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“Khun,” the voice was hoarse, strained and dry due to her old age. Her hair was a mess of grey and the clothes she wore were ragged. One look was enough to tell she wasn't living the best life.
Her name was Kannika, coaxed out over a few brief words. A night-flowering jasmine, it meant.
Tle found himself lingering, genuinely baffled as to why the hell he was still standing there. He should have ignored her the moment she called out to him. Normally, he would have. Yet something about her snagged his curiosity. A strange magnetic pull that on any ordinary day, he would have ignored without a second thought. But a peculiar feeling made him pause, trapping him in a rare stubborn moment of intrigue.
Tle had always held a quiet tender spot for the elderly even if he wouldn't admit. Perhaps it was because he was robbed of the chance to watch the women who raised him grow old. He never got to see his mother or nanny's dark hair fade into silver. He never watched their bones grow fragile with time nor did he get to sit by their bedsides, holding their hands as they exhaled their final peaceful breaths into the quiet of a room. Instead their lives were stolen in a flash of violence, leaving behind a grotesque crimson mural that painted everything across the walls.
Looking at the old woman now, Tle just stared. He was lost in the hollow ache of what they could have been if they were still alive. Old. Wrinkled. Breathing.
Where is her family? Her children?
Why are they still letting her work herself out?
“Tle,” he told her. ‘That's my name.”
A radiant smile bloomed across her face, flushing her wrinkled cheeks. Even beneath the map of lines on her skin, her cheeks glowed with a youthful rosy hue while the wind played softly with her silver hair. She was poor, clearly strapped for means, yet she seemed bathed in her own sunlight. She was wrapped in a luminous grace that felt both blinding and deeply comforting. She didn't look resentful of her lack of wealth. No lingering anger at a hard life. In fact, there was only a calm beautiful satisfaction that pulled a subtle unconscious smile on Tle's lips.
“What could I be of help for today?” He asked her kindly. Very politely.
Dropping to her level, Tle crouched on the sidewalk, sinking onto one knee while the other remained braced to support his arm. He knew the pavement would ruin the crisp line of his clothes. And knowing himself, he would for sure hate the creases later. But he deliberately shoved the thought at the back of his mind. It didn't matter. At the moment, he didn't care.
Looking up at her, he offered the old woman a rare endearing smile.
“Aren't you cold?” He asked softly, a faint line of worry etched on his brow.
Kannika shook her head. Her clothes offered barely any protection against the weather but her smile remained entirely unbroken.
“When you've lived as long as I have and get to this age,” her tone was deeply comforting. “What should be hot is cold and what should be cold is hot,” she explained. Her words carried a soothing warmth, capped by a soft raspy chuckle.
Tle could only manage a quiet nod, captivated by her easy grace.
“You remind me of someone,” she said, her voice catching the wind.
Tle was frozen to the spot. His eyes didn't leave her face. He prided himself on being an observant man but it required no special scrutiny to read what was happening in her expression. Any stranger could have seen the sudden shift in her gaze. The raw vulnerability in her face.
Kannika looked at him with an overwhelming fondness, a tenderness so thick it was palpable yet beneath it lay a crushing weight of longing. The longer he watched, it began to bleed through and morphed into a deep sadness.
“She was lively, youthful and beautiful,” she whispered. “Just as you are.” Her voice fractured on the edge of a sob. “The love of my life.”
The grief in her tone was contagious. The sound tugged at something raw in his chest. Tle felt his own chest constrict in response. A sharp squeeze of sympathy so intense it felt as though he had already learn the entire tragedy of her life story by heart.
“She was my all,” she said. The words were a sacred painful confession. Tle didn't miss the tremble on her hands against her threadbare clothes. “And she was so much more.”
A heavy silence settled on the sidewalk.
Tle swallowed hard, the sharp edges of his usual cynical demeanor completely melting away. He didn't know the name of the person she had lost but he knew the phantom shape of grief. A shadow he could relate and of which he knew all too well. The same shadow that had haunted his own reflection since the day the red mural was painted on his childhood walls.
Tle found himself wishing he had a blanket, a coat or the right words to shield her from the cold memory that had just washed over her.
He reached out. His hand hovered for a fraction of a second in the space between them before he gently placed his fingers over her fragile hand. He didn't speak. He didn't know what to say. Looking at her, he didn't see just a poor elderly stranger on a cold street corner anymore.
Slowly, the question he had asked earlier took on a completely different meaning.
Aren't you cold?
She wasn't cold. She wasn't just numbed by the wind. She was freezing from the ice of a life left empty.
For a long moment, the only sound between the young man and the old woman was the whistling wind. It carried the weight of two entirely different yet agonizingly similar broken hearts.
“Life wasn't kind to us,” her voice was suddenly surprisingly steady.
Tle looked for the telltale glint of unshed tears and waiter for another broken sob in her voice but there were no tears gathered in her eyes. No glassy sheen of fresh sorrow. Though her brows pinched at the memory of old pain, she harbored no malice. No grievance. She didn't look angry at the world. She didn't look cheated. It was just pure sadness and a lingering regret passing over her face.
It struck him then. It was the look of someone who had cried all her tears long ago and whose tear ducks had long since been emptied out.
And yet, her radiant comforting warmth never faltered. Even in the shadow of her tragic memories, the space she occupied and the atmosphere around her wasn't oppressive.
Kannika looked through him and added softly, “Fate was never benevolent.”
When she paused, the silence that followed was almost physical. It was thick and ear-splitting. It swallowed the ambient noise of the street. The rush of the breeze through the trees, the screech of tires on distant asphalt, the chatter of passing pedestrians. Everything was muted. All he could focus on was the heavy stillness that had settled between them.
Why was he listening? Why hadn't he walked away? Why did this old woman's story matter to him?
Tle didn't know why her story held such a grip on him. Yet he didn't dare interrupt. He just held his breath and listened.
“She died.”
He knew it even before the words had revealed itself. Tle had felt it but the words still didn't fail to catch him off guard. A sudden revelation that made him stiffen, though he tried his best to hide it and keep his expression neutral.
Kannika spoke so quietly that her voice faded to a near whisper. Still, a smile remained on her lips as the memories took hold. Her gaze dropped to the hand that held hers gently and then, slowly, she reached for both of his hands. Tle didn't pull away as Kannika clasped his hands in hers, seemingly adoring them.
“We loved each other way too much, young man,” she murmured. “I was weak for her but she was also my strength. She was the reason I kept going, the reason a seemingly endless life began to blossom for me all over again,” she gave his hand a squeeze as if she was quietly anchoring herself to the present as well. “I found my light in her. She woke my slumbering heart and made it beat, after I had spent so long believing it never would again.”
“But also because of her…” her voice trailed off into another silence.
Tle didn't rush her or nudge her to finish the thought. Instead, he waited. The man offered a gentle squeeze to her hand. The warmth of it was almost too comfortable, giving her the uncanny feeling that he had known her for a lifetime or had at least been holding her for just as long.
“I became selfish. I became greedy,” Kannika whispered. “Love completed us but it was also what ruined us.”
He had lost count how many times Kannika had paused in the middle of her story. It was fascinating ut also deeply disorienting the way she fragmented her story. Maybe she had bottled it up for too long. As if she had kept all the memories with no one to talk to, to share them with, and no one to help her remember. Especially her lover. The way Kannika spoke of her, of them, made it painfully obvious how deeply in love they had been. How consuming their love had been. Yet she offered no context. There was no logical timeline. None of them made sense. Tle couldn't grasp their entire love story where it started or how exactly it ended. The sequence of events felt like fillers, a strange detour from reality.
But despite the confusion, the moment felt undeniably good.
Tle listened in polite uninterrupted silence as Kannika continued her story. When the end finally settled between them, the man found himself completely emptied of words.
What could he possibly say to someone who had just handed him the sum of her entire life? To someone who had just bared their soul to him? Would a thank you even begin to cover it?
“Well, young man, I cannot thank you enough,” Kannika offered a small rueful smile. “For listening to an old lady babble. I don't even know what came over to me, pouring my heart out to you.”
Tle let out a quiet reassuring laugh and shook his head, “Don't worry about it at all.”
“I just couldn't help but notice you when you walked past,” she admitted. The old woman then reached into her basket, gently lifting a pretty bundle of lavenders. “In return for listening to a rambling old lady, would you like some flowers?”
In fact, yes.
“I would love to buy some indeed.”
“Take what you want. They're free.”
Tle was quick to shake his head. He opened his mouth to object and to tell her he would gladly pay but her sharp look silenced him almost immediately before he could get a word out.
“I insist,” she added firmly, leaving no room for argument.
“If you're sure then,” Tle replied and offered a polite appreciative smile in return. “Perhaps you could wrap a bouquet of roses and lilies for me?”
“What a lovely combination,” Kannika marveled, genuinely struck by how well the two flowers would go as a pair. “You seem to know about your flowers.”
Tle gave a slight knowing shrug as he looked down at the reds and whites. It wasn't a gesture of pride but rather a quiet confidence of someone who simply appreciated beautiful things. There was just something breathtaking about the way the roses and lilies would sit together the longer he looked at them. The deep and velvety crimson of the roses would look absolutely striking against the pristine snow-white petals of the lilies. Almost as if they were talking to him.
“For a special someone, I assume?”
“Ah…” A slightly embarrassed smile broke across his face, rubbing the back of his neck. Tle's only reply was a sheepish grin.
Kannika laughed.
A simultaneous “Thank you” slipped from them both, breaking into a shared laughter at the perfect timing between them.
And before he turned his back on her completely and disappeared into the rest of his life, before Tle could walk away, move on and inevitably let the memory of their encounter fade, the young man stopped.
With a sudden afterthought, Tle opened his mouth. Although the right words seemed out of reach. But when he found his voice, he glanced down at the bouquet in his hands and then looked up at her, and finally spoke.
“If you could do it again, even knowing how it ends, would you still want to cross paths and meet them? Or would you choose the safety of a different path and just keep walking?”
The air grew briefly stirred as a sudden breeze swept past, catching the stray strands of her hair and a petal dancing through the air.
Kannika didn't answer immediately. She simply held his gaze, letting the weight of his question settle between them. Then came that warm , blindingly serene smile. The kind that defied the sadness of Tle's reputation.
“Yes.”
The answer was clear and unburdened. It was said with confidence and without an ounce of hesitation.
“I would choose to live that first moment of meeting her over and over,” she said. “I would welcome that beautiful chaos of excitement just to be there by her side. That pure joy and the nervous flutter of simply existing in the same space as her.”
It didn't break. It didn't even waver. Her voice was devoice of the slightest tremor.
“From the very first page, every single line, I would write out story exactly the same way. All over again.”
The profound understanding hit him quietly. It settled deep into his chest. And Tle knew then with absolute certainty.
He would choose to do the same.
“Go now,” Kannika said. Her voice was a gently command as she gestured him toward the path ahead. “Be with them. They're waiting. They are where you belong.”
He laughed, a bright sound of full excitement as he nodded with buzzing anticipation. He glanced down at the flowers. The bouquet in his arms was a vibrant collision of petals and breathless colors. Almost impossibly beautiful.
Tle knew Firstone would love them.
Wait for me.
Turning to finally leave, an intrusive thought punctured his euphoria.
The day had been too good. In fact, it had been flawless. Creepily so. From the very moment he woke up, the universe had seems suspiciously compliant. The eggs at breakfast had been fried to a perfect golden crisp. The good morning text from Firstone had arrived at the exact second his eyes opened. Even his usually volatile workmate had inexplicably gifted him a sleek new watch, murmuring something vague about good timing. He had even shared a poignant and cinematic conversation with an old lady at the bus stop, the kind of coincidental encounter that usually existed in movies.
And now, these flowers. The exact shade of Firstone's favorite color that called out so loudly to him.
Everything aligned perfectly. Every piece of the day had fallen into place with terrifying precision. Perfect, almost too perfect.
The warmth in his chest curdled.
Tle froze. The smile died on his lips as a heavy and suffocating dread settled into his stomach and weighed him down. The vibrant petals in his hand suddenly felt like an offering. A cruel consolation prize from fate.
He should have known better.
Fate was never benevolent. The words echoed hauntingly. It was a myth. The world didn't give this much away without demanding a receipt. Perfect days were always just the quiet and beautiful prelude to something tragic. A disaster.
Darkness.
At first, there was only a suffocating void. The world didn't just tip. It spun on a sickening axis and turned into a violent somersault that stole the breath from his lungs and the ground beneath his feet. The vibrant colors of the flowers, the weight of the new watch, the lingering warmth of his excitement, all of them were instantly swallowed by a pitch-black darkness.
Tle gasped. It was a sharp intake of air rattling in his throat as his eyelids snapped back against the dark. The void receded, replaced not by the street but by the dizzying infinite expanse of the open sky. It rushed down to greet him. An overwhelming canvas of vast and uncaring blue that made his feel violently small.
A living nightmare.
It was as if someone had flipped a switch on him, severing him from reality and plunging him into a waking horror. It was brutal. The transition. He wasn't just looking at the sky anymore. He was drowning on a dry land as a metallic and hot taste of copper filled his mouth, choking him on his own breath and bleeding out onto the unforgiving earth.
Through the haze of Tle's fracturing consciousness, the nightmare had completely revealed itself. Bodies of strangers and people he had never seen, whose names he would never know, were strewn across the ground around him like discarded dolls. How they had gotten there, whatever catastrophe had fallen on them, was entirely lost to the shattered and blank space in his memory.
The scene was grim. Despairing. A few yards away, a figure managed to drag themselves up as they trembled on their hands and knees. They didn't last long, unfortunately, as they collapsed back into the asphalt and ate the dirt. The others didn't even try and just laid there, scattered across his peripheral vision. Utterly immobile. Unmoving. Frozen in their final unflattering postures as though the life had been snuffed out of them.
Tle tried to blink. He tried to wipe away the crimson film obscuring his vision but his gaze refused to focus. He could feel the world slipping. The terrifying shadows of the dead and the dying were blurring into a single and horrific smear beneath the sky. Vast and still undeniable uncaring, it remained.
All at once. All too fast. It happened so fast it could rival the speed of lightning. Then again, a tragedy never gives fair warning. It never did. It waits and waits, silently and patiently, and strikes when least expected. One moment, the worlds was a fragile calmness. The next, that peace was shattered by two, then three, deafening cracks. The gunshots tore through the air. It was sharp and violent before dissolving into a ceaseless rhythmic road of gunfire.
Then came the screaming.
The sound finally registered into his ears. It zoomed directly into his eardrums. The shriek of agony and the raw wails of panic pierced straight through his skull with agonizing intensity.
The crown erupted into a stampede. They rushed in collective terror and scattered in every direction, driven by the primal instinct to survive as the danger finalized its grip on the street.
The sound of their fleeing footsteps was a booming and thunderous weight. Every frantic thud of boots on asphalt and every desperate scrape of heels echoed with a magnified clarity into his ears.
What a cruel contract. He thought as he lay paralyzed on the cold ground. Tle could only listen to the world as it abandoned him and as the chaos faded into the distance while he remained trapped and entirely still with the gravity.
Through the roar of the retreating crowd, a haunting image invaded his fading thoughts.
The old woman. Kannika.
She had been standing on the sidewalk. A passing stranger in his life. Tle remembered the soft lines of her face, the warmth of their conversation, and simply her existence in a world that had just turned so violently feral.
Was she among the bodies scattered in the dirt? Did she manage to run away to safety?
Or had the chaos claimed her first like the way it was slowly doing to him?
The urge to know. To find her. To look back toward the corner where he left her, clawed at the remnants of his consciousness. But Tle couldn't. Tle couldn't bring himself to turn his head and force his eyes to beat witness to whatever horror fell on her. He remained locked in his place. Whether it was the paralyzing weight of his own failing body or the deep terror of what he might further see, Tle was terrified to acknowledge that the world he lived in just moments ago was irrevocably gone.
A whimper slipped from his own lips. A fragile sound that was swallowed immediately by a wet and ragged cough. The metallic taste from before returned tenfold and a thick surge of blood bubbled past his teeth and stained his chin. Only then did the numbness give away to a searing reality. A bullet had punched through his clothes and tore through his flesh to lodge itself between his ribcages.
He was shot.
The realization was a cold bucket of ice poured over his head. But Tle refused to panic over his own mortality.
Instead, his hand trembled violently as he desperately reached out across the asphalt. More than the fact that a bullet was buried in his chest, the lethal piece of lead was absurdly least of his concerns.
His fading vision was locked entirely on the reds and whites of Firstone's roses and lilies.
The flowers laid inches from his fingertips completely ruined. The vibrant blooms were crushed against the pavement, their stems were snapped and the rich petals were ripped away violently. What had been a beautiful collection sewn beautiful together was now scattered and bleeding into the dirt right alongside him.
Tle didn't weep for his life.
I have to give him the flowers.
Tle wept for the broken gift he would never get to give Firstone.
I need to give him the flowers.
The thought was a silent scream in his mind. A raw please against the approaching dark as he cried out.
Or was he crying?
Tle couldn't be sure anymore. He had already lost the boundary between his internal reality and external horror, leaving him unable to distinguish between the tears on his cheeks or the blood pooling on his skin.
He forced air into his lungs. A desperate grab for life. But the more Tle fought for it, the more his airways betrayed him.
People always said that when one faces death, their entire life flashes before their eyes in a final dazzling reel like a film. Maybe this was what they had meant all along. Yet as the edges of his vision began to fray and darken, there was no grand retrospective. There was no montage of his childhood. There was no parade of his proudest achievements. No vanity in his final moments.
In the fading light of Tle's consciousness, the universe narrowed down until everything else evaporated and it left him with only one face.
One smile.
One person.
Tle saw Firstone.
Tle heard his voice. It was clear and resonant as it cut through the fading echoes of the sirens and the screams. He felt the phantom warmth of his touch. The familiar ghost of his presence that wrapped around him like a warm weighted blanket against the approaching cold.
A final prayer clawed its way through his thoughts.
Tle wept.
He wished to see Firstone again.
Just once. Just to press the ruined roses and lilies into his hands and tell him… he tried.
I'm sorry.
An apology to only one person.
I will be sure to give you the flowers next time.
A silent promise to the void.
Slowly, inevitably, his vision began to fade. The vast sky collapsed into a pinprick of light. The last remnants of his body heat seeped out through his waistcoat and the shirt and were stolen by the greedy and unyielding ground beneath him. The distant groans of pain from the survivors became a dull and meaningless hum as the world slipped away, sliding irretrievably through his numb fingertips.
Cold. Everything around him had gone so bitterly cold that entire frame began to shiver. A final involuntary protest.
Lying there on the rough cement of the road, a violent hole pierced through his chest as a dark halo of blood pooled beneath him, Tle remained utterly still.
The flowers would never be delivered. The perfect morning was gone. And under the vast sky, still uncaring as ever, it looked down at him as he quietly breathed his last.
A light.
And then nothing.