Watching someone you love waste away before you is a terrible thing.
In some ineffable way the physical symptoms are easier to deal with. Perhaps because they are real and plainly visible; the lesions that can be masked with dermablend, the vomit stains that can be washed out of shirts. The psychological decline though, that’s so much harder.
How can you mask the terror of dying in agony? How can you wash away the crushing depression of terminal HIV?
And because you can’t fix these things, they bore into your consciousness and leech your own mental resources. You suffer as your lover suffers, meshed together in a spiral of hopelessness; the darkness inside one another feeding the sucking singularity that is consuming both of you.
When Jason finally succumbed – a friable, pathetic shell of a human being, full of needle holes and bloody bruises – I wept with unbound anguish.
But I also wept with relief at his passing.
And I hated myself for that.
Carrying around that sort of guilt isn’t healthy, hence why I self-flagellated and made myself miserable for a good six months after Jason’s death. The funeral had been lacking in catharsis; none of his family were there, long ago opting not to have anything to do with the life of their AIDs ridden homosexual son. I longed to rage at them, to tell them how he had suffered in the hospital. I wanted to shove pictures of his grey, wasted corpse in front of them and tell them that it was because of people like them that gay men like us had felt too ashamed to have normal, open relationships and had learned to rely on clandestine restroom hook-ups to hide who we were.
That was a kind of closure I could never get though.
Before Jason had grown too ill to work, he’d been something of a prodigy in the botany world. Our house was still littered with plants of various kinds and I still tended his garden with as much care as I could. Amongst all the greenery, when fleshy plants stroked my arms and sticky sap marked my fingers I felt something of him – some part of his spirit reaching through the root-bound lives he had nurtured and raised from seedlings.
I think I’d give almost anything to have him back.
The florist shop three blocks over became something of a little haven for me.
Every little anniversary I would visit them and buy flowers for Jason’s plot at the cemetery. Grandiose sprays of colour for his birthday, resplendent with different varieties of orchids and lilies, austere posies for the day of his death, Osiria roses on Valentine’s day, and tulips and snapdragons for our wedding anniversary.
People would stare sometimes at the grown man weeping as he tenderly placed expensive bouquets on the grave of his husband. I didn’t care though; this was the only way I could forgive myself for the unconscionable relief I felt after Jason had sucked back his final rattling breath in the ICU.
Obsessed with atonement, it did not dawn on me for quite a long time that the tiny little flower shop was always able to fulfil my requests overnight, no matter what flowers I requested – no matter what quantity.
My first inkling that something was amiss came with my fledgling attempts at being an amateur botanist.
Growing a plant from a cutting can be difficult for even the most experienced gardener, but armed with a library full of books on the subject, I took a rose from one of my recent bouquets and attempted to coax it into growing roots, in order to be planted beside Jason’s grave.
My first few attempts failed miserably, but by using some of my husband’s own root-growth formulas, eventually I succeeded in getting one to sprout.
The first little white nodules appeared as expected, then diverged strangely. After a week, a curious root pattern spread from the base of my cutting, delicate and red-white, almost like a tiny feathered frond of some exotic fern.
Excited and elated by my success, I watched with growing confusion as over several weeks as it grew longer and more defined; fanning out into distinct branched of red and white; nodules of deep crimson forming and familiar white root-structures solidifying into something I didn’t want to recognise.
From the base of the florist shop rose had grown a miniature spine.
Tiny white ribs cradled a collection of little organic blobs that looked for all the world like organs.
I nearly flushed the thing then and there. But rather than destroy the evidence, I decided to test a theory that had leapt unbidden to my repulsed mind.
There was something off happening in that florist.
That they fulfilled my first few requests for out of season flowers wasn’t unusual; plenty of florists rely on suppliers who can courier them blooms as required. It was after I started requesting rare blossoms that my suspicions were confirmed.
Every single time, without fail, they produced the requested flowers the very next day. It was in their marketing slogan, “Guaranteed next-day pickup or your money back!”
While it was conceivable that they had some mysterious supplier, the cutting in my hothouse told a different story; that there was something unnatural going on in that shop.
It was when they casually handed me a bouquet of Ghost Orchids that I knew I had them – not even the most elaborately connected supplier would have next day access to one of the rarest and hardest to grow flowers on the planet.
Breaking into the shop wasn’t difficult; I knew the alarm security code from my long association with the place. The interior was the same as always; fragrant with the scents of a myriad of blooms, the heady perfumes tickling pleasant memories in the back of my mind.
The door to the back was securely locked, and I had to shoulder it down using all of my strength – leaving me quite bruised and the lock undeniably forced.
That didn’t matter to me now. I had to know what was going on.
The back room was decked out with refrigerators full of various flowers, all neatly cut to the same lengths and labelled clearly. But between the rear two units sat what could only be the rail of a spiral staircase.
Stalking through the glowing fluorescent lighting of the glass-fronted fridges, my hand grasped the brass rail and before I could second-guess my own actions, I was rapidly descending into the darkness under the shop. Ghostly images hung in the gloom below the florist. Each was a picture of some kind of flowering plant, static images displayed on small tablet computers, suspended on articulated arms.
Beneath each hanging computer screen was a long bath of faintly phosphorescent liquid.
Moving closer I could see that in each of the baths lay what looked like a person.
”Pick me, oh please, they hurt so much, please pick me!”
The voice was thready and pleading – eerie and curiously soulless.
Peering into the nearest bath, lit by the light of a screen displaying purple hibiscus, I saw something that almost stopped my heart.
It was indeed a person; though that was perhaps ‘person’ was an overly kind description, as I’d never seen anything like her before. She was hairless and naked; and her eyes were clamped open so that she couldn’t blink. Her arms were firmly secured to the sides of the bath and from her fingers, the stems of dozens of purple blossoms protruded, splitting her swollen flesh bloodlessly.
”Oh god they hurt, please pick me!”
From the waist down, the victim in the bath lost all semblance of humanity; her abdomen tapered to a horsetail bundle of spinal tissue and branching crimson nerve fibres that spread through the green bath solution, sucking up nutrients.
I screamed then, which roused a chorus of moans from the dozen baths under the shop.
”Pick me! Please! I’m so ready, I need to be plucked!”
”Cut them off! They’re so heavy, the thorns in my veins! Please!”
What happened from there is a blur. I think I lashed out in fear as the spinal-tail-root structure of one of the bath-dwellers thrashed in the verdant liquid. My arm connected with one of the computer screens or one of the armatures and the electronic device crackled and spat as it fell and ignited the liquid.
I was halfway up the stairwell, I think, when the bath exploded.
Reeling through the back room, I made it out onto the street with my ears ringing. A muffled detonation indicated that another bath had gone up.
I didn’t stick around to watch the shop burn.
I’m glad that those tortured souls in the florist are gone. The police and fire brigade found a dozen mutilated skeletons in the ruins of the florists, three of which matched the dental records of missing persons.
The owners of the shop were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and murder, but no formal investigation was made into what caused the fire.
As for me, I’ve found my peace, I think, after witnessing the horrors under the florist.
Knowing that most of the blooms on the grave of my Jason were grown from the flesh of those people used to disturb me, but when I thought about it now, many months later, I realised that it was one of those things that was meant to happen.
The tablet computer is hooked up over the nutrient bath in the hothouse, and my cutting has grown fleshy arms and a foetal head.
In only a few days, its eyes will be open.
And once they open, it will see all the images of Jason I have looping on the screen of the tablet.
Soon I’ll have my lover back.
Submitted February 08, 2016 at 11:26PM by Cymoril_Melnibone http://ift.tt/1Q5knbL nosleep
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