flowers

I arrived at the Cielo Vista Walmart three weeks later to find flowers and pictures and memorials adorning a quarter-mile chain-link fence erected around the store’s perimeter and a city still in shock.

At least once a month, my mother would pull birds of paradise from the downstairs bush, arrange them like so, place them in a vase and position the flowers as a centerpiece in the living room atop our mahogany coffee table.

At Mahalo Flowers in Culver City and Century Flowers in Inglewood, the multiuse plant is ceremoniously styled in floral arrangements bought by customers.

Forty years after its creation, the Transformers are finally getting their flowers.

By the morning after, the mall was up and running again as normal: no police crime scene tape, no flowers for the dead.