Rose Garden by Denise Dooley

In Portland we find blown out cartoon roses on all the garbage trucks and sewer grates. We

make a game of it. We find them in the beer labels and embossed redundantly across the toilet paper. They’re in outline on the bartender’s neck, too. We keep saying how nice it is here. Roses on the garbage. We all get in the car to go to the famous specimen garden where they have all known varieties. Peaches and yellows, too. Not only reds. We intend to sightsee and sure there are sights but I walk off down a tunnel of my own devising for I need (“need”) to make a phone call. I am talking to the girlfriend who I know I will break up with real soon and she knows it too but there was an emergency and the circumstances became one of those paper wrappers that they put on dirty magazines so that they can be displayed on the shelf. The garden is organized in these flat terraces. I pace back and forth on the terraces, sometimes climbing up or down a level on the concrete stairs. The beautiful garden becomes dull as Donkey Kong. I read her the names of roses, which feels obvious. I push my cuteness forward until it knocks against the cuteness she puts forward.

Two days earlier my friends drove into the salt flats and got out at the side of the road. Clouds of mineral dust blew around and hurt our noses. At the time I said, our exposed membranes. My shoes were powdered salty and my lips dried quick. One friend had so much salt in her hair it creaked. She played it for me. She also cupped her hands around my ear so I could hear the breezes on the sun. When we returned from the trip I cut out talking to that friend and I get it now, you can make a mistake even while you are making another mistake.

Denise Dooley lives in Chicago. Her stories and essays have appeared in Elderly, Jacket2, Chicago Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kill Author and elsewhere. She studied at the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and the Cambridge Program in Criticism and Culture.