Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

Angel and Sully lived in a rundown tenement building not that many blocks from downtown. One afternoon, Torstein asked Sully to take us to his building. The kid ran ahead of us to the building which happened to have about 10 square feet of dead lawn and dirt, a 5-foot patch, 2-feet deep, on either side of its main entrance doors. Torstein proposed to plant sunflowers there. Not the ones that he offered people to eat. He’d actually got some raw seeds to plant.

 

He sent me to the Home Depot for a watering can for Sully, and a little fencing to put around each dirt patch. Meanwhile Torstein and Sully pulled up the dead grass and turned over the hard dirt, to make a place for the seeds. We watered the dirt a good bit to soften it up, then Torstein measured off three little plots on each side of the doors to the building, and let Sully plant a seed in each plot.

“Awesome, Sully,” Torstein said, as he helped the boy cover each seed and water it in. “These are going to come up in a couple of weeks, and then by the end of summer, I think we’ll have some sunflowers.”

I didn’t know that much about growing flowers but I was pretty sure they should have been planted in the spring so they would already have been blooming about now.

“Then we can eat them?” Sully asked.

Of course that would be what interested him — he never got enough to eat.

“Yes, we can eat the seeds, but not for a long time after the flowers come out,” Torstein said. “The flower will come out, and the seeds will grow in the middle of the flower. When the flower dies, then we can get the seeds out.”

“You have to roast them, too,” Pete said, “before you can eat them.”

“That’s right,” Torstein said. “You wouldn’t want to eat one of these raw sunflower seeds. Not much flavor. Once we harvest them, though, we can soak them in salt water, roast them, and they’ll be delicious.”

“How soon?” Sully asked.

“Oh, in the fall,” Torstein said. “A few months from now. But the main thing I think we’re looking forward to here is the flowers themselves. They’re going to be big, and bright yellow, and very beautiful. Even if we don’t get any seeds out of them at all, they’ll give us something else, something beautiful to look at. Don’t you think this entryway needs something beautiful to look at?”

It certainly did. There was graffiti on the front of the building, one of the double doors into the place hung crookedly on its hinges. There was no kind of lawn other than these two little dry patches of dirt, just the sidewalk and then the street. I guess if you lived there and had a car, you had to park around behind the ugly high-rise.

Sully agreed that something beautiful to look at would be nice, but he was still wondering about eating the seeds. Free sunflower seeds to eat was a big bonus to him. He always took some whenever Torstein offered. In fact some days he would come up and ask for some, even before Torstein could offer.

“We can cook them when the flower dies?” he asked.

“Yes,” Torstein said. “Or we can leave them on the flower, and they’ll drop to the ground and bloom again next spring.”

“The seeds?” Sully said. “They just fall on the ground?”

“When the flower dies, the seeds fall, yes. But then they sprout in the spring, in the new season. You’ll see.”

A couple of weeks later, the seeds did germinate. I wasn’t sure of Sully’s abilities to keep watering them, or his neighbors’ abilities not to stamp them down when drunkenly staggering into the entrance of the building late at night. But the little fences around them seemed to help, to keep people from tramping them. By mid-summer, they really did have six pretty sturdy, bright yellow flowers blooming.

The building still looked like crap from the outside, but the flowers looked gorgeous, they actually were like big sunbursts standing in front of that ugly tenement. It occurred to me, they were sort of like our Story Ladies, Tawny and Marigold, shining in that park full of drunks and smelly homeless people. And Torstein, too, shimmering in his green coat against a drab downtown background.