CLS Sandoval

Lilies Under My Feet

At Balboa Park, when I was six or seven, I wanted to walk across the pond in front of the Japanese garden. The man-made pond with the lilies and lily pads on it. My mom and dad cautioned me to stay on dry land. I could lean over to look at the koi fish if I wanted to, but only a little. I sat on the side, and reached toward the lily pad nearest me. It was already broken free from its stem and browning, so I picked it up. It was dying from its disconnection to its roots. At the moment I lifted it from the water, my dad snapped a photo of me. I was accustomed to these candid photo opps. He liked to paint our family from photos. He used watercolor and took plenty of liberties with the paint, trying to make the images a bit whimsical. When he painted the moment with the lily, I was hoping the whimsy would come in the form of making the lily a
deep green or painting me with the lily pads under my feet. Instead, my skin was a light violet and the lily was its actual brown.

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit. She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, as well as flash and poetry pieces in several literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Magical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.

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