Why? He was in the stationery section to get some wrapping paper at his wife’s request and had noticed the glue; had remembered Flora’s Birkenstock sandals abandoned under the sofa from her last visit because a toe-loop had broken free, thought ‘glue’ and was about to reach for it before he remembered that her feet were ash, the Birkenstocks binned, and the house they were left in sold. A shopper beside him burst into scornful laughter. Navigating through tears the perfunctory briskness of the checkouts, and without groceries whose absence he would have to explain, he reasoned to himself that the stationery aisle was also the magazine aisle; that the shopper had most likely been provoked by the unkind cover of a celebrity-scouring weekly zooming in on some former beauty’s cellulite or plastic surgery scars. But the reason was immaterial. The seemingly random collision of thought and laugh had catapulted him into astonished pain. His daughter had died afresh, and he was profoundly, scorchingly alone. Is still alone.

Because no one can understand what he has lost. Because he cannot tell them. The words would destroy him. He needs some kind of counsel. But because he must remain professional to those in his profession, even the one he pays to listen to him, he must counsel himself. Like now, riding the tenuous curve of a viaduct, the outskirts of the town ruffling with traffic beneath him.

What was she called, your daughter?

Flora, he says to himself. She was called Flora.

What happened, then, to this daughter called Flora?

She blew away on the wind. She was very light. She was a dandelion seed.

Where did she go, this Flora-dandelion? Where did she blow to?

To the four corners. To the peaks and troughs. To the hills and the valleys, the seas and the sounds. Where she can be always here, always gone. Lodged in the crack of your heart. Tucked in the fold of your eye.

‌Hole

Moving to the New Forest had been his wife’s idea. How could she feel useful to a man who cried silently into the butter at the breakfast table? Who, since his daughter’s death, lay flat and unresponsive as a piece of cold toast in their marriage bed? Who considered work, not wife, his sole salvation? She would move him.

Not emotionally, Lord save us from the pull of the impossible. But physically, out of the anchored location of memories that followed him round like statically charged apparitions. Flora’s favoured kitchen chair which no longer rocked onto its back legs against his irritated exhortation; the two crescent-shaped holes in the lino mirroring her grin as she ignored him. Flora floating down the stairs in a backless dress, turning, Don’t be soppy, Daddy. Flora on the hall phone, twisting its old-fashioned umbilicus around her fingers, swaying to the music of her blood, calling her invisible boyfriend an adorable arsehole.