The Grief That Bloomed

On the Rue Bertaut, you could read the whole street from the pavement, if you knew how to look at the windowsills. Everyone's sorrow grew there, in a pot, the way it had always grown for as long as anyone could remember. No one questioned it any more than they questioned that bread went stale or that rain fell down instead of up. When something heavy settled in you — a loss, a regret, the slow ache of a life not turned out as planned — it put out a shoot on your sill within a week, and it grew at the pace of the grief, and it died back when the grief did, and that was simply how the street kept its books. Madame Lacroix at number four had a grey, thorned thing that had not flowered in eleven years, since her son went to sea and stopped writing. The young couple at number nine had matching pots of a quick, blue weed that sprang up after every quarrel and wilted by the next morning, so that you could tell from the street whether they'd made up. Old Henri the cobbler grew a low, tough succulent, the grief of a man who had outlived everyone he started with and made his peace with it, a plant that asked for nothing and endured. Adèle, at number seven, had buried her husband Théo in the spring. For a while her sill held what everyone expected — a dark, drooping fern, the common shape of fresh widowhood, the kind the whole street had grown at one time or another and knew how to