The death of the boy had disturbed the lilies on the pond.
     I stood by the low rock wall, stood very still. I was acutely aware of the thrumming of my pulse beneath my skin as I looked down at them.
     There was something mesmerizing about the lilies. They’d been perfect only a day before, I could recall; they had floated on the clear water, porcelain, a most delicate pink sheen like a newborn’s soft skin stretching from the tips of their petals and fading into pastel white in their centers. Their sepals had been a glazed, bright saffron, stiff and yet curved in, matching the curving swoop of the petals, and the green plate-leaves had been emerald ellipses on which the flowers rested, serene, gentille. Perfect.
     Now, as I peered over the pond, shielded from the wind and rain outside by a glass atrium constructed for the purpose, I could see the corruption. It was slight, of course, but it was there. The smooth edges of their petals had crumbled slightly, like sugar candies that water had dripped on. The silken yellow of the sepals had, in the centers of the flowers, ripened and bruised to a patchy, damp fulvous.
     I leaned back. From a distance the damage was practically invisible, but I did not feel much relieved.
     A slow sigh escaped me. I walked up to the edge of the atrium, to lean my forehead against the cold glass. My breath fogged it, rendering the dark tangle of outside vegetation pressing up against the edges of the clearing indecipherable behind the combination of the streaking rain and tossing wind and the condensation from the warm greenhouse air.
     Who had the boy been, again?
     Restless, I began to pace the perimeter of the atrium. The glass was soundproof; the only noises were those of my rhythmic footsteps on the white-tiled floor.
     I could not recall his face. It must have been, in any case, grayed by powdery newspaper ink. His eyes?
     Today it was stormy. No one would come down the rough dirt path to drink in the cloistered peace of my pond, and that was well. The lilies needed to recover.
     His name? No, I knew nothing of the breadth of his existence; only of its termination. He’d been walking at night to his home, hadn’t he.
     Walking home, under night’s black wing; the orange gloaming of the streetlights could hardly have illuminated his path. The fatal vehicle, for all anyone knew, could have rolled up silently just beside him when he turned to cross the street, or it could have leaped with a roar from a distance. In any case what was left was tire tracks and what had once been his body, blood pooling black under the discolored light from the lifeless thing. That was the outline traced a few days ago in the equally lifeless letters of the newspaper.
     I stopped in my tracks again, my back to the pond. Somebody was coming down the path, after all. I hurried to the door of the atrium, reaching it just as the figure on the other side approached it. With trembling fingers I unlatched the iron crossbar and moved it aside, releasing a terrific screech of metal on metal.
     A gust of cold wind hit my face, along with stinging droplets of rain. The figure materialized and stepped inside; the person helped me heave the heavy door shut and move the crossbar again. The nominal charge of one dime was pressed into my hand by clammy, bruised fingers.
     I looked the person up and down. He had seemed big, striding down the path, outline blurred by the rain, but now he was inside I realized he was rather younger and smaller than me, perhaps not even adult. The top of his spiky black hair barely reached my shoulders. As was my custom, I turned away, giving him room to ponder what was left of my lilies. His voice startled me with its clotted thickness when he asked, “Not looking their best, are they?”, but my customers were always treated equally. “Not today,” I answered, and allowed myself a glance over the shoulder.
     The customer was gone. Wet, muddy footprints led out the door.
     I stepped towards the pond, then stopped, leaning forward just far enough to see the edge of the water, and pinched my nostrils shut.

There was something mesmerizing about the lilies. They’d been perfect only a day before, I could recall; now, though, instead of lilies on clear water there was a slimy, rotting, organic mass sitting in a fetid liquid.
     When I exited the glass atrium and pulled the door shut, there was a finality about the clang of the glass and iron that I had not perceived before. As I faced the full brunt of the tempestuous weather, the wind and rain dispersing my self into scattered, unique perceptions, I knew that no one would ever enter the atrium again.