Red poppy and script on a forearm

The seed packet arrived wrapped in your old school jotter paper, so I know you've been rooting through the drawer again. Mrs Abney at the post office held the parcel up to the light before she handed it over, as if she expected something dangerous inside. It was only the field poppies you'd promised, the ones from the bank behind the bakery where the ploughing stopped last autumn.

I've sown them along the back wall, where the sun comes off the brick by eleven. Dad would have called it a waste of good ground, but the ground here is all cabbages now, and nobody argues with the cabbages. The seedlings came up in a week, grey-green and furred, and yesterday the first bud split open like a fist letting go of a coin. It was that scarlet you can't mix from any paint tin, with the dark smudge at its heart, exactly as you described it in the letter you wrote from the depot.

So I've done what you asked. I've written the words along the bottom of the envelope in my best hand, the joined-up loops you always mocked: always with me. Read them slowly, the way you'd read the back of a ration tin. The petals will drop within a day, but the seed heads stay on for weeks, rattling in the wind. Come home and shake one. You'll hear me.