(photograph from designerterminal.com)
After the worst fight ever to take place between a man and a
woman, Allie wakes up to realize that she had transformed into a flower.
Yes.
She wakes up and
without opening her eyes is immediately flooded with the recollection of the
tears and shouts (on her side) and
angry, clipped words (on his side) the night before. The burden of another
awful fight weighs down on her. As if a bowling ball took up residence on her
chest. She decides to roll over and snooze for another ten minutes. It's at this moment when she
realizes she cannot turn.
Startled she looks down at herself. She is not lying on
her back on the right side of the bed as she had been hours ago. No. Instead of a white, airy duvet and 400-thread-count sheets, she sees a thick, green, fuzzy stem where her body should be.
Blinking in bewilderment she looks around. She is not in the bed at all. She
can clearly see the bed two feet to her left and she is not in it.
Allie does not know what to feel. She has never had an
experience even approaching in similarity to this one and she feels completely
baffled. She looks around, hoping for some kind of explanation. She sees that
she is leaning against a crystal vase which is placed in the middle of her
night table. An empty mug, a red hair elastic with a few strands of hair still
attached, her reading lamp and her current book (a murder-mystery set in a Beachtown) lies facedown on the wooden, distressed surface.
She is un-mistakably a plant. She sees her stem, feels the
cool water at her feet and, hey, this is kind of cool, she can suck up the
water through her stem. The sensation is so marvelous that she does it again.
It feels like sucking water through a straw, only better. Imagine a bigger
straw and better water than you’ve ever tasted, that’s what it was like for
Allie.
She casts her eyes around and surveys the rest of the room. How is this happening?
Suddenly, she hears footsteps approaching and pulls herself
to attention, lengthening her stalk to full height. He pauses at the door,
listening. A tentative rap on the door.
“I’m coming in, I need to shower or I’ll be late for work…”
he says. His voice is slightly muffled by the closed door. She tries to answer. In her mind she thinks the words and commands her lips to form them, but no
sound comes out. She tries again, more forcefully this time. Again, no sound. ‘This can’t be happening’ she thinks to herself., ‘I am not a
flower. I am asleep and this is a very strange, very realistic dream. I need to
wake up, I need to wake up right now’. The man gingerly swings the door open and
enters the room. He looks at her side of the bed and his forehead creases momentarily. He
walks to the ensuite bathroom and peaks inside. “Aliie?” he calls out into the
empty room. He checks the closet and pulls the shades up to look out into the
backyard. Sighing heavily he sits down on the foot of the bed, head low in his hands.
Allie frantically tries to speak, scream, make any noise or
movement whatsoever but all her mental capacity pushed to the limits produces no
results.
This doesn’t make any sense. If she can see, why can’t she speak? I mean, obviously flowers can’t
speak but they can’t see either, yet here she is staring around her own bedroom
from a crystal vase. Allie’s thoughts come to a halt. Wait a minute, I am not
seeing the room after all. She looks down at her stalk and notices faint
yellow, dotted lines, kind of like elongated tiny fireflies moving up and down
her stalk. These little ripples form the shape and colour and feel of her
stalk. She glances at the book on the nightstand. These little lines do not
glow. They are darker and fuzzier. The edges of the book are hard to
differentiate from the nightstand. It’s sort of like looking at one of those
static channels on TV with the millions of black and white dots except the
movements around her are calmer and the lines flow smoother, especially in her
own stalk. She looks at the man seated on the bed. He is glowing too, but not
green and yellow like she is. He is red and his lines flow in a dizzying
pattern. Together those lines form the outlines of the man. Allie gapes in
wonder. This is the most beautiful sight she has ever seen. Allie surveys the
room again with a new understanding of what she is seeing. The energy and life
in the room.
Besides the man and herself there is not a lot of activity in the
room. She can make out the distance and size of the objects in the room. Bed,
walls, door, wardrobe but they are dull and dark. The man sitting on the bed
pulls her attention like a magnet. After a while, he gets up and goes into the washroom. He
comes out sometime later, dripping wet. Allie remembers, more than sees, how
handsome he is with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. A deep expanse
of longing washes over her and she wishes that she could reach out to him, take
him in her arms, apologize for the words she’d said last night and promise to
change. But she can’t. She remains absolutely still, in a vase, silently watching.
As the man pulls a pair of pants off a chaise longue his
watch, which was in one of the pockets, flies out and lands on the floor near her
nightstand. He pulls the pants on and walks to scoop up the watch. He pauses
mid-way up, watch in hand.
He has seen her! Allie’s heart leaps with joy. ‘It’s me!
Babe, it’s me!’ she thinks as forcefully as she can. She screams the words in
her head, hoping somehow the thought will reach him and he will understand.
He stands up slowly, clasps the watch to his wrist and leans
over the vase to inspect the flower. She tries to lean toward him, to caress
his hand but her new body refuses to cooperate. He straightens up and moves
away quickly. Allie’s hopes are deflated. He does not recognize her. How could
he?
As time passes Allie feels more and more lethargic. The
water in her vase is now murky and stagnant and she drinks only when she
absolutely must. The feel of the cool, refreshing water is gone replaced with a
thick, acrid taste that makes her shudder. She feels her head drooping and
dozes most of the time. The only way she can
tell the passage of time is by the disappearance and reappearance of a ray on
sunshine that peeks through to the bedroom from under the bathroom door and the subtle lightening of
the walls through the heavy, darkout curtains that remain closed on the far
side of the room. She knows many days have passed but she has no idea how many.
The man does not return and there is nothing to break up her
long days and nights standing vigil. Grieving for a life and love she let die.
'I didn’t just let it die,' she thinks to herself, 'I willfully killed it. My
pride and selfishness seemed so important then.'
Allie realizes that she can
cannot recall the emotions that so often filled her in her human form. Anger, resentment,
entitlement. They are meaningless words to her now. Even the memories of the
events that triggered those emotions are slipping away from her.
She is startled when the door suddenly flies open. It’s him!
He is holding a small object to his ear and speaking loudly. Cell phone. The word comes to the
surface slowly, grudgingly. Allie clings to the word, keeping it firmly in her
mind as she hears one side of a conversation.
“Look, just tell me the truth. Has she called you, stopped
by, anything? Be honest, man.”
A long pause.
“So you didn’t know when or where but she’d talked about it before? She told
you she was leaving me?”
A shorter pause.
“No bro, people usually mean things when they’re angry.
That’s when they’re honest.”
A deep sigh.
“No note man. Just a f’ing vase with a flower.”
The man walks into the bathroom and runs the water. She
cannot hear the rest of the conversation but hears the man’s raised voice and
several expletives.
Allie can’t remember the argument now. She just feels the guilt. And she know. She knows that
she caused their fights, she wouldn’t, couldn't let the two of them be happy. She knows down in her core that she picked
fights. Like picking a scab to see if it would bled, she recalls pushing his
buttons just to get a reaction out of him. She could see it happening. She
could see that her temper and verbal lashings were making him feel bad about
who he was. She could see on his face that he felt like a failure. That he
wasn’t and couldn’t be good enough for her standards. She remembers feeling a
thrill of joy at that. Maybe she hoped he would become some super-human, devoted
lover who planned exotic getaways as a surprise and always knew when she felt
like making love and when she just wanted to watch TV. Or maybe what she really
wanted was a slave? Maybe she had wanted to break him so that he would depend
on her ability to know what was best, to listen to her plans and go along with
them. Maybe she just wanted to be obeyed so that she could feel…what? Feel happy?
It certainly hadn’t worked. And by the time that they were fighting more often
than not, she was in so deep that she didn’t know how to stop the game. Too late to fall
back into who she really was. Or had that been who she really was? How could
she not have seen that he loved her, that he was trying everything humanly
possible? She had let him believe that he never said the right thing, did the
right thing. She had kept her lips pursed and angry when he was late for a date even
though he held out a box of chocolates from that tiny shop that was an hour
away. She had seen his efforts and pretended it wasn’t enough. Why? She can’t
fathom why now.
Now weeks without fresh water or sunlight, and with the
weight of her choices filling her head, Allie does the last thing she can.
She drops her petals one by one onto the nightstand to spell out the word sorry.
Eventually, the man comes back to make sure he’s gotten
everything. He sees the vase. He picks it up and throws it across the room, smashing
crystals all over the floor.
He leaves the broken shards and the pool of water on the floor. He takes his wedding band off and puts it on Allie’s nightstand. He notices
some petals on the nightstand. How odd, the petals are arranged into a perfect
letter S.
He walks out of the room and closes the door.
