Armour-Clad Rose

A Story by Gilad Levanon

Inspired by Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

Rolling hills stretch away before your eyes. Hills blanketed by an impenetrable sheet of yellow flowers, so numerous they seem to be crawling atop one another to reach for the abundant sunlight. You can imagine a network of worms, stems and roots twisting and twirling through each other like a miniature rainforest beneath the solid canopy of butter-coloured petals.

At the pinnacle of the nearest hill, you can make out the slightest hint of red against the eyesore yellow, like a minute blood spot on the face of someone just shaven. As you concentrate on this peculiar redness, it seems to come into focus in the form of an abnormally tall, blood-red rose. The towering green stalk, curiously devoid of rose thorns, waves gently in the breeze for a moment before the pace of this breeze alters surprisingly.

The calming current of air that you hadn’t noticed until you perceived its effect on the rose, suddenly rises in ferocity until it’s battering the flowers without mercy. The tall rose thrashes to and fro frantically while the yellow flowers are ripped clean off their stalks and blasted over the horizon by the new gale. The sky is rapidly consumed by the clawing hands of a storm cloud and the rose is spattered with the first drops of a thunderstorm.

At the red rose’s feet, where a million yellow flowers once congregated, lies the twisted mess of roots and earth, with worms wriggling amongst it in fright of the sudden storm. You sense a throbbing emotion emanating from the beaten rose, a gruesome concoction of fear, loathing, fury, sadness and despair. The vivid scarlet petals wither before your eyes, turning to deadly black and clinging to the plant like a cluster of parasites.

Determined to resist the venomous effects of the storm, the rose forces its thorns to surface. They begin to well up along its slender stalk in the form of bubbling boils before shaping into deadly brambles, tipped with pink poison and aimed skyward. Yet the storm lashes on, striking the earth around your beloved rose with blue fire and crimson thunder. Fearful of imminent demise, the failing plant resorts to its definitive defence. It crackles and bends, transforming into rock-hard wood before your eyes and fastening its roots into the earth.

This thing that now appears to be a talented woodwork statue of an evil rose, strangely begins to release a curling white tendril of smoke from amongst its wooden petals. The smoke strand reaches up, aiming for the devilish clouds, recoiling a little every now and then before stretching even further. Until a single thread of mischievous smoke is stretching all the way from the rose to the clouds where a bizarre thing is happening " the clouds seem to be opening up around the smoke’s tip. A pinprick at first, but soon enough a substantial hole has formed in the cloud blanket and a resilient beam of the sun’s radiance is shining directly onto the rose.

The storm does not abate however; it continues to ravage the land, leaving only a shaft of peace where the rose has assailed it with its smoke. You feel a love for this resourceful yet damaged creation, all wrinkled and frozen in its wooden amour, with full knowledge of the fact that if it ceases to smoke, or if it chooses breaks to free of its self-imposed wooden prison, the storm will not tarry in slaying it.

So certain is the rose that there can be no salvation from this tempest, that it allows its’ wooden shell to petrify into eternal stone. Just as its’ ultimate protection is solidified, mere minutes after the storm began, the storm slinks away, clouds dissolving in the sky like a fragmented memory of something experienced in a dream. As the sky becomes clear and all returns to peace, the rose remains encased in stoned, oblivious the paradise restored.

Around the rose, the roots of those numberless yellow flowers begin to sprout life anew, flourishing in the nutrition brought them by the rains and lightning. They grow abundant and excited, rejoicing with new vitality, appreciating the fresh sunlight as well as the storm passed on for both have played their purpose in these flowers’ lives. And still, the rose is trapped in its’ own armour, too fearful of the reality it believes in to explore the reality that is. Now, it stands, a sorrowful monolith of martyrdom atop the hill of celebrating daisies, there to remind them all of what would happen if they were to cling to fear and forget the purpose of the storms.