Caravellum

“Did they say how long?” She rolled a loose pebble beneath her boot as she stood in the afternoon sun. She stared at the plant before her, an explosion of colour in plumes of gold and yellow like fireworks mid-blast, and she didn’t see any of it. “Right, okay. Yeah, I’m still up north, but my flight’s tomorrow. I’ll go straight from the airport. Thanks for telling me.” She kicked the pebble into the golden bush, its crowned stems swaying with the force. “Yeah, yeah, I’m alright. You? Okay, good, well, I’ll see you soon. Love you.” She held her phone in her hand, wondering what she was thinking before it had shaken in her breast pocket, by her heart. She wondered if there was something watching out beyond the black stump, seeing her excitement for the featherflowers she had stumbled upon, and relishing in the dramatic irony of knowing what they must have known; that this call would come.

The flower was a magical interjection within the crag of red rock and dust, brilliant corollas of sunshine emerging resplendent from their calyxes of green. She thought of her mother’s sundress, twirling over the grass as she danced in the backyard to the sound of the stereo. She brought the clipboard up from her side and stared at her scrawls of blue ink. Verticordia chrysanthum, unexpected within this region, beautiful and gorgeous, yet not at risk and not endangered, i.e. not worth saving. She signed her name at the bottom of the report, approving the land for clearing. Within days, the trucks would arrive and this landscape would be scoured from the earth, left to linger only in the memory of those who had stood where she stood, and seen the world before them.

She took in the vista of the golden flowers before the setting of the sun. She knows that, one day, partly because of her own actions, the featherflowers would be rare enough that they might even have halted such a venture. And on that day, she would mourn those that had been destroyed before, and would be engulfed with guilt as she watched the last of the beautiful things die. Perhaps she would wonder why she hadn’t stopped to look at them more often, like she did today. As she wondered why she hadn’t called her more often, and why she had let herself stay away. But that would be one day, when the veil of remaining moments became thin enough that she could see through them, and the opaque abundance of time no longer obscured her vision of the end. She knows that, on that day, her memories would be like featherflowers on mining country, and she’d be staring at the patch of gold on red dirt, wondering how many she’d lost before she realised how precious they truly were.