Heart Of Flowers

• Tiffany Cheung, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2013

Anger flitted by. It touched her face, soft as the brush of wings, and left no imprint.

She laughed, then forgot why she had been merry.

For each child had a heart of flowers. And each flower would die as their vitality was drained away, leaving them as dust and brittle stems, just as the energies they supplied were only temporary.

*

Flowers needed replenishing.

Day by day she would run to the river, joining the thongs of children that picked their blooms from the water’s edge, where the ground was moist and the flowers clustered thickly in the mud. She scrabbled for those which would bring her new sensations, discarded spent blossoms in the river, the murky waters their final resting place.

Iris for faith… Marigold for despair… They sang within her, those flowers.

Cajoling, teasing, restless. They whispered to her from the cavity of her chest, the hollow that contained their corpses. Murmured insidious nothings that wound their way to her ear, soft as the sighing of the sea. She sat ready in demure repose, and the light from high windows washed over her pensive face…

It was her coming of age, the exchange of the old for the new.

– Save us, save us, save us –

“Shush,” she told them. “Be quiet, my darlings; my daisy, my aster.”

They sang even as she was handed a glass heart by a priest; she shuddered involuntarily as she accepted it, touched it with bare skin. It was wrought in the shape of a furled rose, exceedingly lovely and yet bland, undistinguished and thus mutable.

It would replace them; a heart of glass for a heart of flowers.

“This,” said the priest. “This will allow you to feel emotions – real and sustained and vital.”

Something gleamed in his eye as he made this promise in earnest, something like a star that glittered, or the bright transience of a tear. Something else stirred within her, a heady exhilaration, and the flowers themselves –

– Save us! –

She smiled in turn. Smiled and laid the flowers down, pressed the heart into her chest. It paused, began to beat slowly, ponderously, and she felt its unyielding curves pressed tight against her flesh.

*

And time wore on, as the eternal drip of water ground through stone, and it ruined her.

Memories were long-lived. She could never forget now, not whilst the glass pulsed, released and captured her every emotion. Happiness was brighter – but so was pain, and that dull, gnawing ache never ceased, only intensified. It cut, real as any wound…

Flowers were ephemeral; the fragments retained would fade along with the shroud of their bodies, to wither away as if they had never been. Yet glass was everlasting, compounding emotion instead, preserving it as crystal-clear and sharp as the substance in which it resided.

Real, sustained and vital, the priest had said. He had not lied.

She gasped. Reached into her chest and drew out broken shards of glass, mixed with the cherry-red of blood.