The Dirty Flower Pot

A man who loves cleaning finds an old flower pot that he cannot scrub the stains off of. As life goes on, he hopes his daughter is not being negatively affected by this.

There was once a man who did nothing but clean. He scrubbed his wooden floors, wet the windows, and wiped and polished everything down. But there was one thing in the house that he could not clean, no matter how hard he tried. Out on the back porch, there was a clay flower pot. On the side was gravel dust and muck that would not come off, regardless of how hard he scrubbed.

This flower pot contained no plants, just a clod of old soil that couldn’t even sustain a cactus. He finally stopped trying to plant anything in it or clean the filthy outside.

When his daughter came home with her nanny, she would retreat to the porch to play. She always giggled to herself until the man came to check on her. She always wanted to play with that stupid flower pot.

One day, his daughter was playing out on the front lawn, when he noticed something about the flower pot that hadn’t been there before. In the late evening light, it looked like it had more of a smudge than before, but he thought his eyes were just playing tricks on him. Just as he thought this, he heard a scream, a loud crash, and horses neighing.

He ran outside to see that a carriage had crashed into his daughter and broke her back. Her blood slowly pooled onto the road. The carriage driver was frantically trying to get out of the wreck to see if the little girl was hurt.

The man soon moved out of the house, leaving the flower pot on the back porch, with a now thicker smudge across the side. An ethereal giggle could be heard echoing off of the back porch, accompanied by the sobs of lost children.