Murdering Flowers by Brittany Michelson
Alexander tried to light a flower on fire once. His parents assumed he wanted to test the boundaries. The police officer from two doors down said he was a Pyromaniac. His teenage cousin Luke congratulated him for being a rebel. His hippie aunt, who was a flower child back in the day, remarked with a wistful sigh that he was murdering flowers. If that were the case, Alexander reasoned, his older sister Bella was committing murder every time she picked wildflowers in the foothills.
His parents consulted his teachers. His Science teacher said it was only an experiment. In Science, they were studying plant structures. His English teacher said he was trying to analogize emotion. In English, they were studying metaphor. His Math teacher wondered if a formula could be applied, if the volume of a burnt flower shrinks. In Math, they were studying equations. But Alexander was simply testing the idea of lighting fire to beauty.
The school principal referred Alexander to a therapist.
The therapist concluded that burning flowers was an exhibition of anger and prescribed an anti depressant, which Alexander’s mother watched him swallow at breakfast each morning.
Nobody knew that Alexander really did it because of love. Lily, the girl that made his heart somersault, passed him on the playground without notice, carrying an armful of flowers from Jacob Nellenbaker. Earlier that day, Jacob Nellenbaker had made fun of Alexander, so when Lily dropped a handful of Jacob’s flowers after school, Alexander snatched them up and hid them in his backpack.
That night, Alexander placed the small bundle of purple flowers on his desk. He snatched the lighter his mother used to light candles from the junk drawer. This was the same lighter his sister stole to sneak a cigarette.
He pulled his thumb over the metal ridge, and a flame in the shape of a teardrop struck the air. The blue tear turned orange. The warning label read: Keep Away From Children. But Alexander was twelve, preferring to be called Alex these days.
He selected a pansy with bleeding eyes. As the flame connected with the flower’s velvet flesh, the petal curled under the heat, retracting like a wave unfurling from the shore. The petal shriveled and blackened.
It was a slow burn, much slower than paper, much slower than the house he saw swallowed by flames on television.
The flame surged the stem, turning it dark like the spread of ink across paper. It wilted from the pressure of heat, arching and bending its curvy spine. He waited for a petal to ignite, to sweep across the face of the flower. But the flower took its time to burn. It smelled faintly of childhood campfires.
The next day at school, Lily had a fresh set of flowers. In English class, the journal prompt on the chalkboard asked the students to write down something new they’d learned this week. Alexander remembered his flower burning experiment and wrote: Beauty takes a long time to destroy.
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About the Author
Brittany Michelson
Born: La Jolla, California
Now Resides: Los Angeles, California
Bio: I taught high school English and Spanish, and English as a Second Language in Ecuador. My short prose can be found in Flashquake, The Citron Review, and In the Know Traveler. This story was first published in Every Day Fiction.
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image by Loucos.
