Flourish

They closed the door on us at 5.20pm tonight. Being Friday and all, Sherry wanted to get in an early sherry to celebrate the end of the week. She waddled over the black and white lino and shut the creaky old door. “Uh what a week!” she said to Millie, the timid trainee florist. She has said this same sentence at the end of every week since we got here, me and my family. 

Initially, we’re weren’t really sure what happened exactly. One day there we were, basking in the air. Our leaves twisted towards the Yellow God’s giving hands. I lay on my sofa and we chatted to the Insects. Occasionally we would invite the Bees for dinner, but most of the time it was just us bunch of Green Ones swaying in the air. We feasted all day from Yellow God’s bounty and breathed without a thought in our stalks. We knew nothing else, so we didn’t think we were lucky. Of course we did hear tales, but my sofa was attached to me, and I had my Green Ones around me. I just couldn’t imagine that changing.

Then darkness.

We were taken in a truck somewhere for a long time. I had to hold my breath and look down as the Yellow God had been sucked out of the sky. I felt unsteady in there and my neck hurt. I also had a deep sense of loss and drowsily wondered where my sofa was. Upon looking down I saw where before my foundations lay. My beloved sofa had been chopped away, taken. My legs looked like weeds. 

It came back to me. This was it, we were being taken to the floristry. Like the Birds had fluttered and the Bees had whispered. Yellow God would now only exist through the panel of human creation.

I learnt this to be glass. 

In the night our breathing made the glass go misty and then drips would flow down like tears. I know these are like tears because a lady came in on our first day here. She was howling like a wolf. The droplets shooting down her face were tears because she was sad. She was sad and ‘crying’ Sherry said, because her pet dog had died. Died. That’s the end they think. 

Now I have knowledge of many human emotions. People come in to florists for congratulations emotion, wedding emotion, baby emotion and sad things like dog death emotion. 

Millie talks to us Green Ones a lot. She is very different to Sherry and will look at us deeply. We know her secrets. Whereas Sherry looks at us like we are dolls. Recently she has been looking at us like the worms used to. I’m not sure what this means.

It’s been four weeks here. This night the Yellow God has been furthest away. The glass is crying a lot. We touch the glass, we look, we wait. Unsure of what we are waiting for. I know it’s around 2am because I can see people walking past, either really fast, or droopily. Sherry says 2am is the sort of time glass gets smashed on a Friday, because of these walking people. This fills us with huge fear as we have become attached to the shielding glass and don’t want our legs to break by humans pulling our necks again. It also makes us excited though, as we’d like to breathe again. Properly. 

This is also normally the time when we see Millie walk past. She is much less timid at 2am. Tonight she shouts at the people she is with, ‘Will be there in a minute”. She presses her face and hand up against the glass and looks right through us. She says; “One day I will have a floristry and it will have a mud bottom and no roof. There will be millions of wild plants stretching to the skies and lots of pretty flowers dancing on the bottom. They’ll all be singing and people will only be able to sit here with a cup of tea and a cake or a martini. They can’t ever buy my plants for they are for living in my garden with me. In harmony. It will be wondrous, oh plants!”

She congratulated at our stalks and leaves and for a moment it was like being back on the sofa. Then she walked off pulling her coat’s hood up, lifting her shoulders and closing her hands tight.

The next day Millie stayed after Sherry to clean up. Sherry had overdone the sherry the night before. “Thanks Millo, you are so sweet.” Milly walked around to her bag after the door was shut, and picked some scissors from her bag. She came up to all of us Green Ones and snipped a branch from each of us. This did not hurt.

“Now you shall flourish in my garden too and your children will live a happy life with a million friends and no glass between you and the Sun.”

I had no idea what she meant but she looked like she was in congratulations emotion again and last night and tonight have been the only times I have ever seen her do this, and I liked Millie. So the Green Ones and I all twisted towards her and hoped that the little parts of us she had in her bag would feel congratulations too.

Soon after this (maybe two days), I was taken by a baby emotion. I sat next to a television for a long while before I could take no more and I died thinking of the Yellow God and congratulations. I hope the people felt some dog death emotion and put me outside, so it was not the end. 


For this, a song by: Martha Tilston, Artificial - click.