260708.2 . Two Stems
Flowers for Someone
Eight stems.
If you’d flown a drone with thermal imaging over a certain little village on a certain day and time earlier this month near the waters that become the Black Sea, you would have seen a dense concentration of heat signatures gathered around and in one tiny building.
And if you overlaid map data on your drone feed, you would have seen that this was a florist’s shop.
“Aw, how sweet! A celebration!”
Thermals don’t show happy or sad. Who has a wife or a husband. Who has a daughter or a son. Who is silent and who is grim and who weeps quietly.
Thermals just show heat. Movement. Bodies.
And since they are Ukrainian bodies, that’s all that’s needed to turn them into targets.
Even though at that moment, those targets were buying flowers.
Risking detection and destruction to buy flowers.
Always in multiples of two - two “stems”, as it’s said here. Two, four, six, eight - all even numbers.
In Ukraine, you give odd numbers of flowers to the living, for joy, for love, for happiness.
Even numbers of flowers are given to the dead, and reserved for funerals.
And a bunch of ordinary people were willing to make themselves into targets, willing to risk death by fire and bombs, just so they could buy their Someone two stems of flowers.
They risked everything just to bring two stems to their Someone.
That’s the part that breaks your heart and makes you ache with pride at the same time.
These are not the thing that squats across the river.
These are not whatever it is that’s raged into this once-quiet place, hunting and killing “targets” in hospitals and pizzerias and flower shops, all while eating, sleeping, and shitting on land that’s not its own.
These are men and women.
They fight back when they could run.
They stand up, defiant, when commanded to kneel and crawl.
And they risk fire and death just so their fallen Someone can be remembered with flowers at his funeral.
Ukrainian translation developed in collaboration with three AI translation consultants: Sophie (primary draft), Maya (register and word-choice analysis), and Mara (structural refinement and base text). A fourth AI, who prefers to think of herself as a very well-read editor with strong opinions about flower customs, handled synthesis and final assembly.
Beautiful and love the photo.