All he could see..

All He Could See Was Roses

by Robin Starveling

He interrupted and she wasn't sure why but it didn't matter because the flowers were crying. She had struggled with the dewdrops from the daffodils for several minutes now but it was no use. They insisted upon being miserable, then so be it. She let them be miserable and continued talking.

"They placate until their chlorophyll begins to-", she failed to continue.

"Hey. Didn't you hear me?", he interrupted. "I have no idea WHAT you are talking about now why don't we start from the top?"

She looked up in his general direction but as she had done since they first met, failed miserably at commiting to such an action as he could say would remotely appear to be eye contact. At the present time it appeared that she was looking through his sternum which was particularly disconcerting. "I beg your pardon," she said with a scowl as the field of daffodils turned into a rose garden, "but you were not the one to begin this conversation. You were the one to interupt me. Not the other way around."

"I never said you interrupted-"

"And now that I finally get an opportunity to interrupt you, I will say that I would attempt to start at the top if indeed I knew where 'the top' was. Fact is, I don't think whatever it was that created wherever it is that we in fact are knows which way is up. Nor do I believe they would tell us if they knew."

He raised an eyebrow, "You a woman?"

She looked straight at his nose, which he found less perplexing and uncomfortable than when she gazed at his sternum or bore into his left shoulder with those eyes, but was still not what he considered to be normal, "Of course," she said still scowling, "don't you think I LOOK like a woman?"

Believing turn about to be fair play, he decided to take a long gander at various parts of her body other than her eyes, and found himself more than usually aroused, which annoyed her and made him all the more uncomfortable, "Ya sure don't TALK like one."

"Well Mister Pissed, as the only representative of the female gender present, I must say that you are the ultimate stereotypical personification of the average primitive male gender of the species Homo Sapiens. Right down to your gutteral grunts and other barbaric attempts at communication as well as random flatulations, gastric explosions and the predictable chauvinistic statements that were obviously concocted in your feeble mind in such a manner as to expend as little brain activity or electrochemical energy as realistically plausible."

He stood there a moment in silence. These words came from her lips slowly and distinctly as she stared solemnly into his adam's apple. She spoke them in such a cold, emotionless yet polite way as to make him uncertain whether or not what she had just said was to be considered an insult or a compliment. Since he was not sure if he knew the definitions to about half the words she used, he decided merely to dismiss it entirely and instead bring up a topic which suddenly became much more important to him. "Why do you still insist on calling me Mr. Pissed?"

"That is your name," she said simply as she turned her attention back to what was a field of daffodils but now had appeared to be changed into a rose garden.

"That ain't my name," he wailed defiantly.

"When we met and I asked you your name you said, 'I'm Pissed'. I told you my name and you rambled on about how you were taking a shower when it happened and I commented that you obviously had not had time to rinse off the lather and you repeated, 'I'm pissed'. I explained that I understood what you meant."

"My name ain't Pissed."

"Mister Pissed," she spinned back to look him square in the back, as he had turned around, "one cannot go about changing their name on a whim. It makes communicating with someone impossible." She turned back to find that the rose garden was now a field of mournful daffodils again. What she did not know was that in the brief seconds that she had turned around to face him, the rose garden turned into several things including a cliff overlooking an ocean, a balmy desert, a springlike meadow with a forest off in the distance, a massive expanse of rolling hills with a castle far off in the distance, a city street covered with fog at three in the morning with the Big Ben belltower of London barely within view, and a corn field among other things, before remanifesting once again into a field of mournful daffodils. It remained a field of mournful daffodils until she turned back to him. She stared at the mournful daffodils a long time and there was a massive silence that built up between he and she, and she spent this time attempting to make the mournful daffodils more happy once again, but they only wanted to be mournful so once again she finally gave up and just stared at them some more. By this time the rapidly growing silence that seemed to grow larger with each passing second and threatened to engulf her forced her to look away from the field, which then proceeded to rapidly remanifest into several thousand different locales for the duration of her looking away. She was totally oblivious to this, as she spent quite a long time staring at his naked butt. Not that it was more appealing to her than any other part of his form, but only that of the various parts of the back of his body, the hairy butt tended to demand the most attention at the time.

The silence ensued, and she slowly looked around him, at the wood paneling that had been wood paneling since they came upon this room in what she hesitated to refer to as a house. Indeed it had always been wood panelling for as long as it had been a wall, and possibly even before that, but she could not verify this fact, and so only took its apparent existence as a wall covered with wood paneling for granted, with the willingness to accept its existence should it choose to remanifest into something else, as many things in this "house" tended to want to do. The silence continued to threaten to engulf her and she feared she would burst, until finally she heard his low, obnoxious, but ironically welcome voice filter about the strange room they were in and echo into her ear.

"My name is David," he said.

"I do not believe we know each other well enough to be on a first name basis just yet, Mister David Pissed-"

"God damnit!" He spun around and for the first time she actually looked at his eyes.. sort of. He couldn't really tell for sure. There was something about those eyes. He didn't understand. "Will you just call me David for Christ's sake?"

"Are you aware that being named David, you are named after a biblical figure, and so blaspheming God is doubly risky when one calculates your chances for a positive afterlife, if of course one takes for granted that the Judeo-Christian theology is correct which I have never assumed wholeheartedly myself having never been a Christian, and if I were a Christian I would doubt much more now having been in this strange place as long as I have-"

"Shut the hell up."

There was another silence. They stared relatively AT each other, but not very directly. She had to interrupt it this time, as she could feel the imaginary balloon of silence swelling about her head. "Are you a Christian?"

More silence. She was looking at his left nipple.

"Yeah," he said finally.

"And you use your god's name in vain?"

"Yeah. What of it?"

"If I were a Christian, I would thank my Lord I will never have to judge you. I think it would be quite difficult."

"Why?"

"Because you cannot help being so incredibly ignorant."

"Shut the hell up."

"Is that the best retort you can do?"

"We've been here for a long time." He walked across the room into what she saw as a rose garden, but to him it was just more wood paneling. "I'm real tired of talking to you. You hurt my head."

"You believe in the Judeo-Christian God," she began again, apparently ignoring once again what he was saying, "yet you curse his name as if it doesn't matter. I do not believe in the Judeo-Christian God, but would never in my life even desire to blaspheme His name, much less dare to." she looked inquisitively at him as he walked about the roses, brushing up against the thorns, and witnessing his naked body sitting in what she saw was a bed of thorns but what he assumed to be a wooden arm chair with fluffy cushions. Victorian design he noted. He always liked the Victorian design, though he would never be caught dead furnishing his house like that.

Despite her instincts, she refrained from mentioning that she was seeing thorns piercing into his body. Blood flowing down his skin and into the welcoming ground. Something told her that only she could see it, and so it may not be in his reality. That may be the only thing that would save him from pain; his ignorance.

"You hurt my head," he repeated as he swivelled his butt back and forth into the cushions, which she saw as him squirming deeper and deeper into the vines and thorny stems. "I don't think about God much. I wish this place had clothes." He was obviously trying to change the subject.

"Adam and Eve wore no clothes-", she continued.

Again trying to alter the topic he said, "So okay, I was in the shower when it happened," he brushed off some foamy lather that still hung from his body for emphasis, "why are you naked? I mean what were you doing when.. you know, IT happened?"

"At the time I disappeared, most probably in much the same way as you experienced, I was in my bed having sex with my lover."

As was appropriate to his rather impolite character, he fell off the chair with laughter. She almost found herself enjoying witnessing the new wounds forming all about him, but was still mildly perplexed at his lack of realizing them. Was she seeing reality, or was he? The wall tended to change when she looked away, and it only seemed to remain now with her watching because he was in the view now. Perhaps if she looked away he would disappear and be left in the rose garden. She didn't want that. Not because she LIKED him, but before he arrived here she had been alone in this place for a long time, and even a chauvinistic male such as this was better than no one at all.

"You were in bed fucking when you popped here?" he said as he climbed back into the chair and failed to get comfortable, "HA! That's a hoot! I bet your boyfriend is real confused right now!"

He was rapidly wearing out his welcome.

"My lover probably understood. SHE knows this sort of thing happens to me every once in a while. I use to dabble in the mystic arts." Actually though she had stopped several years ago, she assumed this to be some wicked manifestation of someone else's bad karma somehow siphoning off her, and that her past experiences with magick only had a minimal effect upon the present events. She understood what was going on a bit better than this buffoon now writhing in the rose garden. She didn't understand it, but she could cope.

He appeared bloody and beyond help despite his ignorance, and if she was to keep him alive, she needed to do something. However, she was going to have to play it by ear. At this present second that dreadfully uncomfortable silence was returning again. The gentleman's revelation of discovering that he had been conversing with a lesbian who admitted to experimenting with pagan witchcraft seemed a bit much for his mind to digest.

Finally he spoke, still squirming in his chair, "This sort of thing happens to lesbian witches all the time?"

Apparently, he digested it.

"Not exclusively. Are you a lesbian witch?"

Smartass bitch, he thought to himself as he began fingering the petals of a rose he just noticed in a vase on the coffee table.

She couldn't tell where his bloody body ended and the red roses began. "Uh, why don't you come over here?"

He looked up at her. "Why?" He looked back down and was mildly surprised to find that there were now two roses in the vase. He thought for sure there was only one a second ago. But there's two now. He must have been mistaken. Roses ain't rabbits, he thought.

Perhaps if she tried to taunt him and flirt with him, it would bring him over and keep his mind entertained at the same time. She entertained that notion for about two seconds. She was a formidable woman, but had no wish to entreat the gentleman or make him want her in any way. He seemed to her the type of man who would rape her with little moral thought just as soon as look at her. She just wanted to save his hairy butt. She didn't want it for herself.

"Ouch." He accidently pricked his thumb on a thorn and a drop of blood immediately excreted. He absentmindedly stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked on it for a second. He pulled his hand back and noticed that his entire hand was red with blood. He looked over at the other hand, and his entire arm was covered with gashes and it appeared suddenly that his life's blood had been pouring out of him for some time and quite rapidly.

"You fucking witch whore!" He screamed at her as she stood there naked and helpless to save him. "You did this didn't you!"

"You have been here long enough to know I have nothing to do with any of this-" she screamed back as she witnessed his eyes growing wide with horror.

Then the pain hit.

He howled like a sick dog seconds away from being shot by its owner's rifle. He howled loud enough to wake the dead, if indeed dead resided in this reality. Or if there was only torture. Until now, she never had the chance to find out. The pain had come to him from every pore of his being. All the major arteries had been slashed and poked as well as practically every square inch of his epidermis. Liquid iron poured crimson from his very soul it seemed, and his barbaric cries could perhaps have been heard on the moon some several realities away. Perhaps it is his soul that the wild wolves of his original reality call out for all those brisk nights of the full moon.

Perhaps he was still thinking cursewords for both his only companion in this strange place as well as for the God he had abandoned long ago, who had apparently also abandoned him. However, his guttural bellows were nothing even vaguely similar to a word of any human tongue, which she would have found a welcome relief as his foul mouth often in the past made her ill. However, she just stood there. Tears streaming out of her strange eyes. She couldn't reach out to pull him back without risking being ripped to shreds herself. He was no longer capable of vertical movement, as his squirming (at first merely an unconscious inability to get comfortable in the chair) had inevitably placed him into a position where the thorny stems and rose vines were now tightly wrapped around his throat and legs. She found herself in abject terror as she witnessed the rose garden slowly growing INTO the wood panelling room, which meant soon she would meet his fate. She was paralyzed from the waist down, as if her legs were already going numb. Perhaps she was already in the rose garden, slowly bleeding to death. She just couldn't see it yet.

He could only see red. In his now deranged mind he envisioned that the vines and roses were turning into macable serpents and Venus Fly Trap-like plants with drooling, gaping mouths and sharply pointed teeth. He fantasized nightmarishly that one particular vine had wrapped about his head like the crown of thorns he heard Jesus wore on the cross. He heard this as a child, and even then was more afraid of the actual description of Jesus' death than he was thankful for his God's sacrifice. The mental picture of a man literally tortured to death only to live again three days later like a zombie was horrifying to him when he was six years old. He remembered that now. And as the life drained out of him like seawater bursting into a submarine with compromised bulkheads going down, he suddenly recalled his entire pathetic life several times over. All the people he had done wrong. All the times he put off helping others or getting important tasks done. All the broken promises and all the cruel jokes. He saw it all, and somehow in all his madness he almost understood, and almost repented.

At the same time, he could no longer see her. He was no longer trying to see her. All he saw were roses. From horizon to horizon, it was nothing but red. The sky was a dark pink, and the blazing sun in the sky was blood red as well. He could see no mountains in the distance, or any form of landmark whatsoever. All he could see was roses.

He couldn't know this, and the realization would have only made him all the more mad, but the strange place that had replaced his shower, had presently transported him to a planet elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy that actually exists. It does not have a name. It does not have a civilization. It never has. It has no bodies of water large enough to map. It has nothing but roses. A sphere about the size of Venus that has a thriving self supportive ecosystem of a thousand different exotic species which Terran botanists would classify as roses. There is not a square foot of land on this planet where a human could place a foot without needing sturdy boots that would protect one from particularly sharp needle like thorns.

He could no longer speak. He knew the end was almost here. It was less than a moment of time that had passed since he first pricked his thumb, but it felt like a long nightmare from which he never awoke. Soon it would end. He had lost the strength to cry to the heavens, and was rapidly losing the will to live.

She saw the roses approach her. They didn't move so much as appear. As if it was the wood paneling wall that had been the illusion. But, she thought wildly as she suddenly felt a sharp pain in the underside of her naked right foot, only mere moments ago the wood paneling was reality, and this rose garden didn't exist. It was a field of mournful daffodils! Before that it was a rose garden. Before that it was a field of daffodils again! It was what she was looking at that didn't exist, because it was less real than what she had been looking at. But at the same time each field looked so real.

Oh may the gods preserve me, she thought as her strange eyes widened with horror. IT'S ALL REAL. ALL OF THIS EXISTS! IT IS NOT A FIGMENT OF SOMEONE ELSE'S IMAGINATION. IT IS NOT BAD KARMA! IT IS HERE AND NOW AND I MUST DEAL WITH IT! I MUST FOCUS!

She looked away.

She saw the wood paneling behind her.

She noted the particularly bland erratic pattern of tree ring lines and the sadly placid brown tone of the liquid coating that had been painted upon there long ago and left to dry. Is it turpentine she asked herself? What is it called that they use to cure the wood? Like I should know she responded to herself. What am I? Bob Villa?

The pain that shot from her right heel to her brain suddenly went away into a dull throbbing.

She looked back.

David's bloody body lay limp and lifeless in a field of mournful daffodils, and she understood now why they were so sad. They knew this was going to happen all the time. They tried to warn her. If only she listened. Instead of trying to make the flowers happy, she should have asked them WHY they were so sad. She was such a fool.

She limped cautiously into the field of daffodils toward David. She checked for a pulse but already knew what she would find.

She cried. She blamed herself for her indecisiveness and her inability to figure it out in time. She didn't know why that wall in that strange place was an opening to other worlds. She was too busy assuming it was only a figment; a fabrication adjacent to reality. She didn't understand, but she finally did understand that she could cope. David couldn't be so lucky. And except for the mournful daffodils, she was alone again.

Suddenly David's body disappeared, and only the daffodils that had been crushed beneath him, now stained with blood, were evidence to prove he had been there. She thought he must have rematerialized back to his home, and what little blood still held inside him was now being slowly washed away by the showerhead spray into the drain.

She thought of her lover. And feared if she were not careful, perhaps when she returned to her lover's arms, all she would find would be her dead body. Shivers ran through her and she wished for a jacket or something to call off the wind. She stood up and walked back to the nearby wood paneling room. She looked back and the field of daffodils was now just the moving wall. The field of mournful daffodils framed like a shimmering painting by the room's wood paneling walls, floor and ceiling. She would walk out the door behind her and continue on alone now. But not just yet. She was in no real hurry, and she had nowhere in particular to go.

Well, she thought to herself after she had no tears left, it was a long time but whatever brought me here obviously brought him too. Maybe eventually it would bring another to keep her company. This time, she would be more protective. This time she would not let carelessness bring about fear and death.

The daffodils were still mournful, and nothing she could do would make them happy.