Violets In Bloom: A Very, Very Mediocre Story

And that is being generous. This is, a mediocre (at best) story, I've written, and...yet, I would like some feedback about it. So, I apologize in advance for the odd, questionable story. I should also point out two things. UHH means Unfit for Human Habitation, and there are a few foul words. Not many and not often, I assure you, but be advised.

Violets in Bloom

            Meadow fields turned ashen like a book where its stained nicotine-yellow by the malicious sun, plants in a state of entropy, pulling up from the earth and down from the arches of heaven as if receding into themselves. Life as it was, broken and scattering, a stellar play drummed out of town by a minstrel show done up with the tinsel of majesty, the crude youth beating down ancestral beauty, as the sun kicked into high gear, revving its solar engine for full worth as it thrashed the planet below and away. Winter in the Wastes, one long joke whose punch-line humanity has yet to grasp, though a good guess might be the aristocrats.

In the midst of nothing though, life, such as it is, the tarmac road of half forgotten bureaucracy, stretching from Pandemonium on one end and Jerusalem on the other, with a perennial disagreement over which was which. If the road were followed from this juncture, about twenty miles west, one would come to a small town, population in the low fifties, almost a city out here. The lawns are all turf, giving the look of real grass and the feel of plastic fruit, with its fences oh-so-cute white pickets, the houses themselves stamped out of the same great press that sired baby-boomer homes and the boomers themselves it seems. It was just north of the road, down a path, and the best that can be said of it, is that it’s better paved then the road. Even so, potholes eagerly gaped for tires to shred and tear, their prescient mouths awaiting the squeak of rubber. Twice a month, when the trucks delivered supplies, there was always great concern that they might destroy their wheels in one or the other of the potholes, making egress and ingress to the town an impossibility, until the government or the Emergency Council noticed, and as old dude (a moniker given to him when he even he was unable to recall his name) said “Those little shits are only liable to miss us when no damn tax returns get filed.” No one bothered telling him the area, UHH 132, was a designated disaster (or more aptly doomed) area, and thus the whole lot of them were exempt from the tax. They just nodded and got on with the bitter chore of living. Let the old bitch and the young moan, they all thought, its up to the adults to carry on.

But with what, one might rightly ask. And no one could give you answer, at least none that would satisfy, though they all shared the same vague hopes and twilight dreams. It was as though to articulate such would be a betrayal and falsehood, even if said honestly. So they’d keep mum and shake one off, like a coat they’d tried on and found too disagreeable.

On this day, a day without chronological number, or tricky pneumonic, a prayer service was held, strictly non-denominational, although the officiator was a rabbi of long standing in the community, who’d taken over when the former officiator, an atheist of all things, but one well versed in the dogma of group reinforcement had caught the red sweat, his blood expunging himself of his person through pores that in autopsy were at least one tenth of one millimeter wider than a normal man’s. A rumor even went around that the people who discovered him had been forced to swim through a lake of blood that drowned his bedroom in bright and rusty tones. Not that anyone would admit to believing the rumor, but again, in the town’s psyche it felt true enough. The service today was a double-ticket affair; all fifty or so of the town’s residents crammed into the small stucco room of the community center, their back and behinds resting uneasily on the glacial surface of the folding-chairs, since time and memoriam the uneasy companion of the small town meeting, and may that go on ad infinitum, blessed be the father, the son, and the holy ghost, praise Allah, praise YHWH, amen. Please be seated. Occasionally, a member of the congregation would move, making the rustle of an insect’s wing, shaking the gathered people, for whom familiarity had certainly bred contempt.

At the front was the good rabbi, small and inverted the podium seeming to block him from view despite the two or so feet he had on it, a tallit draped around his shoulders, as if to signal the importance of the event. Beside him, on his chair that Mr. Roth had dug up from the rectory basement this afternoon, padded and wooden, a throne stripped of its gild adornment, but a throne all the same, was a tall and affable looking man. It was to him the people looked with their hidden eyes but thunderous stares. A man no older than forty-five, his hair lightly streaked with grey, arms crossed and legs folded, regally drinking in their attention. His look was confidence to the men and women gathered there, but the children thought he looked like a satisfied glutton, a cat whose eaten through a whole menagerie of canaries. On his lapel were two flag pins, stars, stars and stripes, a duality of allegiance that marked him a turncoat or conciliator and neither was to be trusted in the long run.

The rabbi coughed twice, before speaking. “Ladies and gentlemen, its nice to see so many here today. I certainly know what a big occasion it is for our little town. And I know what you’re all waiting for.” He looked out, ruefully, rearranging the note cards. “But before I give Mr. Seward a chance to speak, there are a few guideline from the government, that I am to read to you, so that it goes as smoothly as possibly.” His voice sounded faint and distant through the double filters, as though he was on the other side already, calling out to them, or maybe, god forgive them, like Jehovah himself. Poor Mr. Roth was as good a god as any other, and better than most they had known. “Item # 1, there is to be no question regarding relocation. There have already been far too many, and the government’s position is firm. Item #2, due to the current circumstance, food shipments are already at the peak of what the government can support, and so to preempt any questions regarding increasing the number of shipments, the answer is a flat no. The government” he paused, changing cards “apologizes, but, ah, this all they can do at this time. And, um, Item #3…The government requests no one ask about the…War.”

The silence turned lethal in an instant as the collective fire devoured the fuel of this announcement and shone its beacon of rage towards the men on the podium, indiscriminate as it burnt through one of its own to engulf the placid stooge. They saw that now, all the gathered. He was the adversary, clothed in the clothe of his position, a Caligula walking among the commoners, not the sheer yellow plastic of the congregation, their breathers providing a second heartbeat to their lives. He eschewed such necessities. He was the antithesis and for once, they all hated with the same fervor.

The silence played out, its path the country back road, leading inexorably to nowhere. Mr. Roth, again, cleared his throat, tapping his note cards nervously against the podium's edge, waiting to move on or to dismiss the gathered. As he was about to speak though, Maria Paul stood up, a Rarity, tall for her age which was just on the precipice of womanhood, looking over the age with a fixation both natural and in the town morbid. A boy at the front, well skilled in the volume control of the apparatus, leaned over to a friend and whispered, “Isn’t she the one-“ “With the watering can. Yeah.” He looked back. “Freak.”

The girl looked around her, the sea of faces turning from her as from a leper, to which she gave no answer, preferring instead to focus on the government man, still in the throne, tapping his left foot slowly. A crackling of distortion as she adjusted the speaker, then she asked, “When will we get flowers?”

Nonchalant, the government man roused himself, brushing away Mr. Roth and grasping the podium with both hands, a prophet of the televised era, ready and willing to sermonize on any topic from municipal funds to celebrity gossip, provided few of those irksome facts entered into the discussion. “Well, young Ms., flowers have to be special order from the Malonik Corporation, it just not logistically possible to ship out that many, not if we want them to be” he grinned “environmentally sustainable. And, you have to keep in mind, the government isn’t going to help you out here, these are expensive, exclusive items and we don’t have that kind of budget. I mean we barely have enough for water sanitation in the UHH 479, so we really can’t afford to subsidize luxury items for residents of the less…damaged areas.” His smile was bleached bone. He waited for the girl to sit down, to be shamed, as though the question was impertinence. The government had already made it clear this was little more than a show of good faith, likely a whole lot less. But the girl remained on her feet, shifting from one to the other.

“No, not that plastic shit.” A gasp from her contemporaries and elders, an sharp intake from those younger, now intently interested in the girl and her question. “I mean, the real ones. The kind you pick and keep in water; the kind that die in a few days and leave this sickly smell that hangs over everything like death. But its worth because before they smelt so sweet.” She paused again, likely blushing beneath the breather. Her left hand checked the seat she’d occupied, as if in reassurance, that there was still an exit strategy, before holding her ground. The government man glared at her, his rugged claws digging into the wood beneath them as his shoulders hunched.

“Are you dense? Have you not looked outside in the past oh, nine years. This is UHH 132. It is inhospitable to all normal, non-supported life. We” he gesticulated to the assembly, “need these damn masks to breathe. When do you think we might actually get flowers again? Maybe, if your lucky, your children’s children, might, might see some vegetation. But honestly, that doesn’t look promising.” He raised his arms then let them flop as if weighed down by the situations obscene gravity. “Now are there any more questions?” But he reaped what the salt he sowed.

Maria Paul made her way down the street in a solar manner, a speed derived from the glacial but forever forward momentum of her gait. A Rarity is all well and good, but for a Rarity to want more is the worst kind of selfishness. The townspeople, no longer a gathering, but still a roughly contiguous body, thought of her in such terms, as they made their ways home. For her part though, Maria cared almost nothing for them. She was the sole Rarity of the town’s inhabitance, an impotent label that could any given day be stripped from her. That it hadn’t yet was no great wonder, most of the children had been Rarities at first, to the point were some people joked that they should be called Commons, until the great sweep of progress was gunned down by regression, and one by one, the children ceased to be Rarities.

As Maria turned down the street to her house, she could see her mother had already returned, as the shades were drawn, eliciting a small sigh from Maria. Her mother, Ms. Francis Paul, would already be sequestered in her room, all the lights dimmed and shawl wrapped around her shoulders as she read fervently in the high back chair of her bedroom. When Maria had been younger, her mother would read to her, never children’s books but always this brief or that one, a study on climate change, another on the ills of industry, the exact type of literature, in its loosest sense, that children find repellent. Maria had eschewed the ink and paper of her mother’s passion and thrown herself into a more hands on approach, diving deep into the life-fantastic, a gangrenous mess of leaves and paw prints for the mind, amputated but not cauterized after the event, leaving Maria with a bloody, hemophilic stump, that refused to close on its own.

Exhausted, she flopped down in the disappointing harshness of the turf lawn, the two plastics repelling one another as though a negative charge ran through Maria’s whole person. She turned over, examining the ground beneath her. Black sand met her probing fingers, that hideous byproduct of the turfed field. She dug with her fingers, removing a small patch of the lawn as she became her excavation in earnest, desperately digging until she hit brittle earth, that gave way easily at her touch. She lifted some of the dirt to her face, then turned her fist over, letting the granules of sand fall before her eyes. The signs were all around her, she could have walked a few more blocks and reached out into the wastes, but she’d wanted to be sure that here the reality was the same. She wanted to know that the earth was barren waste, in the midst of life. That it was death. That one Rarity would change nothing.

“Stop it, you’re morbid.” She chided herself, sitting up and taking stock. She was healthy, more so than most. In two years, if she was spared the regression, papers could be filed for evacuation. Rarities can’t just die. Not anymore. And she began to plan, to keep her mind off wastelands in front and those behind. “So, they’ll be Rose, Irish, Heather, I’ve always like Heather. Would Juniper be okay? Probably not. Well, what about…”

Woah! You made it, but I'm sorry, your princess is in another castle. I hope that joke distracted from the bad story.