I gave my love a stone rose. It was cold and beautiful. 

She planted the rose in a concrete lot in a New York City slum. 

I would hold my love’s hand and tell her how beautiful she was. She would smile and whisper in my ear, her voice spiced with secrets, grown in a garden behind her eyes. 

We lived in the heart of Brooklyn, above a soul food diner. We could see the river from the rooftop. During the summer, we would sit on the roof and bask in the heat. We smoked cigarettes and listened to Marvin Gaye, high in the friendly sky. 

Sometimes my love would ask about the stone rose. 

Did you find it in a pawnshop? Was it abandoned in a dark alley? 

No. I sang a ten-story love song to a gypsy in Central Park. She began to cry and showed me her belongings. She kept them in a burlap sack tied to her back. 

Why did she cry? 

She had never heard such a beautiful song. 

That’s a lie. You can’t sing. 

It’s a story. Let me finish. She offered me fools gold, but I refused. She offered to read my palm and tell me when I was going to die. I declined. She showed me the rose. She said it was the best she could offer and told me to give it to my lover. And so I did. 

That’s very sweet. 

It’s the truth. 

I still don’t believe you. 

That’s okay. 

I held my love close, telling her secrets from a world only I could see. A world beneath the city streets where myth and legend run rampant, like wild things. 

It’s sad. 

Even when things seem perfect, they can shatter under the weight of perfection. Like a dismantled angel wing, I would find her hair in strange places after she left.  Long, thin strands of yellow in the corners of my bedroom.   

You took my copy of Catcher In the Rye.  I wish you’d asked.  It belonged to my father in high school and had sentimental value to me. 

Your love was like that stone rose:  a cold and beautiful sham.

by Cail Judy

Spring 2009 (revised Spring 2010)

Photo by Elizabeth

Forthcoming in the first edition of White Rabbit Quarterly Spring 2010