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PROSE
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The Keukenhof Gardens
fiction By Emma Kowatch
“I don’t want to be married anymore.”
The words walk straight out of Alayna’s mouth and into my brain, like a door-to-door salesman
walks straight into your house to clean your perfectly fine carpet with his over-priced, better-than-
life vacuum cleaner. Even though we’re in the Keukenhof Gardens, I feel like everyone in the park
knows what has just been said. As those seven words, one for each year of our marriage, reach my
ears, I experience a slow-rewind of VHS fuzz. A blur of angry reds, shocked pinks, and confused
yellows flash across my eyes. Dutch tulips, the only witnesses to my humiliation, surround me.
The colors rewind: Technicolor unplugged. Her delicate, soft shoulders suddenly feel rigid and
brittle in my hands. I retract my fingers and drop my arms.
I’m not on vacation in the Netherlands but sitting on the couch in Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s apart-
ment living room. Except here, the jokes don’t sound funny. They come out familiar and stupid.
Ricky’s loud laugh is cruel and Lucy’s just an awkward fool. Marriage is comical.
Tourists muck around. Pamphlets gossip in the wind. A wasted clear sky averts its eyes. Our new
Adrie drools on my shoulder. Her exhaustion organizes into a deep rhythm of exhales and inhales.
A fly zooms in and out of her inherited dark curls. The second she entered this world, we could tell
she looked more like me. Unlike our first creation, Michelle, who parades ahead. Her four-year-
old fingers bless each member of the tulip mob, even her awkward stride resembles her mother.
Ten seconds ago, my day was beautiful. Ten seconds ago, this spontaneous vacation was comfort-