the flower arranger

the flower arranger

fiction
edward w pritchard

As charity work, being a religious woman, Mrs Lemat, florist took flowers to the patients at the hospital at Arles. She came on the painter of sunflowers in the hospital having quarreled with a fellow artist and later cutting off a piece of his own ear. Mrs. Lemat remembered the painter because she had as a commission for the artist a few months ago supplied and arranged twelve sunflowers and a vase that the artist had spent several days painting. The patient who could be amiable at times [ despite his reputation] spent several minutes talking to Mrs. Lemat, as she delivered to him several sunflowers in a small vase, about the differences in color between the commission vase and flowers she had supplied earlier and the one's she delivered to him now as charity.

As she left the hospital, feeling sad for the fate of the sick painter, Mrs. Lemat wondered if the painter's being in the hospital was influencing the way he saw the colors of the two sets of sunflowers, for in truth they looked the same to her.