Celeste

To celebrate 50 years of the Carnation Revolution

“Do you have a light?” 

Celeste stepped out of the subway, her arms full of freshly-cut flowers she feared would go to waste. The restaurant’s celebrations had been cancelled on the revolutionaries’ orders, leaving her with unused bundled bunches of carnations and the manager’s instructions to ‘make something out of them.’

The sky roused, yawning and stretching over the Praça do Rossio. Beholding the city square, she knew her flowers had no place in a day like this. Her bouquets of swirling scarlet skirts, would droop, idle; crowds of port-drunk cheeks, would wilt, withering away.

“Ma’am, do you have a light?” 

He was just a boy, like many others standing by. Only peach-fuzz and a tenor’s voice, lazing against one of the military’s tanks. An unlit cigarette poked out from between his lips.

“No, sonny.” She wished she had anything to help or thank them, but she only had carnations. Scores of blossoms, whose petals spewed fresh and wound-like, when the revolution should spill no blood…

“If a flower will do.”

The soldier-boy took it. Amused he called a friend. Celeste sowed their green lapels, then the muzzles of their rifles. Shoots red like spring made a meadow of the army.

Lisbon stirred and rubbed its eyes clean of wintery sleep. But Celeste? Just then It was enough the flowers wouldn’t waste.