I watched. The stem, usually limp and docile, stood rigid as rebar. The flower seemed to lean out of the window, tilting toward the gray smog.
I met a woman once in the highlands of a forgotten province. She kept a single red lotus in a glass vase on a windowsill that faced east. The valley below was a war zone of progress—cranes eating the skyline, highways slicing through rice paddies. crimson lotus soaring
But the beauty of the crimson lotus is that it does not crash. It descends with the grace of a spent firework. It looks for another patch of murky water. It touches down gently, closes its petals around the seed of memory, and waits. I watched