Garden Variety

He sat in front of a computer, having painted the staircase walls and ceiling and resting now that he had made a contribution to the house. Looking out the window to the east, he saw flowers, small red flowers in lines where the cauliflower or corn had grown and been harvested. The small red flowers reminded him of the Wizard of Oz poppies. He looked them up on the computer in front of him, and discovered them to be corn poppies. The sky was a heavy and grey one, an English sky weighing down on the fields and the horizon.

He went out and had a closer look at the flowers. Vladimir stood above them and tried to eat them, to see what they tasted like. They were caustic, bitter, and sour. Continuing on a walk, a longer walk through the quiet and ethereal country side, he passed tall purple flowers and their large globes of seeds, each one some magical wand of sleepy witchery, a cold and white green. They caught his eye. They were tall and beautiful. He felt, as usual, that he was somehow dead, wandering the earth as some ghost in search of rest. Peace only came in transient and fleeting nods.

Something told him to pick the tall witchwand flower stalks. They bled from the places where he broke them off. The long fibers oozed a sticky red blood, like they had human souls or they bled in sacrifice or lament of sadness itself. He chewed the woody fibers, and salivated the bloody pulp until he could swallow it. Vladimir felt like he was invested in some witchly ritual for peach. A spherical ritual of a three dimensional pentragram, and with each ancient mastication, some peace crept into his heart. The stark sky seemed to begin to let the sun through.

When he got back to the house, Vladimir broke the fibrous globes into smaller bits with a scissors and poured hot water over them like the oldest cup of tea. They bled the water red and brown, like the rusty sanguine peace the water now held. He let it steep until it was cold, then drank it with a cigarette that he rolled. In front of the computer named "trimagestus", the peace from his caduceus tea crept in to his heart. The documents he read on trimagestus showed the purple and white flowers to be setigerums. He was amazed, so he lit another cigarette.

A year later, he was smoking a cigarette talking to Paul. Paul spoke about a book that indicated that the flowers Vladimir was finding along the banks of the dikes were of ancestry from flower growing competitions of 100 years before. The book was about opium and the masses. Vladimir was mystified and amazed. He lit another cigarette. The smoke coiled up to the hermetic sky. He thanked the ancestors for their honesty.