Short story · 4 min read ·
The Night Florist of Hanok Road
A florist who opens the shop on Hanok Road after midnight to sell flowers that bloom only in the dark is asked each night for a bunch by a customer who never says what the bunch is for.
Lorna Feist opened her florist's shop on Hanok Road at ten past midnight, the way her mother had before her, and nobody in the block ever asked why. The shop was narrow and deep, with buckets of cut flowers along both walls and a single green-shaded lamp hanging over the counter. The flowers she sold were the ones that opened only in the dark: moonflowers that unfurled white at dusk and closed at first light, a heavy-headed night lily from the hothouses at the back of the market, a grey-leaved thing with pale petals that her mother had called widow's cup. People bought them for vigils and anniversaries and nights when sleep would not come. Lorna never asked what they were for either.
The customer came on a Tuesday in late October. A tall man in a dark raincoat, with his hands in his pockets and a hat he did not take off. He did not look at the flowers. He stood by the counter and waited until Lorna came out from the back room with her scissors and her ribbon, and then he said, quite politely, "A bunch for the usual."
Lorna did not know what the usual was. She asked him. He smiled, a little sadly, and said she would know it when she made it.
She went to the buckets. She chose a moonflower, a night lily, two stems of the grey-leaved widow's cup, and as she stood there with the stems in her hand she felt her fingers move on their own, cutting the stalks to length, wrapping them in damp paper, tying them with black ribbon in a loose bow. When she was done the bunch was heavy and cool and smelled of cut grass and rain.
The man paid in coins she did not know, old and worn, and took the bunch from her and held it against his chest for a moment, very carefully. Then he went out into the street and walked away toward the river. Lorna watched him go and realised she was crying, without any idea why.
He came every Tuesday after that. He always wanted the usual, and Lorna always made it without knowing what it was. Sometimes she added a stem she had not planned, a single bloom of something pale and fragile that she had never stocked. Sometimes the bunch was lighter than she expected, and sometimes it was heavier, and she could never tell from the flowers which it would be.
In December, her sister Maud came to help with the Christmas orders. She stood at the counter one night, watching Lorna make a bunch for the man in the raincoat, and said quietly that she knew who he was. He was the husband of a woman who had died in the flat above the shop, in the winter of 1972, after a long illness. He had come to the florist every Tuesday for a year afterward, buying the same bunch, leaving it on the step of the flat. Then he had stopped, and the shop had been sold, and the flat had been let, and nobody had seen him again.
"The usual is for her," Maud said. "It always was."
Lorna looked at the bunch in her hands. Moonflowers, a night lily, widow's cup. She understood now that the grey-leaved stems were not for mourning. They were a sign that the one who received them was still expected to come home.
The following Tuesday, the man came in as usual. He stood by the counter and waited. Lorna made the bunch as she always did, and this time, without deciding to, she added the single pale bloom that she had never stocked, and wrapped the whole thing in a sheet of white paper she had never used before. When she handed it to him, he looked at it for a long time. Then he said, very softly, "Thank you. She'll be pleased."
He turned, and went out, and when Lorna went to the door to watch him walk to the river she saw the flat upstairs had a light on, the first in a year, and a shadow moving slowly across the window, pausing as if to listen for the bell.