The Purple Flower

            “I’m telling you, he spoke to me!” I insisted.

            Sungmin shook his head, but couldn’t speak because his mouth was full of cinnamon roll.  Sungmin made me promise to buy him breakfast at the café in exchange for driving me back into town to fetch my car.  After chewing and swallowing down the gooey bread, he pointed out, “You were drunk!  You probably imagined it!”

            “I knew you’d doubt me,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee.

            “I used to room with you.  I’ve seen you drunk before!”

            “I’ve never heard this voice before!  I didn’t invent his voice.”

            “It could have been the voice of an actor from some movie you watched five years ago,” he pointed out.  “Subconsciously, you liked it and remembered it.  Now it’s making an appearance in your dreams.”

            “He told me he didn’t like the roses.  He likes purple better.”

            “I knew you were lying when you said that you were buying the flowers to make it feel more like home.  If you wanted it to feel like home, you could just pile the sink up with dirty dishes and throw your clothes all over the house.”

            I laughed at this.  I was a terrible roommate, back in my college days.  Whatever possessed him to keep me as a roommate was beyond me.  In comparison, Sungmin loved to keep things clean.  I wasn’t as bad as I used to be, back in my college days.  I will admit that Sungmin has seen the worst of me.

            Yesung walked over to clean off the table next to us and I stopped him.  “Hey, Yesung.  You were friends with Ryeowook, right?”

            He walked over and nodded.  “I wasn’t as close to him as some of the others in town, but we hung out on occasion.”

            “Do you know what his favorite color was?”

            “Ah, that’s easy.  It was purple!” 

            I smiled wide and looked back across the table at Sungmin. 

            “That’s just a lucky guess.  There’s not that many other colors to choose from.  What do you have, about six or seven more?  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, black, grey and white.  Eight!”

            “Gold,” Yesung suggested.

            “Silver,” I answered, nodding in agreement with the barista. 

            “And then all those in between colors, like mauve and magenta.  Must be dozens of them.  But why do you want to know what Ryeowook’s favorite color is?” Yesung questioned.

            “This thinks that Ryeowook’s ghost spoke to him last night.”

            Yesung gave me a curious look.  “What did he tell you?”

            I opened my mouth to speak, but Sungmin beat me to it.  “Kyuhyun bought red roses for the house and he claims that the ghost told him he didn’t like red flowers and that he liked purple best.”

            Yesung smiled.  “I guess, if it was him, I could kind of imagine him saying as much.  But do you really think a ghost would come back just to tell you that he didn’t like the color of the flowers you bought?”

            Sungmin leaned forward and whispered to Yesung.  “He was a little drunk last night.”

            “I was drunk, but not drunk enough to hear things that weren’t there,” I insisted.

            “Minnie’s right though.  If he were real, I would expect him to tell you something more significant than what color he liked best.  Half the people in this town could have told you that.  You probably heard someone tell you that already and just forgot it,” Yesung said, patting me on the back and walking away.

            “There were rose petals all over the floor when I woke up this morning,” I told Sungmin.

            Sungmin sighed heavily.  “All flowers wilt and their petals fall off.  That is not proof that a ghost is real.”

            “It is for me,” I simply told him, standing up and walking to the door.  “Thanks for the ride into town.”

            Sungmin waved me off and I headed out the door.  My car was just down the street, in front of the grocery store and I was relieved to find that it still seemed to be in one piece.  No one felt like stealing a shovel out of the back seat.  I headed inside and grabbed a cart.  I had a long list of groceries to grab.  But as I walked in, I noticed a large display of flowers.  I walked over and looked over the assortment. 

            “Anything I can help you find?” a lanky guy in an apron asked.  He looked about my own age or a little older, but his bleached hair made him seem younger. 

            “I was looking for some purple flowers,” I told him.

            He pointed out an area with several bouquets full of purple flowers.  They were beautiful, but I knew that Ryeowook would not like them.  He had criticized me for buying cut flowers because they were essentially dead.

            “This is going to sound crazy, I know, but I was hoping to find something living.  These are all cut flowers and are just slowly dying.  The person I’m buying these for seems to prefer things that are still living.”

            He gave me a strange look.  I knew that I sounded crazy and nearly walked away, embarrassed about the request, but then he walked over to the side of the display and picked up a potted plant.  It was a single iris. 

            I smiled at seeing it.  “That’s…that’s exactly what I was looking for!  Thank you!”

            He nodded, setting it in the cart for me.  As I watched him, I noticed that his eyes began to water a little and he had to wipe his cheeks as he backed away.  “I once had a friend…a while ago…he used to say the same thing about flowers.”  He loudly sniffed.  “I always make sure that we have at least one iris in stock, whenever I order.  It makes me think of him.  They were his favorite.”