Flowers of Joy
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a short story
— — Witness the field. Kept with tender soil and sown with a combined love; of lilies and iris, the peony, the dahlia; of poppies and marigold, the daisy, the daffodil. The pride of Aster Penrose. A fine hobby for Alma Penrose. The husband and the wife.
— — Nurtured with the care reserved for parenthood, the field flourished. Watered and fed. Pruned and processed. All held to the ground save for the poppy seeds and the daffodils. The seeds baked to their delight. The daffodils Aster’s preferred ornament. A way of love enmeshed in petals. And when the passion of resentment rose, there was always the field.
— — Here days went by the months and years, and in age the pain multiplied. Never under the weight of marriage but of physical wasting, which confined Aster to a chair when his bones began to rot. Every step was a risk, from the kitchen to the field, and after many an attempt to maintain the good order, he gave up all hope. The pain would overtake him and he would call for Alma and when the pain would overtake her, she would call an ambulance, where upon arrival an EMT would administer a dose of morphine to Aster. Enough to calm and cart him to the hospital. There he would growl and hiss, snarl and shriek in wait for death over a week of observation. Then the days would shed away and they would send him home with a pocket full of pills, to continue living.
— — Continue living he did, relying on the best relief second to death. Three pills a day, ninety a month, one thousand and ninety a year. And as the pills digested accumulated, his condition alleviated and he was taken off the medication.
— — Alive and in withdrawal and distraught over seeing the field withered, he had every intention of returning to the flowers. But when he came out the other side of withdrawal, the pain lingered and eventually took hold. Consultations ensued and despite his pain he was denied medication as his condition was gone. The way his doctor put it was that the pains of old age do not justify a cabinet of opioids, and suggested a nerve blocker, which Aster refused. It seemed as if all his friends, at least those who were still around, received such injections only to discover a slightly lesser aching elsewhere. He felt the only solution was to be completely numb.
— — Under the pain rose frustration and soon came anger and lashing out. A tumult of fury, which to the one person who understood him, who had him in love for forty years, were the actions of a stranger. Alma would leave him to his own devices and care for him when he was calm, listening to him ramble on about the pain and what relief he would have had he a pill or two or three, but just the one was all he needed. He swore. Then came the day when he lost control. Frenzied by the pain, he charged around the house intending on destruction, intending on harming someone, anyone, and since Alma was the one target in sight, he lowered his arms. Stalking into the garden, he took a pair of hedge trimmers from the shed and severed the flowers at their base, one by one, undoing nearly half a century’s work. It was that night as Aster wept over a handful of daffodils, that Alma convinced him to attend an NA meeting.
— — Three meetings in he realized he was in the belly of the beast. Where he was not seeking the help people thought he needed, and while most there did, there were a few who felt the same. Those few who he clung to, who informed him of what was out there. What was affordable. What would alleviate him. And after the fifth meeting, he received a bag for ten dollars, a note with a phone number on it, and a syringe which he turned away, feeling he would not willingly stick himself. Watching too much television taught him that he could cut off a fourth of a straw and use it to breathe the powder into his brain. That was good enough for him and he ceased his attendance.
— — At home, when Alma went to bed, he stayed up late and untied the bag. Using his debit card, he cut an eight centimeter by six inch line, and with a sliced up straw from the cache of party favors Alma had stored for their nieces, he took it in. Lying back in his chair, he waited. Focusing on his pain. Then he thought about what he had done and after a moment his thoughts came in clear. The fog was lifted. The pain was gone. Completely numb and tingling as the euphoria spread throughout his body. It was stronger than before. It was stronger than anything. He was in a state beyond control and nodded then fell asleep in his chair.
— — Come the morning the pain returned, for Alma found Aster’s secret exposed. He never left the chair. The paraphernalia never left the table. She called emergency services. The police arrived first.
— — They told her it was cut and dry and confiscated the fentanyl in an evidence bag. The number was checked for priors and they scheduled a pick up using Aster as an alibi. Caught and cuffed, the dealer was charged, possession with intent to sell and involuntary manslaughter. Alma felt it was not enough, that one in a million made no difference.
— — Alma drove home from the funeral with Aster’s ashes buckled in the passenger seat. Sobbing on an empty back road, cruising like they had in their youth, and every couple of yards she would lose focus and fantasize about the telephone poles. And what in the past came and went was seriously being considered for the first time, her careening off the lane and wrapping her car around the pole, expelling her body through the windshield to be found in a cornfield some time some day. Then the thought faded as she came to believe, it was not about wanting an exit, but seeking an excitement which has evaded her. At home, she placed the urn on the mantel with a wreath of dried daffodils around its base. Without consideration of the thought, she sat in the chair Aster expired in, and discarded a stack of sympathy cards on the dining room table. Surrounded by flowers, the smell nauseated her and she briefly occupied herself moving the arrangements into a spare bedroom. Then it was back to the table where she sat staring out the window. Seeing nothing. Thinking nothing. Feeling nothing.
— — Soon, within her line of sight crashed a goose in the field. It’s shrill howl accompanied a hobble, indicating injury, as it tossed about the fallen flowers. Alma stood to watch the goose nip at the petals, tearing them and letting them fall from it’s beak. It sought nourishment, something to alleviate it, and when it came to the poppy, it picked the pod, crushed the pod in it’s beak, and swallowed. Each of the four poppies which laid in the field were eaten by the goose.
— — Alma smiled for the first time in years, half concerned about the goose’s condition, and half giddy by its waifish appearance, thinking perhaps she could domesticate it and care for it. A daily project she could sink her time into, what time she had left, and she scoffed at the notion, never again, and decided on lunch. Something to pass the time, she mixed bread flour with yeast, barley malt syrup, and salt, and added warm water until it thickened and she could knead the mixture. Building it into a dough, she formed it into a ball, placed it in a bowl, covered it and set it in the fridge to rise. From the cabinet over the window, she retrieved a plastic bag of poppy seeds, and when she looked out, she saw the goose lying flat on it’s stomach with it’s wings extended. Momentarily stunned thinking it was dead, she dropped the bag on the counter and went to the sliding glass door. Outside, she was careful to approach the bird, and when she got close, it reared it’s head back and squawked. Rather cheerful, the goose stood and stumbled, hopped and danced and flapped it’s wings. It spun in circles then hopped in place, which meant one thing to Alma. She went inside and from the same cabinet, she grabbed a bag of sesame seeds and with the poppies, she placed a handful of each on the back porch. The goose hopped over and pecked at the seeds, spread them thin and carefully ate the poppies, ignoring the sesame seeds. When it was finished, it crawled under the porch table and fell asleep.
— — Never again became once more, and she cared for the goose, feeding it poppies everyday. And when the goose was rehabilitated, Alma had an epiphany. Enlightened enough to clear the field, she sowed what poppies were left. Alluring life grew. So witness the field. Kept with tender soil and sown with love; of poppies. The pride of Alma Penrose.
— — When Aster left her, Alma came to understand many of her friends were suffering similar fates. Of tremendous pain, relying on the streets to fulfill their pharmacy induced addictions. Eventually funerals were common place and while age was certainly a factor, a growing majority of deaths were accidental. When she would ask the details from those left behind, they were seldom forthcoming. Those that passed under medical supervision had their stories shouted, and those who she suspected took the poison had their stories wrapped in lies. It was with the latter, she assured the widows that were they to ever find themselves in difficult company, that they should come to her, and they cursed her from their home. But in every case, the curse came to lift and she gave them what they needed.
— — A tenth of Alma’s cultivated poppies were eaten by the goose. What remained were experimented on. Once the pods of the poppies were fully formed at a diameter of seven centimeters, she made light vertical incisions on three sides. From it slowly oozed a milky white substance known as latex, which dripped into buckets on the ground. After a brief time, the latex browned and the scores scabbed effectively sealing off the liquid. She fumbled scraping the scabs into the buckets and collected what ran until the bleeding stopped. Moving her buckets to three other poppies, she made deeper incisions, spilling the latex and eviscerating the flower, bled and killed. Finally, she chose three more poppies and pierced them at one millimeter the length of the blade. A steady tap poured into the buckets and she had what was necessary. Continuing the process ad nauseum, she finished the day with three buckets of significant latex.
— — Feeling euphoric and drowsy, a bit uneasy and dizzy, she brought the buckets into the house and laid every cookie sheet she had on the kitchen counter. Through sheer common logic, she chose a bucket, removed the latex, kneaded it and rolled it into a ball, then spread it flat on a cookie sheet, smoothing out any irregularities. Once the cookie sheets were covered, she set them on an elevated surface outside to dry, then promptly had a lie down and fell asleep.
— — Sleeping sound through the night and well into the day, Alma awoke, exhausted, to the smell of a rank smokehouse. An earthy bittersweet aroma. She thought that must have been what it was like one hundred and fifty years ago in the dens, and chuckled. Foregoing breakfast, she brought the cookie sheets inside and was delighted to see the latex had bricked, appearing an opaque black like a vein of coal. Thrilled to get started, she needed something to break the brick into powder, and rifled through the utensil drawer, and used the first thing she saw, a meat tenderizer. With the first swing, the corner of the brick cracked leaving an indent of fine grains. Then came the second swing, shattering it into fragments and shards which scattered into nooks and crannies all across the kitchen. Thinking that won’t suffice, she cut off large sheets from a roll of plastic wrap and laid them out on the floor, and chipped away at the brick until she could place large chunks on the plastic. From there, she broke the chunks down and folded the plastic wrap over top and hammered the substance between the layers. When she looked at the roughly ground powder, she couldn’t help but laugh as she thought, ‘what’s the difference between this and making breadcrumbs?’, and why didn’t she use plastic bags. What a mess. Rolling up the plastic wrap to contain the powder, she poured it from one side into a one liter measuring cup, and carried on using plastic bags in her process. Once all the bricks were roughly ground, she poured a cup of the powder into a mortar and ground it with a pestle, and transferred the fine powder to an empty measuring cup.
— — Now that the latex was refined, she had the question of how to distribute. As far as she knew, her ailing friends were hardly ones to snort or inject. It has been a long day’s journey since the seventies, and her generation’s morals have changed. What once was wild was tamed; what had no fear became dignified. There was a single manner in which she could hand it out and that was in the most common form. But how was she to compress the powder into a pill?
— — In the attic, Alma rummaged through boxes of sewing equipment and found a table hand-press for cutting eyelets. Affixing the press to the dining room table, she removed the bottom punch, known as a die, opening a circular hole, and used the die to extend the hammer. Filling the hole with powder, she pressed down on the hammer as hard as she could, and using a pair of tweezers, she popped out a brown pill. One after the other, the exhaustive work consumed her, burning away the evening hours into the night, and by the time she called it quits, she had compressed ninety pills.
— — The pills were bagged. The powder covered. Having not eaten or drank anything for twenty four hours, Alma passed out and slept until midday. Another drowsy waking moment, she felt her lethargy would have passed had she slept longer, had she not been awoken by the ringing of her handset. A friend was in need and she intended on fulfilling the order. It was nothing a quick trip couldn’t fix, but she had to be inconspicuous, refusing to travel with a baggy full of homemade narcotics. From her nightstand she grabbed a prescription of a thousand milligram acetaminophen, and feeling she didn’t need them anymore, she dumped them in the toilet, scraped the label off, and filled the bottle with thirty of her own pills. At her friends home it was explained to her their pain had reached new heights; that another member of her family had used her prescription; that the pharmacy denied all refills. Offered a hundred dollars, Alma refused and gave them away and in return asked for any empty prescription bottles.
— — Through her day came another call, another friend, another thirty given away. Another call, another friend, the last thirty given away. Near identical stories. Terminal. Recovering. Denied on the fear of abuse. What she had, needed to be more. Rows upon rows of poppies, every last seed from every last pod planted. And when she came home, when her day had ended, she looked out to see the poppies devoured and there lied the goose, dead in the field.
‘When the narcotic is mightier than those who consume it, might that which is pure save a life?’ — Unknown
‘Everything in moderation… including moderation.’ — Oscar Wilde
