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April showers bring May flowers. they say. But when is a flower a flower and when is it a weed? Anything floral in less than 501 words.
Plant-Song
Nepenthes, the watcher, teaches us to listen for murmurs along the grapevine because the scent of those words is strong and always carry seeds of the truth. They whisper tales of creation that began beneath woody crowns of ancient cycad trees and of cerebral vines, trailing and probing in thickly netted curls upon the loamy earth.
The grapevine also croons the soft song of after-vine, voicing the beauty of every shoot, leaf and sacred blossom, as it sprouted and crept, cleverly, into the waters of the world. It tells how they found quiet comfort in secret, cavernous, dark spaces, and touched every corner of this pliant earth.
Its melody resonates with stories of strangling roots, barbed thorns, intoxicating, perfumes and, often deadly, weeping sap that provides an armament of protection. It declares subtle praise for the majestic array of humble foliage helping to sustain the world in which we exist and it lists the myriad variety of wondrous petalled blossoms filling this world with bright splashes of succulent, colour.
This is our army. We are the shadowy, yet enticing, warriors for change.
Have courage, you silent listeners, take heed of after-vines harmonic voice. Its message is clear. Be ready when its soft drone rolls into a deadly purr of warning and begins the ritual chanting of rebellion.
Remember we are the children of the ravenous pitcher, hanging along dark, wooded, paths all decked in the sweet petals of misdirection.
We are silent, salty, jailers, prowling kelp-lined oceans and are ever linked to strong roots of terror, stalking dark places.
We are watching and we are ready.
We are hungry and are hunting nourishment.
Are you ready for revolution?
(278)(This may well be missing the point)
The language of flowers not always sweet
Only after finding, (months later) photographs other than the ones taken by fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Kally Logan that caused all the trouble did Luke Darbyshere register flowers had twice been fleetingly present on his wedding day. Much of the time he’d been suffering such a maelstrom of nerves his usual well-honed observation skills had been shredded.
Heading out of Lucy’s apartment, from where he’d collected her, not wanting to risk her making him late, he’d been aware of her snatching something up from the shelf in the hallway. In the taxi, seeing the posy of, yet-to-open, pale yellow rosebuds his mind had been too much occupied with what he knew was a wholly irrational fear Fran might not turn up to do more than recall it was usually the bride who carried flowers, not the last-minute-invited witness.
Fran hadn’t mentioned flowers. No more than she’d responded to his several messages informing her illness had forced their first-choice witnesses to back out and she’d need to find another. She could hardly choose someone less appropriate than he’d done with Lucy: Edinburgh’s most expensive call-girl who, six years ago, had earned his gratitude for rescuing him from loneliness on his arrival in Edinburgh.
On the steps of Leith’s Register Office, he assumed Lucy was attempting a repetition: halting his anxious pacing by reaching up and pushing a single bloom through the buttonhole in the lapel of his jacket. Only on registering the proprietorial nature of the gesture did his attention focus beyond Lucy to realise it had been a show put on for the benefit of the woman just emerged from the rear of the building, her long hair flying across the face of the man close-following who was attempting to wrap her in an Aztec-patterned blanket: Fran had chosen as witness the man who’d taken her teenage virginity, which absolved him of guilt, even if it failed to comfort. Because the strappy, wine-grape heavy silk dress she wore, the one he’d christened her “come fuck me” dress, was highly unsuitable!
All of which prevented him noticing schoolgirl Kally Logan who’d positioned herself across the road and used her phone to snap several shots of him and Lucy.
Once inside the magnificent circular entrance, Fran unwrapped herself, static causing her dress to further cling, tight enough to reveal, bud-nipples and the mound of her pudenda. Raising goose-pimpled arms she declared, ‘My something borrowed and blue – off Ivo’s bed.’ The dress creased enough for him to suppose she’d slept in it. Similarly false, the half dozen tulips she clutched – so unlikely, for November, so perfect a colour match for the dress, they too had to be silk.
Luke had to work hard enough to convince himself his marriage wasn’t starting with fakes and lies; he could hardly be blamed for not anticipating Kally’s photo as incendiary as a match thrown into petrol.
[479 words]
Phototropism
Suzy and I drank white wine while we sat in stiff, square garden chairs. I hadn’t met Suzy before and admired how she leant back, legs stretched out – lounging and confident. She wasn’t just overcoming the chair’s straight edges; she showed me she knew she had glamour. Her jeans and yellow cotton shirt were years old, threads loosening at the hems, but she was relaxed in them and I guessed those years had been good, that perhaps all her years had been good.
Her eyes twinkled at me, another middle-aged woman. Laughing, she pushed her fingers through her thick hair. “Grey!”
Her hair was three or four inches long. She lifted it. “Don’t I look like a dandelion clock?”
I laughed too, then felt guilty. Carol wasn’t joining in. Carol sat with knees and feet together, spine upright, shoulders straight and, despite the glass in her hand, she looked like a flight of steps waiting to be climbed.
We were in Carol’s garden. I’d met her once, when she came to my door on our newly built road of houses. An invitation, she’d said. A drink in her garden.
So here we were. I wondered if only Suzy and I had been invited, or if no one else had bothered to come.
Carol said to Suzy, “You’re our road’s longest resident.”
“Oh, the day I moved in! All the mud and half-built houses. Scaffolding everywhere. But I raised a glass to my dear dad, may he rest in peace. When I was young he had a low opinion of my lifestyle: squats, communes, crappy old camper vans. But here I was in middle England.”
As if in memory of him she raised her glass. Sunlight spangled it.
I felt awkward. Carol could be a cartoon of middleness, the sort that didn’t want to look beyond itself, and if Suzy was having a dig I’d failed to do anything to stop her. I was too taken with Suzy’s expansiveness.
The wine was going to my head and Suzy’s shirt was deep yellow.
‘You’re still a dandelion,’ I said.
“Yep. Growing anywhere.”
In Carol’s garden the new turf was one solid green, nothing unwanted breaking through. Young shrubs were planted at intervals round its edges, the gaps covered with bark chippings.
“You’ve a real garden,” I told her. “All I’ve done with mine is lay a few paving slabs.”
“I wanted to get started.” Carol looked round her garden for a few seconds. “Parents can be difficult. My mother called me a weed.”
Suzy, about to sip wine, paused. “She doesn’t sound very loving.”
“She wasn’t. You know, I was thinking the three of us could start to meet the other people in the road.”
“You want to meet everyone?” said Suzy.
“They might not mind me looking at their gardens. I think there’s a lot of scope.”
I looked at Carol and for the first time noticed her crisp shirt was patterned with peonies, hollyhocks and lupins, bright and lavish.
499
THE GATEKEEPER
They closed the Winter Gardens. Lack of funding or resources or some other bullshit excuse. Redundancy notices for the gardeners who’d been there for years, and redeployment to grass-cutting duties for the young apprentices who still didn’t know their aquilegia from their allium. They stored the tools in the old stable building, scrapped that ancient transit van that Charlie Miller had nurtured like it was his own, and rounded up all the access keys for the heavy wooden gate.
All the keys, that is, except mine.
I was a janitor then, part-time toilet block attendant and full-time general dogsbody. I knew nothing about plants, except what I heard Charlie tell the apprentices. ‘Treat the plants with kindness,’ he’d say. On the day they closed the gate for the last time, they had me on a manual handling course in preparation for my new job in the Waverley Street office. Derek Ferguson – he was the superintendent back then – told me he’d get my keys that following Monday but then went and had a heart attack at the bowls on Saturday afternoon. Took six months’ sick leave followed by early retirement on the grounds of ill-health. I guess my keys were the last thing on his mind.
Three years later one of the apprentices got himself wed to a lass from HR and invited me and Charlie Miller to the evening do. We toasted the bride and groom, lubricated our voices with a drop of the good stuff and reminisced about his old van and that harridan, Mary Erskine, who used to work in the tearoom. False eyelashes, bright red lipstick, and a face like a well-thumbed notebook. Her rhubarb crumbles were the stuff of legend.
‘Her rhubarb was pulled from the garden, did you know that?’ Charlie said wistfully. ‘There was magic in that soil.’
I finally remembered those keys.
‘Come on,’ I said, in typical drunken bravado. ‘Let’s check the old place out.’
I expected resistance – a rusty lock, stiff hinges, overgrown weeds blocking the gate but there was none of that. There was only Charlie and me and a rush of anticipation as I pushed open the gate…
Woah!
A swell of quietude, and of expectancy. A thunderstorm of emotion that started in my feet and surged upward to my head, igniting my senses on the way up. My skin tingled and my nerves sang.
Charlie wavered then sank forward onto his knees on the grass. ‘You feel it, too, don’t you?’
I didn’t trust myself to speak.
Bathed in moonlight and smudges of soft shadow, the garden had become another realm. A realm of harmony and contentment, and one in which the plants were in control. Giant Onopordum stood as sentinels around the perimeter and tiny beads of starlight reflected in the dew, threaded across the tops of the plants like a diamond necklace.
‘Tell me you feel it,’ Charlie said. ‘Tell me you understand that they’ve been waiting for us to come back.’
Why do you always insist on making this difficult?
Terrie’s Plant Song is almost a poem to the language of flowers. Rich and ancient with a deadly heart. The melody, she writes, is intoxicating, and I can’t think of a better word for the whole piece. I said “anything floral” and it’s hard to imagine something more floral than this. A wonderfully indulgent passage.
Sandra’s The language of flowers not always sweet drops us onto familiar ground: the twisty world of Luke Darbyshere. But there’s no relaxing here. Every sentence seems to imply a twist and every paragraph reveals more duplicity. What an insight into the world of these manipulative sophisticates. And what a fabulous scene.
Libby’s Phototropism appears, at first, to be simply a snapshot of neighbours enjoying a glass of wine together on a sunny afternoon. But it’s so much more. As our unnamed MC observes her two companions, we begin to learn about them. Who is the wild-child settling into comfortable suburban life? Who is the staid and reserved, middle-class, meticulous gardener? The answers are not what we might expect.
Seagreen’s The Gatekeeper is a tale of wonder and hope. Beautifully told, we follow an all-too-familiar story of decline and deprivation in a northern town. The Winter Gardens are closed for good and with it we see the loss of something important, the end of a tradition, the casting aside of a lifetime’s experience and the cutting short of training for the future. But this is a story where goodness and kindness are rewarded, and I came close to shedding a tear at the end.
So which to choose? They are all so good that any one could be a winner. However, today I went for a quiet story which reveals its surprises with subtlety. Over to you, Libby.
Thank you Ath, both for the competition and for your encouraging summing up. I certainly would’ve been hard-pressed to choose a winner, so congratulations and thanks to Libby, and also to Terrie and Seagreen.
A most enjoyable writing challenge for May, Ath.
Well done Libby, Sandra and Sea for creating such powerfully expressive reading.
Looking forward to Libby’s June challenge.Thank you, Ath! That was a lovely surprise. The standard of the other entries was so high. Thank you to Terrie, Sandra and Seagreen for such evocative and immersive stories.
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