A florist becomes obsessed with the strange, haunting red flowers she buys from an equally strange old lady…
I hadn’t seen the old lady with her pram full of flowers for months. In A Bunch of Love, we joked our takings were up; without her five-dollar bunches of flowers, people came in to us instead. My boss didn’t find it funny.
“You know she steals those flowers? No outlay.”
“And spends the profit on bad men,” I said. I kind of loved the resourcefulness of the old lady. So when I saw her on the street corner, I stopped. I had five dollars in my wallet, “burning a hole,” as Jack Torrance said in The Shining. Mad money, meaningless in the grand scale of things. I worked in a shop full of flowers, could make myself a hundred-dollar bunch without flinching, but I liked the look of these.
“Which one you want?” she said. She pushed back the hood of her pram to reach a posy made of red flowers. Their petals were rose-shaped, with longer petals interspersed, these folded like fronds. The centre was a bright, unnatural red. “Lovely red like your shoes.” She wasn’t wrong. I called them my Dorothy shoes, ruby-red and almost magic.
“Lovely carnations,” I said, because they had to be.
“I call them Bright Hearts,” she said.
I took the bunch (she wouldn’t let me hold it until I paid her) and sniffed. The scent was subtle and sweet. “All from my garden,” she said. She didn’t need to go through the sales pitch but she seemed compelled to, a recording set to play and not done until all the words were spoken.
She sighed as I walked away.
Back in the florist’s, I set the small bunch in water by the cash register. The boss was out for the day and I felt cheeky. The red flowers were gorgeous, and seemed darker now. My workmate said they stank, but she has a strange nose. We had so many queries about them I sold them for fifteen dollars, a tidy ten-dollar profit straight into my pocket. I bought the flowers; the money was mine.
A customer I hadn’t seen in ages rushed in just at closing, demanding red flowers like her friend bought. “They smell so beautiful!” she said. My workmate shook her head in disbelief. I guess it was the same as coriander; some people think it tastes of soap, others love it. “And they almost look like fairies, at a glance. Like those Conan Doyle fairies, you know?” and she lifted her heels, raised her arms, and for I moment I thought she was a fairy.
“We only had one bunch but we are trying to source some more,” I said. On a whim, I gave her an index card, asking for her details so we could call when the flowers came in.
“Thanks!” she said. She used to be a frequent customer but it had been months. “It’s good to see you,” I said. We’d been helping her get ready for her wedding but we hadn’t supplied the flowers and I saw no ring on her finger. I didn’t ask how it went.
Even so, she looked momentarily panicked, then said, “He walked out on me. I’ve been trying to fill my place with beautiful, bright things. Like those red flowers. The colour in the centre.”
I made her a posy from flowers we had in the store. I chose mostly aromatics, thinking she’d enjoy the scent.
As I worked, she said, “What about you, did you and Jeremy have your baby?”
I’d forgotten I’d told her that in a fit of camaraderie. No one else apart from my boyfriend had known. I walked outside with her, not wanting my workmate to hear.
“It was one of those phantom pregnancies. A ghost baby. At least I didn’t have to go through the birth. She disappeared at around three months. Jeremy and I were brokenhearted.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. I drew deep breaths to stop myself from crying. I barely thought about my baby. I was tempted to pile it on her, make her feel worse, tell her Jeremy was in a coma, in hospital, and I was alone. Instead, I said I was sorry about her fiancé leaving her and she left with the posy and me with another twenty dollars in my pocket. I wrote the flowers off in the “compost” column, as I always did. The boss never noticed and neither did the other workers. I figured I was saving those flowers from waste, I deserved a little reward.
I closed up the shop, sweeping up lost dirt, petals, and leaves, tidying the shelves. A bunch of yellow roses we’d try to sell cheap wouldn’t last another day so I took them with me to give to the nurses at the hospital. They looked after Jeremy so well.
I told Jeremy about the flowers and the old lady, trying to fill his day with interesting stories.
“I bought them for five bucks and sold them for fifteen. Not bad, ay? I can’t do it when the boss is around. And I don’t know how many red flowers the old woman can get. Or where she gets them from. Mission tomorrow: find out.” I rubbed my cheek; there was red dust all over my face. “I should jump in the shower, grubby after work.” I looked down at my red shoes, dirty from a day in the shop, and gave them a clean with my fingers.
“C’mon, let Daddy clean you up,” Jeremy had said last time I wore them. He loved me wearing red shoes; said it made me look like a baby doll.
“Jeremy! Don’t. You know I hate that.” But I’d asked for it. I’d said the magic words, grubby and shower.
“Naughty little girl doesn’t love Daddy, needs a spanking.”
He always said he was only joking but I found it hard to laugh.
He lay silent, eyes closed but sometimes blinking open. I said, “She asked about our baby. I didn’t tell her. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.” I knew he felt bad. He felt terrible. It wasn’t his fault. He’d hallucinated. He’d thought I was his father coming at him, fists up, so he punched his father (me) he punched me (his father) so hard in the stomach we lost the baby.
So we pretended it never happened. Better that way.
At home, I fed the cat and put my yellow flowers in a vase. But like my jilted customer, I wanted those Bright Hearts.
I approached the old lady on her street corner early the next day, wanting to snap up all the red flowers she had.
“I don’t have any today but I can get you some tonight. They only grow in one place.”
“Not your garden?”
Her eyes shifted sideways. “Yes, in my garden. I’ll bring you some tomorrow.”
I finished work early that day, jumped in my car, and parked close by, watching her work. She was a master; slumping her shoulders, holding out those flowers sorrowfully, the other hand out for money. I wondered where she’d pinched these ones from.
A couple of police approached, and she packed up her pram and took off. I followed, thinking she’d get on a bus and I’d follow her, like I was some kind of spy. I practised how I’d describe it to Jeremy. He liked me to tell a story with a lot of detail.
She trudged past the main shopping centre and through the local park to the casino. I assumed they’d refuse her entry, but they let her in. I parked and followed her. The pram was at reception; I sneakily peeked in but nothing good was hidden.
I found her at the poker machines, pumping in her five-dollar notes. It didn’t take her long to lose the lot and she trudged back out, retrieving her pram and standing outside. She looked tired, drained.
“Hi! Would you like a lift? Us flower girls have to stick together.”
She looked at me blankly, then said, “Red-shoe girl.”
I nodded. “If you show me where those red flowers grow, I’ll buy you dinner. And more. What do you say?”
She shrugged. “You give me fifty dollars,” she said.
I did a quick calculation. “Sure.” If the flowers didn’t sell well I’d undercut her. Fair enough. But she put out her hand, pre-payment, so I gave her the fifty, already thinking what I’d tell Jeremy. I never could keep a secret from him.
We folded her pram into the boot and her into the passenger seat. She wouldn’t tell me where we were headed, just turn left, turn right, turn right. We got lost, but I’m sure that was deliberate. She didn’t want me easily finding the place again, but that was too bad for her. My sense of direction is excellent.
We eventually arrived on the outskirts of town. A small dilapidated hut sat in front of a copse of what looked like apple trees. We left the pram in the car.
“This is my home,” she said, belatedly remembering the lie of her own garden. I managed not to laugh; she clearly did not live here.
The trees were stunted and twisted, but small apples littered the ground, so they were still fruitful.
“Poison,” she said, but that was bullshit. She wanted them for herself.
We reached a small courtyard, the remains of walls around it. It was laid with red bricks, professionally done some time ago. These bricks were inlaid with names: “The Collins Family.” “Julie and John Myers.” “Your Friendly Butcher.” Clearly a long-ago fundraiser where these people, once connected to their community and wanting to make a difference, paid to have their names here. They were surely all long dead, even the children. The bricks were securely in place although the grout was cracked, with grass growing through.
And the red flowers. Some grew tall, their bright centres glorious even in the twilight. Others budded out like droplets of blood.
The old lady muttered as she started to pluck them. She told me, “You say a prayer for each one. These dead, lying underneath here, they’re an angry lot. Never happy. You have to say a prayer to them to keep them calm.”
“These people aren’t actually buried here,” I said. “They just donated a brick.” A murmuring in the air filled the silence that followed.
She waved a flower at me. “You see? Bright Hearts. ‘But seek alone to hear the strange things said, By God to the bright hearts of those long dead.’ Yeats, he knew a thing or two.”
She kept plucking so I started, too, pretending to pray to keep her calm. She took about ten flowers, I took eight, which seemed fair. Even in the open air the scent was heady, almost like a good man’s aftershave, the sexy smell of a man who’s made an effort.
I drove her to an apartment block about twenty minutes from where I lived and dropped her off. She gave me a nod and said, “Be careful.”
As soon as I got home, I fed the cat (always the first job), opened the windows to get some fresh air in, and found vases for my flowers. They were already wilting slightly and I imagined they were panting, like a thirsty dog. “Here you go,” I said, as if they could hear me. Their colour was so rich, so beautiful. I placed them on the desk in my bedroom, wanting to see them when I woke up. I’d sell them, sure, but I wanted to enjoy them first.
I settled into bed, pulling just a sheet over me on this warm night. I slept fitfully, as I always did. I awoke to breathing in the otherwise quiet room. And a whistling sound that startled me. I reached for Jeremy, comforted by the sound of him, this deep, healthy breathing, but it wasn’t him. He wasn’t there.
Of course he wasn’t there.
I woke up feeling guilty so called in to say I’d be late. I had to visit Jeremy, I said, and no one could argue against that.
The hospital was quiet in the morning. I went in to Jeremy’s ward. It was always quiet there; even when it was full of visitors, everybody spoke in low tones, comforting stories into the ears of our catatonic loved ones.
“He’s doing well,” the nurse said. “Chatting away in his sleep as usual. Daddy this and Daddy that. Bit of a clean freak, was he?” She had two vases of flowers she placed on tables amongst the four patients in the ward.
“Did those just come in? I should have brought some with me. I’ll bring some after work tonight,” I said. I wouldn’t bring the red ones.
“That’d be lovely. We do love fresh flowers. I don’t like to leave them in the ward overnight, though. Superstitious, maybe. But it doesn’t hurt to take them out.”
She told me softly flowers would breathe in your last breath and you didn’t want that. They drew in oxygen overnight, and when a person struggled for breath, it wasn’t a pretty sight. As if to demonstrate, Jeremy gave a great sigh, a deep rattle, then settled into measured breath again. My heart raced; I felt no comfort in this sound. I yearned for the gentle in-out breathing of the bright heart flowers.
“If you think about it,” the nurse said. “If you think about it, your first breath is in not out and your last breath is out not in.”
I told her she wasn’t wrong. I wondered if the old lady had ever stolen flowers from the hospital. I know they throw out the ones from rooms where people have died; it seems a waste.
I spent an hour at Jeremy’s bedside. Honestly, it was very boring. I almost missed his instructions, his directions, his criticisms. I’m sure he’d blame me for the head injury that put him here, but I wasn’t the one who picked the fight. I wasn’t one of his mates, egging him on. I was the one sitting at home with a rug on my lap watching British crime TV. Getting the phone call and thinking he was pranking me, making fun of me and my delight in crime when it wasn’t real.
I told him about the red flowers, how I could sell them and make a bit of money, and I could have sworn he said, “Anything for nothing, right?”
“Daddy’ll clean you up,” I thought he said, soft and scratchy. Of course he didn’t say any of it. It was the echo of him, my memory. It still hurt, though.
I kept those flowers until they rotted, the breathing fading as they did. I know I should have sold them; I did sell one single bloom to my jilted customer, but only because she begged me. “My god, the smell,” she said, “the scent of them.”
I had to agree. It was so sweet, it filled the house.
The old lady came into the shop, shoving her pram inside and knocking over pots, banging into the shelves we had near the door. She honestly didn’t care and I had to admire that.
“More have grown. You drive me and you can have some.” I nodded; after work, I told her. But I took a long lunch (a very long lunch) and I went out on my own. I wanted to experience it in silence, without her jumping at me, demanding. Praying.
I picked my way through the trees, bending to collect fallen fruit as I went, tiny apples I knew Jeremy would love. I’d pile them by his bedside. The nurses would like them.
The old lady hadn’t been wrong. The courtyard was red with the flowers. Again, some of them peeked up like small globules of blood, others grew tall. One in the centre was almost as tall as my knee and I couldn’t imagine how it had grown so fast. I knelt down to smell it. God. God. I almost fell over with it. This one was almost sweaty, fresh, hardworking-man sweaty. I plucked it, tried to pluck it but the roots ran deep. I dug with my fingernails, determined to have this flower, and gently tugged it out of the ground, feeling a tearing. The flower instantly withered and died, turning to dust in my palm. I grunted in disgust. Another grew nearby almost as tall and I found a discarded piece of old metal to help remove the bricks so I could get to it without killing it. My eyes itched from pollen and my fingers were covered with dead-flower dust.
I levered four of the bricks out carefully, then dug down. This one came easily, its roots pulling out of the sandy ground, coming out dripping red. I took off the light jacket I was wearing and laid it on the ground so I could place this flower on it. I heard a sigh, and a whistle, and saw another flower had grown tall. I dug up the bricks around that one as well, and around the next, and the next, until I had a dozen tall red flowers resting on my jacket. I felt shadows upon me and shivered, not only because I was without my jacket. Tall shadows shaded me, as if the trees of the copse had taken leg and walked closer. When I turned, though, figures stood, clustered together, breathing in out in out and I fell backwards, landing on the sharp corner of one of the bricks and cutting the mount of Venus on my left hand.
There was a menace about them, but I’d keep picking the flowers as long as they kept growing.
“I told you,” the old woman said. She was sweaty, dirty, without her pram, as if she’d raced to be here as fast as she was capable. “You need to pray to them. They are always angry.”
She fell to her knees, muttering, but the figures didn’t fade.
Another flower, and another, and I’d lifted two dozen bricks before the woman’s sobbing finally made me stop.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll go.”
I took the flowers with me. The sound of them in the car was almost deafening, as if men were sucking oxygen in an airless place, desperately trying to draw breath.
The noise of them.
They flicker-imaged in the corner of my eye, here and gone. I felt surrounded, tricked, I tripped over my feet climbing stairs, I slipped in the shower, I became the clumsy idiot Jeremy had always said I was. I couldn’t just throw the flowers out, though. I didn’t think that was a solution.
I did an image search on those flowers and here’s what I found: people saying they grow from the heart of a person buried alive. They’ve been found all over the world. Over graves, in collapsed buildings, in the dirt floor of huts where victims were buried in the cellars. These red flowers, growing lush and loud. If they were collected early in the morning they’d be shining with dew, like fresh tears.
The old lady knew but she wasn’t telling, and I wasn’t about to go dig under the courtyard for fear of what I’d find. I knew what I’d find; flowers growing from the chests of the dead. Is that what they wanted? To be discovered? To tell their story, be seen? To be found? In Victorian times people were so terrified of being buried alive, some were buried with a whistle to blow. Had these poor souls whistled, whistled, whistled until they had no breath left?
I made an anonymous call to the police and here’s what they found. An old water tank beneath the ground, and a dozen skeletons inside it, resting in a dark, old sludge the colour of my flowers. They don’t know who; from the old asylum, they think. Forgotten people, not missed.
It was all over the media. They uncovered the top of the tank and cut it open. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to crawl in, torch in hand, and try to find my way. They cut it open like a can of sardines, lifted the lid off. The metal was rusty and crumbling at the edges. We watched the whole thing live on television, me, the nurses, and Jeremy.
“I hope no one cuts themselves,” a nurse said. “We’d have to cut an arm off if they did.”
Twelve skeletons. Two small ones curled up together in the corner. Three larger, pressed together. One alone, curled almost into a ball.
The rest were piled on top of each other. One had reached the door handle of the water tank and that’s where he stayed. The rest had tumbled into a pile, drawing the last air together, perhaps, one last mutual breath.
“How people die is how they stay,” I said. My limbs twisted to mimic some of those positions.
“Dirty girl,” Jeremy rasped. His eyes closed, his mouth open the smallest bit. I helped him shift onto his side, mimicking the skeletons, curling him up into a ball, making him comfortable.
My flowers shed their petals and withered. The dust of them lay thick on the table and I swept it up, put it into a plastic container until I decided what to do.
The breathing faded and in the silence I felt alone.
And Jeremy. Jeremy. Stuck in his body. Buried alive in it. He wouldn’t be getting out. He’d die, and they’d bury him, and his flower would grow. I didn’t want that for him. I didn’t want him tortured, dragged out, alive when he should be set free.
He needed to be set free.
I took a day trip out to the river, where I knew a large cluster of flowering caster oil plants grew. I loved those red flowers. Jeremy and I had been out here a year ago, a few months before his accident. Swimming and actually enjoying ourselves, until he suddenly couldn’t breathe. The doctors called it an asthma attack. But I figured out he was reacting to the flowers of the castor oil plant. We never have them in the florist. They’re on the “sorry, but no” list.
I knew better than to breathe them in. Wearing gloves and a mask, I collected a good dozen bloom-covered branches. They looked enough like bottlebrush the hospital staff would be fooled. I put the branches into a plastic box, lidded it, put that into the trunk of my car. I picked some nice yellow wattle on the way, for contrast.
I’d brought a vase from home because I didn’t want the nurses dealing with the flowers. I have so many, anything with a crack or a chip would otherwise be thrown out at the florist, and that seemed a waste. I chose a bright red one to match, and delivered them just before visiting hours finished.
“These are natives,” I told the nurse. “They’re fine to stay in the room with him.” I’d made sure the superstitious nurse wasn’t rostered on, and the rest didn’t seem to care as much.
“They look gorgeous!” the nurse said, and they did.
I kept my phone under the front counter while I worked. The boss had kids so she knew the importance of always being contactable. The call came at 2:30. They’d tried and tried, but he was gone. An asthma attack, they said.
I genuinely collapsed, shocked and more grief-struck than I thought I’d be. The boss gave me money for a taxi. “You shouldn’t drive,” she said, but I did drive and I kept the money.
I told the nurses to keep everything in his room except for the flowers. The chocolate and grapes he couldn’t eat but his manager had sent anyway. Porno mags his friends left, beer his friends left. They never stayed and they wouldn’t miss him.
On top of that, I got the sack. The rest of the team threw me under the bus when the boss properly checked the books, blamed those “compost” write-offs on me, and the “missing stock,” and the under-the-counter sales. I actually didn’t care; Jeremy had some good savings and he’d want me to spend it.
He’d want me to be happy.
For months after I didn’t know what to do with my spare time. I worked at another florist. I gave away the cat; it was his and still smelled of him. I visited Jeremy’s grave and no flowers grew, for which I hoped he’d thank me. At night in bed I moved myself into position after position, mimicking the skeletons, the bright hearts. It was really quite comfortable. The old lady spent some time in jail, arrested again for flower theft. This gave me a free run at the courtyard flowers but none grew anymore; only the grass and the red dust remained.
I found it comforting, though, and would sit by myself, listening. And then I heard whistling, and followed it, and found a rusted sign saying “secondary water storage.” There was another tank, with no courtyard built over it, just layers of dirt and stone. Globules of red pressed through the black dirt and so I sat and called down to make them angry about all they’d lost in life. All they’d missed by being buried alive, with no one to care. Even as I watched, the flowers pushed up like mushrooms, growing into my waiting hands.
You can find me online at RedFlowersandShoes.com.
Pressed blooms a speciality.
“Bright Hearts” copyright © 2024 by Kaaron Warren
Art copyright © 2024 by Sonia Lai
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