A girl, a flower, and a wasteland

The apocalypse has come, and a girl, who is but a child, feels pity for a frail blue flower.

There’s an old folks tale.

As the heavens retreated into the sky, and hell infected the animals and poisoned the air, the last thing left to survive were the plants.

They are torn up easily, shredded and devoured by swelling stomachs, that become so filled with wood and poison that it tears and burns at their harsh innards. The plants, unlike most animals, fight back, even in death.



A small human child trembles as the ground rocks aggressively, with unbound dirt whirling up into the sky and clouding the forsaken sun. She cries, alone and dying.

Humanity has fought well. They tried as hard as they could.

She writhes in pain, clamping her hands over her mouth to hold her screams. She doesn’t want to die, not like her parents, or her friends, neighbors, and the strangers who lie on the streets, nameless.

She does not have a reason to survive, except that she must. It is a compulsion that digs into her mind. It picked her feet up when she watched her parents go down and made her run far, far away.

She has lost the strength in her legs now, and she mourns. Pitifully and agonizingly.

Flash, in the swirling and dull wasteland, she sees a glimpse.

Something green.

It makes her forget about her parents, and her friends and neighbors and the nameless strangers. She feels them fall out of her mind. She hasn’t even had the time to feel their loss, before her mind is swept away by hope.

Green is good. It means life.

Her stomach is turning with grief and nausea, but she can understand that green is meant to be eaten to stop hunger. She crawls towards it, intent to dig up the roots and eat every small morsel.

But it sways in the hazy, brown wind, and she stops.

The petals are not beautiful. It is no miracle. They barely hold a frail, fleeting blue tinge, and the green stalk holding it up is as weak and brittle as her bones feel.

She doesn’t want to die, but seeing this flower fighting just as much as she is, she can’t bring herself to kill it. In the end, like the flower, she is destined to die and be devoured, whole and warm. To hunger or the hell beyond her human body.

They will both die.

She crawls for the flower again, so she can sit up and block it from the dry and gritty breeze. The ground rumbles, and she can imagine the flowers roots being torn with the harsh vibrations.

She digs into the loose dirt and carefully extracts the flower. Its roots are delicate and torn in many places already.

There is no water, she knows this. There is no nutrients in the dirt, no fertilizer to feed it. It will die. She will die.

Carefully, she settles the plant, roots and dirt and all, into her lap. Its weak stem trembles greatly. She trembles too.

The ground shakes again, but stronger.

She curls herself into a ball around this flower, her tears dripping onto its cracking petals and trickling down the stem, slipping into the dirt.

She cries as the ground shakes again.

She forgets about her parents. Her friends and neighbors, and the nameless strangers. They are meaningless in the face of death.

She sees the faint blue petals and forces her body to arch into a cage of flesh and bones. Like how she would have eaten the flower for its meat, she will feed the flower her blood.

The ground shakes again, and again, stronger with every quake.

Blue, she thinks. Once, that was the color of the sky. She doesn’t remember those times.

Blue is the color of un muddied waters. It’s the color of her fathers eyes, and her mother’s pendent

Blue.

It shines brightly in this dirty world.

POUND, POUND.

Blue, she smiles, is definitely her favorite color.

POUND, POUND, POUND, POUND.

As red colors the browns and greys, the flower goes undetected in her shadow. It trembles greatly. Her skeleton, broken and crumbling, does not collapse onto the flower. Like a roof, the flower is protected.

It feeds on her tears, her blood, and her flesh. It feeds on her despair and grief and learns about her parents, her friends and neighbors, and it ponders about those strangers on the ground, nameless.

The flower cries, with its petals shining beautifully blue, at the cruelty it has to live with.

The flower, burrowed into this little girls heart, pumps blood. Her hair falls out and is replaced by blue petals. Her brown eyes turn green.

The flower, a scared little girl, stands up. The flesh is not wholly perfect, and holes of flesh have been covered by coarse leaves and her delicate skin is covered in thorns. Her bones�" broken and brittle�" creak and ache, as they are pushed back into place.

Her red veins pump alongside green vines.

Together, she, it, thinks. They will survive together.




I close the storybook, smiling. Several children are crying, others are sitting in serious, contemplative silence, and the other ones are staring at me with blank, wide eyes.

“AAAAAAAAAH�"“ the closest child to me, who saw all of the intricate details drawn on the pages, especially the last picture, screams. I flinch slightly, my smile twitching.

Hey, classical literature can be learned at early ages!

Author's Note

Horrifying? I hope so.