Dawn Allison lives and writes in North Carolina. She has no adorable adjectives or catchphrases with which to describe herself or her writing. You can browse her list of publication credits at http://huntingthemidnightmuse.wordpress.com/

No Fear for Flowers (May 20, 2009. Issue 5.)

(First Published in the Nov-Dec 2008 issue of The Writer's Eye Magazine.)

She wants to bloom at noon and die at nine. Holly lives like a woman drowning, flailing and sinking deep, fighting her way to the surface to sink again. She wishes she was a flower, not clumsy and ungainly, and not afraid of the dark when the night comes to smother the world.

She is not a flower. She is a telemarketer who sells cemetery plots. One of the tactics passed on to her is to assure her cold calls that they will, inevitably, die, and perhaps sooner than they had anticipated. Long tearful conversations about mortality and no discussions about flowers.

Sometimes she picked a daffodil or a primrose on her way to the office. She would get a paper cup made to hold just one swallow from the water cooler, fill it, add a quarter packet of sugar and snip the flower’s stem to just the right length. It made the cubicle a little less hostile and barren. She would place it next to the telephone so that she could bend over and sniff when the conversations turned gloomy. Nobody wants to think about death, but somebody has to. That was the company’s motto. She’d learned it the first day of training.

When Holly sold more plots than anybody else in the department, the boss put a single rose in a crystal vase on her desk. She enjoyed it for a week, but when she came back on Monday it was dead. So it goes. She doubts that roses feel pain, only the warmth of the sun on velvet petals. She emptied the vase and had nothing to sniff but the permanent marker in her top drawer for the rest of the day.

She does a better job of selling when she doesn’t sniff markers, and Tuesday, when she passes through the rat maze to get to her cubicle, she sees that someone has put a yellow carnation in the vase. It’s no rose, but it’s still lovely. It smells vaguely sweet and gentle against her skin.

She dials the first number from the list on her desk. Nobody picks up. She dials the second.

“Hello?” The raspy voice of an older woman.

“Hello, Mrs.,” she squints at the name on the paper, “Pendistaldt?”

“That’s right,” the woman says. “Nobody ever says it right. Who is this?”

“My name is Holly and I’m calling on behalf of--”

“I knew a Holly once,” the woman says. While she talks Holly doodles on the back of the paper. She draws flowers until her hand cramps. She lets the carnation tickle her nose and breathes in deeply. The woman on the other end of the line falls silent. Now for the tricky part.

“Mrs. Pendistaldt, have you given any consideration to where you’ll go when you die?”

The sharp intake of breath. A cat meows in the background. “Heaven, I suppose, but I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“No, I mean, where will you be buried?” Holly rushes on before the woman can reply. “How would you like to spend eternity on a hilltop beneath a weeping willow?”

“No, won’t do. What’s the point of spending all that money on a casket, if some tree’s roots are just bound to pull it apart anyhow?”

“Of course, that would be silly.” Holly means it, too. She wouldn’t want to be sucked up into a tree after she goes, mostly because she’s never had any desire to be a tree. She believes that the spirit lives on in whatever takes nourishment from the body. Trees live too long, and when they don’t, their deaths are violent. Axes and lightning, wind and parasites. “Do you have a plot already, Mrs. Pendistaldt? We have some lovely ones in a field where the grass is never allowed to grow taller than a quarter of an inch.”

“That sounds nice.”

Holly makes her first sale of the day. The man who picks up at the next number curses at her and slams the phone down so hard it makes her ear ache. So it goes. At eleven thirty she has a turkey sandwich and strolls outside to admire the crepe myrtles.

After lunch she talks to a man who is afraid to die. He buys a plot by the end of it, and she shares with him her philosophy, the secret to coming back as a flower, beautiful and free from the drudgery of the world. By the time he gives her his credit card number, he almost sounds excited by the way she describes death and burial as a lover’s embrace. She tells him she has her own plot and that she visits it every day. She doesn’t tell him that her plot is in her back yard. She lets him think what he will. Maybe that they’ll be flowers together in the future and they will be happy.

For the rest of the afternoon she fantasizes about her plot, it’s lovely there any time of the day or night, and safe. She imagines that her cramped cubicle is really that little piece of land, the murmur of the office around her just the trickle of the stream that separates her yard from the next.

Only three people tell her no all day. Holly has no idea what the cemetery she’s selling bits and pieces of looks like. She’s seen pictures, but all those things look the same, really, perfectly forgettable.

When she gets home the house is dark and silent. Often she considers getting a dog or a cat for company, but decides against it. Everything she’s ever loved has died and left her with the flowers.

She sits on her little cast iron bench and watches the sun set behind her plot. She notices a flower, a wild unkempt thing. A perfect thing. Red, with green tendrils that stab out in every direction. When she looks over the shoulder, she notices that the shadow of her head, with her frizzy hair and the shadow of the flower are almost a perfect match.

Holly kneels down to smell it. Like not-quite-ripe raspberries. Absent-mindedly, her deft fingers pluck the juicy red seeds and she pops them into her mouth and swallows without chewing. The secret of how to come back as a flower. There is no fear for flowers, no loneliness. Just a moment of radiance and a quick return to the earth.