Envy

Crushing another’s roses secretly,

malicious though it is at the moment,

ends up biting the crusher very deep.

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He couldn’t stand luxuriant roses or immigrants.

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Roses

On summer evenings the family’s father set out chairs in the yard while the mother laid food on the table. They liked to eat outdoors. Their son tuned his violin and played softly in the dusk, like the song of a nightingale. It was as American as could be—just a family who came here to build the best life they could.

One morning, the mother went out for the newspaper and found almost all the roses crushed on the ground. She raked them up and dumped them into the tip bucket on their porch. When her husband came out to find her, she whispered to him, “Maybe they don’t want us here after all.” They couldn’t hide it from their son, since he would see that the flowers were missing when he left for school. He left the house angry.

The neighbor had no qualms about spreading his insults around town. At the grocery store, he told the clerk that the family held “illegal gatherings” in their basement. At the post office, he told the mailman that the violin case hid drugs in secret compartments. At the movies, he told the popcorn girl that he knew the father cheated on his taxes.

He was nasty, but people believed him—or they at least gave him the benefit of the doubt. A woman at the market turned her back when the family’s mother greeted her. Another woman at school tugged her daughter away from the son’s violin case as if it were a snake. A red-hatted man on the neighbor’s porch agreed that “They don’t belong here.” Then the neighbor jabbed his finger toward the rose bushes and jeered, “What gives them the right to have flowers?”

On Sunday, after church, while the congregants were milling outside the entrance, a little girl tugged at her mother’s skirt. “He sneaks into their yard. He crushes the flowers. I saw him from my window when got up at night to go to the bathroom.”

Suddenly, folks remembered petals stuck to his shoes. They wondered how he would know about things like the inside of the son’s violin case or how the father filed his tax forms. They recalled the gloating, unpleasant rasp of his voice when he related his gossip. They started to laugh at him. And when this made him even angrier, they started to avoid him.

The roses grew back and kept blooming, redder than ever. The family continued to have dinner outdoors, but the spoke softly and kept an eye on passers-by. The boy always played his violin, but now it sounded more like a stuttering bluebird.

Next door, the neighbor’s grass dried up and turned to dust. He sat on his porch staring at the fence covered in red blooms, infuriated. People passed by his yard heads down. Some even crossed the street before reaching his house.

The violin was drowned out by his deafening rage.