send shivers running down spines. They were turbid and hollow husks of what they had once been, due to the loss of the brightness in his life. His shirt hung on his hunched and tired shoulders, his body all angles and bones. His calloused fists had rough, dry skin barely able to hold on to his hands’ skeletal frame. He had tight, precise lips, small lines tracing along his pockmarked jowls, framing his mouth. Freckles were spread everywhere on his taut, bland face, a memorial of past difficulties.
We only could see his radiance when he shone down on his precious garden. We always saw him stepping into his garden, bending down to pick out the withered twigs and leaves, pruning the stubborn green warped branches of bushes and taming tangled and twisted vines. Mr Cyclamen would have dropped onto his knees and gazed out and stared at his sea of carefully trimmed agapanthuses, while his usually seemingly doomed eyes possessed the smallest spark. Brushing the alabaster petals tenderly, he would don a dreamy grin, unsuited for someone of his age.
“Lily?” he would always mumble.
Had Mr Cyclamen always been a dreary man?
No.
Mr Cyclamen had once been a quiet man in his twenties, enjoying life slowly and cautiously. He believed in the simple yet tasteful pleasures of life, fine art, listening to tranquil music and attending theatres.
He was set in his ways, a quiet refined gentleman as his mother had raised him and expected to be. And yet, when Lily came along, he knew it was the cliched true love at first sight. Her eyes were a lucid cerulean blue, warm and yet sharp and bright. Her face could have rivalled the beauty of vermillion-red roses, identical to the alabaster petals that had flowered in summer. She was the sweetest, just like agapanthuses. Lilies of the Nile.
“Wake up my son. She is the wrong girl!” his mother yelled
“Yes mother,” Mr Cyclamen replied meekly.
“Life is too short for you to be dawdling through its corridors,” his mother quoted.
But Mr Cyclamen’s life has been fatuous ever since then.
Now, Mr Cyclamen felt exhausted, lying down on the mahogany timber bench. He sighed, laying his tired head into the swaying agapanthuses. The sweet fragrance wafted up his nostrils, calming the tensed bones in his neck. The stems poking his eyes, he closed his dimmed eyes slowly. Then, he saw her.
He saw her coming toward him, red eyed but so beautiful. Lily. Tears poured down his face, like the Nile River, as he grabbed her hand. Mr Dee would never let her go again. His Lily of the Nile.