Exercise (Anna Jacobs)

When Sabu came back from her walk someone had been in her room.

There was something inside her room: a white tulip with a broken vein purple border around its petals and a half wilted leaf inside a glass bud vase.

Sabu took the vase and carried it, her palm so intent around the glossy heft that she did not sweat. She did not look to see if the flower swayed around the open mouth while she moved. She walked down the three flights of her mother’s house into the white scrubbed kitchen with its double-height ceiling. She threw it inside the deep stainless steel sink. Then she washed her hands with soap so the tulip would die. The tulip lay perfectly quiet against the steel. Sabu backed away from the beauty of the tulip in the sink.

She went back upstairs. To take each step hurt. After the first flight she was so angry that her gaze narrowed from the width of the spiral stairwell to a circular spot of green carpet the size of her head. Once in her room she pulled all of the white covers over her face. The afternoon sun was grey on the walls, green on the carpet, yellow through the covers. All the doors in the house were open. Silence passed through each room toward her and she breathed it back out, in and out. She picked her nose. She lay there with her eyes open.

Each breath in and out seemed to her like the only one, but two hours later she had breathed enough to uncover herself.

Tilting her head upward toward the wall, about to reach out her hand to turn on the bed-side lamp, she saw another thing in her room. Next to her sleeping head was a tiny vase full of bright purple flowers. The thing was so strong that when she threw it at the railing of the stairs it did not break.

The pansies strewn on the green carpet looked like they were growing. The vase that Sabu kicked into the gap between the banisters was just hanging on, upside down.

Inside the sink, the white tulip Sabu had savaged with soap lay there, still breathing, its white petals open millimetres above the surface.