Speedwell

It comes up every damn year, right in that patch by the ditch where the gravel breaks and the runoff tries to eat through what’s left of the road. Same shade of blue, same stubborn little stems standing there like they’ve got something to prove. Speedwell. That’s what folks call it. Always thought it sounded like a warning. 

It was my name, once. Veronica. Nobody calls me that anymore, not even the people who know better. I’ve let it fall off me like a scab. Now it’s Ronnie. Just Ronnie. It’s easier to carry.

I know why it still grows here. You’d think it’d have moved on. Everything else has. But no, it comes back, like clockwork, like a habit. I knelt beside it this morning, squatting until my knees ached and the left one popped like a jar lid. Touched the nearest bloom, just a fingertip, careful not to bend it. Felt like it was looking up at me. Like it remembered.

I’ve tried, Lord knows. Tried to become somebody worth knowing. I knit scarves now. I show up for the latest protest. I put five-dollar bills in the tip jar even when the coffee at City Lights sucks. I tell people I don’t hold grudges. And it’s true. Mostly. I’ve read the books that say forgiveness starts at home. That you can’t carry your past like something dead across your back. That you’ve got to put it down somewhere, let it go.

But mine don’t go. It blooms. Right here in the ditch. Every year, like a poem nobody reads.

I tell myself I’ve forgiven the girl I was. That twenty-two-year-old who didn’t know what a person’s heart was worth. I tell myself she meant well. That she was broken, sure, but trying. I tell myself she didn’t mean to hurt anybody.

And maybe all that’s true. But the flowers still come. They don’t care about what I meant. They only care about what I did. I’m not even sure I feel sad when I see them. It’s not sadness. It’s something muted. Like recognizing a scar you forgot about. I walk down from the porch every June like it’s my job, stand here in the dirt, and just look. That’s all I let myself do.

I don’t speak his name. I don’t go that far. But I know what week it is. And I know what road this is. And I know why the speedwell grows. 

Stephen had those hands you only ever see on boys raised Baptist—soft, nervous, like every time he touched you he was asking the Lord’s permission. I used to joke they’d never done a lick of dirt work, not even weed-pulling. No calluses, no nail crescents black with grease. Just clean hands. Always clean. Like he thought he could lay them on me and I’d be clean, too.

He was from King—somewhere east of here, flat and hot and full of houses and grandmothers who prayed with both hands raised. Said he came to Cullowhee to study philosophy but talked like he thought poetry could save a person. I don’t remember what I was doing that night we met. Laughing too loud at a party I didn’t want to be at. High, maybe. Tired of pretending I liked the locals I’d come with. He showed up with some boys still living in the dorm, the kind that smelled like cinder block walls and cheap weed. He brought me a beer like it was an offering. I didn’t drink beer. I drank rum. But I took it anyway.

He looked at me like I was made of light. Like if he held still long enough, I’d turn into an epiphany.

First night we slept together, he asked if I wanted the window open—said he liked to fall asleep to the sound of wind. I said nothing, just pulled my shirt off and watched his hands hover like he wasn’t sure if I was sacred or just breakable. He touched me like an amulet, slow and reverent, and I let him. Thought maybe if I stayed quiet long enough, I’d believe it too.

The sex was soft, apologetic, full of eye contact and whispered things I wasn’t ready to hear. He said my skin felt like sunshine. He said he’d never wanted to protect anything more. I almost laughed. Instead, I bit my lip until it bled and kissed him harder, like maybe I could make it ugly enough to enjoy.

He was the boy with clean hands, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what those hands would do if they ever touched the parts of me I kept hidden. He believed in me. That was the worst part. Believed like belief was enough. Like if he kept loving me with enough patience, I’d step out of the fire whole. But I wasn’t in the fire—I was the fire. And Stephen? Stephen came to build a life.

We lasted six months.

He started asking questions too precise. Was I happy? Did I want to maybe get away this summer? His folks had a place on the coast. We could dry out, he said. Get away from the scene. He’d take my face in his hands and say he liked who I was when it was just the two of us. As if who I was in the dark was the real me. It wasn’t. The real me was the one flickering behind a dive bar, half-listening to some girl lie about sobriety, wondering if Dewey had pills. The real me was tired of being loved like a rescue project.

So I started leaning harder into the parts he couldn’t reach. I'd come to his place with my pupils wide, a little too fast in my speech. He never said anything, just held me like maybe next time I’d come softer. I didn’t. I came sharp. Wild. Laughing at the wrong moments. Fucking him with my eyes open, waiting for him to flinch. He didn’t. That made it worse.

He told me once he thought I was like a doorway. Said I made him feel like he was stepping into something beyond himself. I told him he was mistaking ardor for revelation. He didn’t understand that either.

I’ll say this—Stephen loved like he was afraid it might kill him, and that made it feel holy at first. Like maybe I was worth something. He kissed me like the ends of my thoughts mattered. Took off my clothes like they were armor and he wanted the truth underneath. Whispered things in bed like “you don’t have to be perfect, just be real.” And for a while, I believed him. I stopped smoking for three days. Deleted a number or two from my phone. Let myself imagine what it would feel like to be wanted for more than what I could ruin.

But the problem with boys like Stephen is they don’t know what to do with the mess. They say they want truth, but only if it’s tidy. He started hinting I should cut back on the weed, maybe not hang with the old scene so much. He never said it cruel—just quiet, careful, the way a man might suggest a woman cover her bruises for church. He thought he could save me from the gravity of myself.

I let him think so. It was easier than telling him I liked the way things smell after a storm.

He wanted a girl who needed saving. I wanted a boy who knew how to burn.

And Stephen didn’t burn. He glowed beautiful in the dark. But he didn’t know fire clings to the fuel. He wanted to light candles. I wanted to torch the altar.

So I started testing him.

Little things at first. Letting his calls go to voicemail. Flirting with the bartender while he was in the bathroom. Asking if he thought monogamy was a form of colonialism. He’d laugh, try to keep up. I don’t know if I loved him. I think I did in the way a stained thing loves clean water. Grateful, curious, terrified of drowning. He saw beauty in me no one else had bothered to look for. But he made it into a goddamn mission, and I was never built for that. He wanted to carry me out of the wilderness, build a life on the far side of damage. I wanted to see if he could still look at me once I poisoned the well.

After we broke it off, he’d sit on Dewey’s porch, or at parties, with a beer and a face like a ghost, watching me talk too close to strangers. Watching me pretend I hadn’t noticed him noticing. I could feel it. That hope in him, hanging on like a barnacle. He still thought I’d come back to the version of myself he’d drawn in his mind.

But I’d already handed the matches to someone else.

Dewey never looked at me like I could be saved. That was his only mercy. 

What broke it wasn’t a fight. It was the silence after. I stopped answering texts. Started hanging around Dewey’s porch, passing bottles, saying too much with my legs crossed just so. Stephen would stop by sometimes, look up like maybe he’d catch my eye. I never gave him that. He deserved better than a long goodbye, so I gave him none at all. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to see if I could. Turns out I could.

Stephen and Dewey met that first fall at the university, back when boys still wore puka shells and said “man” with this slack-jawed sincerity, like the word itself could absolve them. They landed in some 8 a.m. seminar about ethics and the self—taught by a retiree whose hands shook when he wrote Dostoevsky on the chalkboard and who’d cry when talking about grace. Dewey talked too much, even then. He liked the sound of his own mind—the friction it made against people. He poked, prodded, lobbed half-formed provocations just to watch folks flinch. He never aimed to understand, only to stir. Stephen, though—Stephen listened like it hurt him not to. He had that particular kind of silence that makes people think you're important. He’d tilt his head when others spoke, fingers steepled like he was praying. Dewey must’ve seen it as a kind of permission. A mirror that let him believe his chaos meant something.

They became... not friends, exactly. Something stickier. A tether. Wherever Stephen went, Dewey followed like shadow caught in the hem of light. Stephen found the A-frame—half-collapsed at the ridge’s lip, floorboards soft with mold, a porch that leaned like it was bowing to the view—and said it felt spiritual. Said it’d be good for solitude, for cultivating stillness, for peeling back all the noise. It was on Utopia Drive. He imagined becoming himself out there. Dewey grinned and called it "ascetic chic," but moved in all the same. That’s what Dewey always did—tag along, mouth full of irony, never once shouldering the burden of his own direction.

Stephen tried to keep it clean. No weeknight parties past midnight. No weed inside. Quiet hours for reading. Like he believed rules could keep the scene at bay. Dewey rolled his eyes, cracked open a window, and invited the world in. Art kids with leather bracelets and unwashed hair, clove cigarettes, someone’s band that only played feedback and screams. Within two months, the loft smelled like a drain that hadn’t been cleared. The bathtub filled with Dewey’s long hair. Someone tagged the fridge with Sharpie poetry. A girl arrived with no last name and stayed like a house cat.

Stephen started to unravel in silence. Not with anger but with this growing absence inside his eyes, like each day pulled another thread. I came by one evening, and he was sitting on the porch with both hands clasped in his lap, thumbs stroking the line between his fingers. He looked up at me like he was waking from some long sleep. “It’s not the noise,” he said, “it’s the way people stop meaning anything.” I should’ve touched his shoulder. I didn’t.  

He left a few days later. Back to the dorm. Slipped out quiet at sunrise with only his backpack and a stack of dog-eared books. Dewey didn’t say much when he found out. Just moved into the loft like a parasite crawling deeper into the host. He started painting directly on the drywall—faces smeared and distorted, geometric shapes, landscapes and waterfalls. He said he liked the emptiness. That it helped him see. But it was Stephen who gave that place shape. Stephen who made the stillness mean something. Dewey just squatted in his absence.

By the time I started hanging around there again, the A-frame had gone to seed in that slow, fungal way only wood and men can—wet at the corners, soft in the spine, air thick with paint fumes and something feral. Dewey was coming undone, sleeping on a stained mattress that slumped to the floor. No sheets, just a threadbare quilt curled around his legs. Said it helped his back, like degeneracy was therapeutic. His girl had left—Molly or Holly or something like a child’s name—and with her went the last shred of his routine. He drank now like it was medicine, bottom-shelf gin poured into mason jars and chased with flat ginger ale. He smoked indoors, windows closed, ash clinging to his chest hair. Everything about him had the texture of a dare.

He talked too loud, too often. Said things like “the world owes me an audience” and “real art doesn’t apologize,” as if bitterness were a philosophy. He wanted to be ruined, but beautifully—wanted someone to witness it and call it genius.

The walls were littered with self-portraits. Dozens. All wrong. Dewey without a mouth. Dewey with no eyes. Dewey in reds and sick greens, blurred around the edges like he couldn’t hold still even in oil. I asked what they meant once, and he said, “They’re not me. They’re how people think I am.” I said, “Same difference,” and he went quiet. Just turned the canvas to face the wall like he couldn’t bear to see himself anymore.

I never wanted him. Not in any real way. That should be clear. Dewey was static. He didn’t burn. He just simmered, sweaty and unfinished. Stephen still stopped by sometimes like a dog pacing the edge of its old yard. I could feel it. I knew if he saw me there again, Birkenstocks on that porch, laughing at something Dewey said—if he heard me in the place we used to be young and desperate together—it would cut deeper than cruelty.

So I played it light. Showed up with my hair still wet, no bra, a mouthful of almost. Dewey bit like a man who thought hunger was romantic. I sat close enough for our knees to touch, just enough for him to imagine it meant something. He’d lean in like he was waiting for an opening. I’d smile, the kind of smile that tastes like salt and suggestion. I never said yes. But I didn’t say no, either.

Once, I kissed him. Just once. On the porch rail, with the sun going down behind me so it gilded everything—like the moment deserved to be framed. He tasted like cloves and disappointment. I pulled away when I heard gravel at the bend, the low hush of tires over rock. Stephen’s car. I didn’t turn. I let Dewey tuck his hand behind my neck like a trophy. I let him think he’d won.

That was the blasphemy.

After that, Dewey started playing “Lonesome Loser” on loop, full volume, day and night, as if he could conjure absolution through decibels. Said it was his anthem. That it “got him.” He played it like a man dragging his own corpse into the light and calling it brave. The windows rattled in harmony. The porch shook like somebody was looking inside. He thought it was profound.

But it wasn’t about him. It never was.

He always played that song like it was his prophecy. He thought we were building something. That the silence between us meant depth. That my half-smiles were doors. But Dewey was never the flame. He was just the match I used to start the fire. He held the coats, watched the smoke, thought he was paying tribute. Never saw he was firmly outside the temple.

I never promised him anything. I only let him believe. That’s the part I can’t run from. Not what I did. What I allowed. And isn’t that worse?

It was somebody’s birthday, I think, or else just one of those Appalachian Saturdays where the fog burns off early and everyone feels invincible again. A rental house sagging off its cinderblock footings, twinkle lights stapled to the eaves, a keg in an ice tub sweating into a child’s playpen. I’d worn a halter top too thin for the temperature and jeans that cut just right at the hip bones, because I wanted to feel watched. Not desired, not even wanted, just seen—which is its own cruelty when the person watching still believes you’re worth anything tender.

Stephen showed up late, or maybe I’d just started early. His face was already quiet when he walked in—he wore that expression like a funeral suit those days. Soft, sorrowful, fitted. He scanned the room like a man half-hoping for proof the world wasn’t ending, half-dreading the confirmation. And I—God help me—I smiled at him like nothing had gone wrong yet. Like the apple hadn’t browned and the snake hadn’t bitten.

I let Dewey pour me bourbon from a plastic jug he claimed was “for artists only,” and I laughed too loud, let it drip down my chin and wiped it away like a dare. Dewey had that glazed look he wore when he felt in control, like he couldn’t be touched by anything so provincial as consequence. He put a hand on my bare lower back, fingers splayed. I didn’t move. Not because I liked it. Because I knew Stephen was watching.

The music was bad, something distorted and ironic, girls swayed like they were willing themselves to disappear. I flitted—yes, flitted, like a moth already half-burning—from group to group, brushing arms, bending to whisper into people’s ears, as if I were dispensing intimate knowledge. What I said didn’t matter. It was how I said it. I lowered my voice just enough. I leaned in just close enough. I turned heads just so he’d see mine turned away.

Stephen stood in the corner with a red cup held like communion. Dewey beside me, growing smug, crowding closer. I laughed again, threw my head back, gave the room my throat. I felt like a magician pulling grief from a silk hat. I looked right at Stephen and whispered something to Dewey—something meaningless, mean, sharp. I made sure Stephen saw the way Dewey leaned into me, the way I let him. There was nothing in it. That was the cruelty. There was nothing in it but show.

Stephen’s eyes didn’t widen. They dimmed. That’s the thing I remember. Not rage, not shock. Just this slow, wet dimming, like the last light going out in a flooded basement. He left before midnight. Didn’t say a word to anyone. Just turned and walked out like he’d finally read the story and knew how it ended.

I didn’t go after him.

I danced instead. Found the loudest spot in the room, let the beat fill my bones like anesthetic. Someone handed me a joint and I took it. Dewey stood behind me, too close, thinking we were triumphant. That we’d won something. He leaned to kiss my neck and I beamed—not from joy, from the sheer ridiculousness of the farce. The comedy of it all. The trial was over, and he thought he’d been the judge.

But I was the architect. I didn’t throw any stones. But I pointed. I made it look like fun. And when Stephen walked into the dark, I let him. Not because I didn’t care. Because I needed to see if he’d survive.

The air inside the A-frame had turned viscous, something you didn’t breathe so much as wear—gin-fogged, paint-choked, wet with mildew and that sour-sweet stink of standing water and a man who’d stopped caring. Dewey was already half-faded into the corduroy armchair, one sock on, shirt damp under the arms, muttering about beauty and grief like a prophet too drunk to finish his own gospel. His eyes were slick and loose in their sockets, face slack as if the bones underneath had melted. I sat across from him with my Birks still on, legs crossed, spine long and clean. I didn’t lean back. I wanted to look like control.

I hadn’t come to be touched. I’d come because the party had ended without ceremony, and Stephen had left looking like an unfinished tableau. I’d come because I still felt the heat of his eyes on my skin, and I wasn’t ready to let go of the tension. Because Dewey was easy. Malleable. A man already softened by loss and gin and whatever small lies he’d fed himself about what I was doing there.

He shuffled over to the record player, hands shaking just enough to make it feel divine, and dropped the needle like he was summoning something. “Lonesome Loser,” of course. It always was. That pitiful pulse of bass and self-pity, those lyrics worn through like a patch on an old pair of jeans. He turned to me, grinning through his own fog. “This is the one, Ronnie. This is the fuckin’ truth.” His voice thick with that awful hope men get when they think sadness makes them interesting.

I smiled, teeth barely showing, and handed him another drink. I knew what he thought this was. That he was part of some redemptive arc. That I was choosing him. He didn’t know I was only there to see how close to ruin I could ride before the whole thing had cost. I hadn’t planned to stay. Just long enough to watch him slur something sentimental, maybe try to kiss me again so I could recoil in a way that felt poetic. Let him believe he was nearly wanted. That almost. That ache.

He stumbled off to the bathroom, singing out “he’s a loser, but he still keeps on tryin’” and didn’t come back. The album kept going, looping on repeat. I curled into the couch cushions, pulled an old afghan over my knees, stared at the ceiling like it might confess something. The party still buzzed under my skin. My lips tasted like lime and someone else’s cigarette. I felt full—not of joy, not of regret, but of the kind of power that tightens in the chest like held breath. I had wound the spring. Set the stage. Marked the bodies.

Then the sound.

Not a crash. A shift. Like the world took one long, stunned inhale. Then metal against metal—distant, shuddering, final. A sound with no rebound. Just the hush that follows after something irreversible.

I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Let the record play over it like a balm. Told myself deer. A limb fallen. A car taking the turn wrong like they always do. Told myself anything but what I already knew.

Because I’d seen him. At the party. On the porch. At the moment the veil tore. I’d whispered just loud enough. Turned just slow enough. I’d said nothing, and in that silence I handed him the final sentence. Not with malice. With curiosity. He left like a man walking toward his own stoning. I didn’t follow. I never meant to.

When I woke, the record had stopped. The needle ticked in its groove like a cheap clock. The house was colder than it had any right to be in June. Dewey was upstairs in Stephen’s old bed, curled fetal, breathing like he was hiding from something in his dreams.

It was late morning when the call came. A girl I barely knew, voice gone high and feral. “Stephen’s dead,” she said. “He was going to Dewey’s, I knew it? He was—he wasn’t right when he left. He looked psychotic.”

Lost control. Rain-slick road. No skid marks. Just a clean exit off the side, like he’d decided to slip the whole thing. That afternoon, I went to the curve. Took the turn slow, careful. Parked in the same spot where it all unstitched. Wet sandal feet through the grit and rain, each step deliberate, each car part a syllable in a sentence I had written. There it was. The patch. Speedwell, bright and blasphemous against the mud ruts. Blooming as if to say: “yes, this happened. Yes, this was yours.”

I knelt. Not to weep. Not to beg. But to touch the ground that knew. He loved me like I was still whole. And I—God—I wanted to see if it would break him. Turns out it could. And it did.

The thing they never tell you about power is how small the space is where it lives. It’s not sweeping. It’s not spectacle. It’s in the space you don’t fill when someone’s waiting for an answer. It’s in the pause between one look and the next, when a man believes—truly believes—you might turn toward him and wreck everything clean. I used to live there. In that pause. In that moment where mercy could have happened but didn’t. Not because I couldn’t give it. Because I chose not to.

Now, I put my groceries into a Tesla. I write checks to causes I know by acronym. I don’t miss Stephen. That word’s too soft. What I feel now is more like hunger with no object. Not for him, but for the girl who made the world bend. The one who could speak a word—just one, carefully timed—and watch men rearrange themselves in the aftermath. I buried her in that ditch. Or maybe she crawled into the ground beside him and never came back.

I saw Dewey last week. He stocks at Ingles, back by the freezer section, crouched beside a cardboard box of frozen peas with his back to me, that same hunched shoulder, that same tremble in the wrists like he still couldn’t get warm. I stopped. Watched him for a second too long. He turned. We locked eyes. No one smiled. No nod, no throat-clearing excuse. And yet, he still flinched when our eyes met, and that gave me something. Small, but bright. There was a time he’d have reached for me, said my name with that strange reverence he mistook for possession. Now we pass like smoke through moonlight. All of it—our little war, our little stage—reduced to cold labor and a cart full of discount groceries.

They say speedwell brings luck to travelers. Maybe it does. 

It’s blooming again. Blue, petal-thin, defiant. Speedwell. My little sacred place. My perennial witness. I squat beside the patch and let my fingers hover above the tallest stalk. It grows in the same place every year, no matter how many times the mower comes through. No matter how many tires pass by close enough to slice. It always returns.  

But I’ve come to believe the flowers don’t grow because of him.

They grow because of me.

Because something in the dirt remembers what I did. Because the earth is not a blank page. It’s a witness. It blooms not in forgiveness, but in “reminder.” That I was once potent enough to unmake a man. I could watch a man burn and call it a form of art. Power. That was the truth. I tasted it. And everything since has been a long, dull ache of living without it.