Flori

pronounced Flo-REE

Flori sells mistletoe by the town market. You’d wondered how she was doing, knowing she had a brain tumour — she told you that herself, and then your brother had sent you the CATscan report showing that it was quite advanced in its quest to kill Flori. All that had been last year, but you haven’t heard anything about Flori since, so you hoped that “no news is good news” would stand.

You remember Flori pregnant, almost forty years ago, and you briefly wonder how old she is. That medical report did include her age, but you forgot. She looks the same she did back then, that’s why she’s ageless to you. Did you ever meet the child she bore before the world around you changed? And do you think the Revolution, back in ‘89, changed much for Flori too?

Flori sees you and stands up from the little seat she brought to the market. There’s no table for the bunches of mistletoe she’s selling, only a vinyl tablecloth on the cement. You wave at her and tell her you’ll be back, you’re just crossing the street to buy fast-food from one of the three places that popped up in that old-fashioned “commercial centre”, so unlike the one on the other side of town — the one with a Lidl and a Kik and a China Mega Store (you figure that’s much like Dollarama) that will soon get a Kaufland too, just across from the cemetery. A lot has changed, especially since your country has officially and economically, not only geographically, become European, but Flori sits in the same spot where she sat with Geta, her mother, when you, in first grade, always walked by them on your way to school. Geta sold sesame bars, sweet popcorn, and ciubuc — red- and white-striped candy cane without the curve, sugary segments you could barely afford back then.

Today you can afford your fast-food and a bunch of mistletoe that Flori offers you as she keeps calling you “Miss Lavinia” and refusing to tell you how much she sells them for, and Flori hugs and kisses you on the cheek, and you do the same, and you see people watching in confusion because Flori is Roma and we’re not, they must be thinking, and you’re thinking how long the road ahead for us still is, and that makes you sad but you’re happier to see Flori alive, and what the mistletoe now in your hand holds in the translucence of its fruit is just as frail and transient and shiny — hope.