[stylist] Tomorrow's blossoms

[debby]

What an awesome story! I reY liked it, and definitely hope that you will enter it in to a contest or two. And I love the names ofthe flowers. In this case it is totY appropriate !use ficNal flowers. I'm not an editor so I won't be sharing about sentence structure, etc. I just liked the story a lot.    Debby

On Sep 2, 2016 10:50 AM, "Jacobson, Shawn D via stylist" <stylist at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
> Here is my latest story, I mentioned this on the gathering call last Sunday. 
>
> I did have one question, in the story I have a lot of fictional names for flowers; I put them in quotation marks.  Would this be the proper way to handle the situation. 
>
> Thanks in advance for any answers I can get (and for any criticism/good advice about the story. 
>
> Shawn 
>
> Tomorrow's Blossoms 
> by Shawn Jacobson 
> Blind gardeners never use gloves, so I am glad that the things I am pulling out of the earth do not have thorns.  I am sure they will evolve them, or something else equally nasty, before too long. 
> "Uh!" Patrick grunted as he pulled against a stubborn weed.  "This must be one of the new flowers, the kind that you can't pull." 
> "Cut it off at the ground and put herbicide where you pulled.  That should kill the roots" I replied.  As I said, these things evolve new wrinkles all the time. 
> "Bonnie was telling me that she could hear the plants scream when she pulled them" Pat said ripping another one from the ground. 
> "Nuts!" I said.  "The lady hears things, always has, angels, faeries, ghosts, you name it, she hears it." 
> "She was a jazz singer" Pat replied.  "I'm told they hear things the rest of us can't." 
> "That would be Bonnie" I said hoping to bury the subject.  "She hears all sorts of things we can't hear, because they aren't freaking real." 
> The whole concept of screaming plants was stone crazy, but these were crazy times.  After all taking folk from the Iowa National Guard and training them to weed blindfolded was stone crazy to, but it was how to rescue all the corn fields from the deadly beauties that were the kin of the weeds we were pulling tonight. 
> My wife would tell me all about the blossoms so I could share their beauty.  There were "blue angels" azure flecked with gold and "blood of Christ" startling the eye with ruby and white petals.  There were "royal cardinals" resplendent in red and gold, but her favorites were "heaven's sunrises" she could not believe that there were that many shades between orange and yellow.  I never quite got into the beauty of it all, something for which I'm glad.  I don't want to admire things I must kill. 
> As I pulled, pitching the lush piles of blossoms into the trash pile, I remember the trip out to the mansion, the folk who lived there, rich enough to hire personalized service, had wanted there garden back.  I was sure that part of the reason they'd wanted a rush job were the farmers in the area who had more to lose than prize tomato plants.  These glorious flowers were real good at getting rid of the competition. 
> We had arrived at dusk; no one wants to see us at work.  Dan, one of the children, had drawn the unenviable task of taking us out to what had been the vegetable garden.  Now it was a jungle of overabundant blooms so beautiful that none who beheld them could bear to see them destroyed. 
> "You have cans for this stuff?" I asked; "it gets real bulky." 
> "We have a dumpster, with wheels" the kid replied and he went to fetch it more quickly than decorum would call for. 
> "Did you just hear a plant scream?" I squeaked startled from my reverie by a noise I couldn't identify. 
> "Don't think so" Pat said "I heard it to and it wasn't a scream, more like, like a dog whining.  Damned if it hasn't been a while since I heard a dog.  You do remember dogs? Pat continued.  He was a fount of unhappy conversation.  "It wasn't that long ago, was it" he continued, and I could swear I heard a plaintive note in his voice. 
> "Yah" I said "my wife shot ours for getting into the flowers; this was back before, well back when it was practical to keep a dog. 
> It had been the shooting of our dog that started my weeding career.  I wasn't so much her shooting the animal as the cold way she had done it, as if the flowers had cast a spell on her making the ten years we owned Rumball meaningless, that had freaked me out.  My wife would spend entire afternoons just gazing at the plants, to the point that I had learned to cook just to make sure we got fed. 
> Anyway, that night I pulled everything, the "Blue angels", the "Blood of Christ", the "Royal Cardinals", "Heaven's sunrises" and a bunch of other kinds "astral nights", "Viking crowns", "sacred lions" and all the others.  After my work was done, the morning come, and, let's just say that it was really good that I had learned to cook. 
> "That was probably an act of mercy" Pat replied.  "My neighbor's dog got into these flowers.  It took him two days to die.  The poor thing just kept vomiting all the time till the end.  It was a downright awful way to go. 
> "Damn them things anyway" I said.  "If anything deserves to burn it's those Hellish things." 
> "They're not evil" Pat said calmly "they're just real good at surviving, like sharks.  No one would say a shark was evil, or came from Hell." 
> "A shark is an honest predator, you see a shark, well, it's dangerous and you know to be careful.  These flowers are just as deadly, but they look so nice, soft, inviting and so beautiful, not honest at all." 
> "Lots of survival strategies are nasty" Pat said.  "For all the smoke some people blow about mother nature and Gaia, and such, when it comes down to it, survival is a brutal game and the only rule is the loser dies.  Life is about not being the loser" 
> "Nice" I said, then after throwing more blooms into the dumpster, "I hope there's enough room in here.  They sure grew a bumper crop." 
> "Here's the shield" Pat said "you're tall enough to reach over and push them down." 
> I agreed and reluctantly leaned over the edge and used the plastic sheet to press the blossoms down deeper into the dumpster.  The blooms felt soft and thick, like a child's plush toy. 
> Up this close, I could smell the floral essence, a thick cloying scent.  I didn't know if I smelled a hint of deep corruption or whether that was just my bad attitude.  I was glad when the pushing was done; we had gained a foot, maybe eighteen inches, of room for the weeds we had yet to pick. 
> "And these things came so quickly" I said as I panted from the exertion. " It's hard to believe that we didn't have any of this until five, six years ago and now they're everywhere." 
> "From what I've read" Pat replied as I ripped out a particularly recalcitrant stem "they've been around more than five or six years.  One scientist thinks they first appeared after the meteor shower of '26.  Real strange thing, it wasn't one of the main showers that happen the same time each year.  It took all the astronomers by surprise." 
> "Can't say I remember it" I said "but I'll take your word for it."  Pat had always wanted to be an astronomer, but he had believed that a blind guy couldn't be one.  Astronomers spent their time looking into telescopes. This was what he had grown up believing.  So he went into computer science in college and had been everything from a software designer to a hacker who tested computer security.  He had also rolled silverware in the bad times ten years back when even sighted folk were having trouble finding work.  Still he had kept his interest in space even to these days.  I had never been the bookish type, my sole strength was a persistence to get the job done. 
> "No reason you should remember" Pat said "with everything that has happened since.  Anyway, after the meteor showers, there were a lot of reports of strange, mutant looking plants.  Folk blamed everything from herbicides to genetic modifications.  It was quite a source of hysteria, though nothing compared to now.  Then, suddenly, the blossoms showed up.  Sighted folk went around marveling at their beauty and at all the new colors of bloom that kept showing up.  Then the crop failures started." 
> I dropped the plant I had pulled yelping a bit from the hooked barbs on the roots.  I would probably get boils from them; these barbs probably poured the poison into the ground that the plants used to kill its neighbors; as I said, they're nasty. 
> "So, what you're saying" I said after my yelp "is that these flowers came from space, like something out of 'Little Shop of Horrors'."  There had been a film revival last week and they'd shown the old movie. 
> "Or like 'Day of the Triffids', an even older story of space vegetables." 
> "Never heard of it" I said. 
> "The idea" Pat explained "was that there was a meteor shower and everyone who watched it went blind.  Then these plants that could walk and kill things showed up." 
> "Kind of like what we have now" I said "except now we could use all the blind guys we could get."  There were parts of the world where ancient ways of making blind guys were being resurrected and used on those luckless souls who couldn't do anything about it. 
> "Or maybe we could use robots like they're trying in Japan" Pat said, he kept up on such things. 
> "Heard they've had mixed results" I said "I guess it's harder to program the whole stoop and weed procedure than it is to just do it." 
> "Recon" Pat said.  "It's amazing who hard that is; it seems so simple. 
> About then, something rubbed against my right leg; barking noises cut through the silence. 
> "Sounds like you've got a friend" Pat said. 
> "I've missed having a dog" I said.  And this would have shocked my wife; she had been the one pushing us to get a dog; I'd resisted, not sure I could handle the responsibility. 
> "Lots of folk miss having dogs" Pat said "or that's what I'm told." 
> "Maybe I can call him Ribsy."  The dog didn't feel like he had much extra meat on him. 
> "You name him, you keep him."  Pat said.  What went unsaid was that if you kept him you feed him; there was a reason you didn't notice a lot of pets around anymore; you couldn't get food rations for dogs.  "Besides" .Pat continued "the name is already taken." 
> We resumed weeding as the dog hung around; every once in a while I heard barking.  Finally, towards dawn, we got the last weed out of the garden. 
> "Better hit it with some herbicide, just to keep these things from coming back" I said. 
> We trudged back towards the mansion pulling the dumpster; I had used the shield to push the plush mass down to where it would not spill out on the ground, if we were careful.  Meanwhile our new dog friend wagged around us giving the place his own wake-up call. 
> "I wouldn't plant anything for a couple of days, let the herbicide work, if I were you" I told the homeowner as he came downstairs.  He looked half awake.  "If you see any stems, pull them fast before they bloom."  Then I asked "Is that your dog?" 
> "Buster!" a boy's voice rang out with all the love of for an animal you never hear anymore. 
> "We can't keep him" dad replied.  His tone of voice told a novel length story about regret and the pain of crushed joy.  "Would either of you want to keep him?" he asked. 
> Pat said no right off but I thought about it.  Then I politely declined.  The few people I knew who still kept pets fed them out of their food allotment buying companionship with hunger.  I found that I'd worked through that decision.  I was not ready to make that sacrifice.  We pulled the dumpster out to where the incinerator truck would pick it up.  Our truck would come soon. 
> As I waited, I heard my wife accusing me of being selfish, the way I'd been before we got our dog; I plead guilty accompanied by the dog's whine of despair.  I guess now that what my wife had done to Rumball was an act of mercy afterall, I wouldn't have wanted her to ge through what I heard now. 
> As we left on the truck, I thought I could still hear Buster whining for all the pain of loneliness, or maybe I heard the death screams of the plants.  At that point, I couldn't tell. 
> There is a lot I don't know, but ne thing is certain, the old bard had it wrong.  The truth could be ugly as all get out, and beauty could lie through her teeth.  It would take wisdom, not sentimentality, to see us through to the future. 
> And this I know, that tomorrow there will be blossoms as deadly as they are beautiful, blossoms of a spellbinding beauty with the power to bewitch those who can see them.  Then I, and my blind friends, would be called upon to rip them from the Earth, saving us all from their suffocating splendor. 
> And this I hope, that through persistence, through dogged determination, and through all the wisdom we can muster, that we can see this through to better days.  I hope for a tomorrow when we can keep dogs and also keep fed, when beauty doesn't bind our hearts and starve our bodies, to when we can have this world back again.  And because I hope, I will be out there tomorrow night to pitch tomorrow's blossoms into the fire where they belong. 
>
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