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Like A Flower (524 hits)

Category: UberMadness! Entry
Labels: ubermadness

Rating: 2 on 3 reviews (Rate this item) (V)

Submitted by Coyote <spacecoyote42.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2004-10-31 17:44:05 EST

This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.

At 23:58 the nuclear fireball blossomed over the city skyline like a flower, transforming buildings and people and baby kittens into interestingly-shaped smears of greasy ash. Tulip Starkweather was a hundred miles away, in her parents' basement, doing the laundry and listening to Madonna's "Immaculate Collection". It would have dampened her mood considerably to learn that nine-tenths of her small client base had been incinerated to a fine powder in just under ten milliseconds, but she sang her way blissfully through the end of "Papa Don't Preach" without suspecting anything more unusual than a mild earthquake.

There was nothing particularly special or interesting about the Starkweather residence to distinguish it from the thousands of identical houses that surrounded it-- except for the truly astounding collection of exceptionally detailed and precise extreme closeup photographs of flowers in all their stages of dormancy, bloom, and decay that covered every available wall surface and littered the tables and counters like fallen leaves. While out of the ordinary in the bland suburban sprawl, these lacked the necessary physical, chemical, and electromechanical properties to effectively supply the house with power independently of the massive grid that connected each house to every other, and, ultimately, to the city itself. This was perfectly understandable, but as a direct result of this lack, Tulip was plunged into utter darkness and silence at exactly the same instant as every other resident for miles around.

Tulip thumped the side of the washing machine and swore. A rolling blackout wasn't so out of the ordinary, but she was pretty sure she'd have heard something on the news if power demand was getting too high. She thought it would probably pass quickly, and toyed with the idea of simply waiting it out in the basement. There was, after all, a six-pack of beer in the little spare fridge that would be getting warm. The idea of spending an indefinite amount of time in the cozy little below-ground room seemed very appealing, until she recalled that the only bottle opener was upstairs in the kitchen. So, up the stairs it would be.

There was a murky orange glow on the western horizon, which Tulip ignored out of long habit. The sky over the city was almost always an unpleasant hue of one or another unnatural color. Her father, the botanist, often compared it to the pigmentation of some exotic flower, but then again, that's all he ever did with anything. He'd even gone so far as to name all three of his children after flowers, with mixed results.

The eldest, Daisy, had been a delicate and charming beauty of sunny disposition, until the day of her ninth birthday when a bee had crawled into her can of orange soda and she subsequently died from an allergic reaction to a sting on the inside of her throat. Tulip had learned to drink only from clear containers, survived adolescence with nothing more than a strong antipathy for boys who wanted to "get a look at her petals", and put her degree in pharmacology to good use distributing cunningly designed little pills to a select group of customers. The youngest, Rose, had seethed through life until he was able to change his name to Ted, for reasons known only to himself. Ted had stalked off into the New Mexico desert in search of an advanced degree in one of the more obscure sciences, vowing revenge upon the family.

It was strangely warm in the kitchen. Tulip liberated a Red Hook IPA from the fridge, fumbled it open in the darkness, and went out to the porch to see if any air was moving out there. A hot wind was blowing from the direction of the city. There was a faint, but pungent reek to the wind; she would have appreciated the irony in the fact that she'd just inhaled a few molecules that had previously been part of an ex-boyfriend she'd dumped because of his burgeoning coke habit, but unfortunately there was no one in a position to point this out to her.

"Humulus lupulus," came a low voice from the other end of the porch. There was a long, appreciative sniffing sound, and then a quiet chuckle. "Otherwise known as the common hop flower. Any chance you could spare one of those for your little brother?"

Tulip couldn't entirely stifle a little shriek. She hadn't thought about her brother in years, and it took her sluggish brain an instant to identify the voice and silhouette of the sinister figure who shared her parents' porch with her. In that instant, she became dimly aware that the neighbors were standing in their yards in tightly bunched knots of fretful humanity, having quietly intense little discussions and pointing to the west. She felt hungover, confused, left behind by events that had accelerated out of her control.

Somewhere deep in her subconscious, little nagging hints connected her brother's presence to the temblor, the blackout, and the acrid, smoky tang on the incongruously warm breeze, but Tulip just handed the bottle to her brother's silhouette and licked her lips nervously.

"Thanks," Ted drawled before taking a long pull at the bottle. "Thirsty work tonight." There was a pause that only failed to qualify as an uncomfortable silence because of the thundering overhead of two fighter jets streaking pointlessly but with great zeal towards the city. When the reverberations of their passage had faded away, Ted put his feet up on the porch railing and cocked an eyebrow at his sister. "Don't say much, do you? Would have expected at least a hello, after all this time..."

"Hh... Hello, Ro--I mean, Ted. Hello, Ted." Tulip finched at her mistake, half expecting him to lash out at her for the mistake. The warmth and light were starting to penetrate her consciousness, making her feel more awake and alive. She thought the surge of adrenalin that hit her when she noticed the light glinting dully on Ted's handgun might also have played a role in her rise to alertness. Gouts of fire sprouted in the west and reached delicate tendrils to the crescent moon.

"Quite a show out there, wasn't it?" If her brother was irked by the gaffe, he gave no sign. "I mean, wow. Am I right?" He looked expectantly at Tulip, and his face gleamed infernally. His expression was fiercely triumphant, but there was a hunger there, a need for approval that she recognized only too well.

"I don't know, Ted, I didn't see anything," Tulip began, and didn't realize her mistake until he stood abruptly, knocking over the half-finished beer, and pointed the gun at her. Sirens were echoing all over the town now; most of the neighbors had retreated to their houses or piled into SUVs to depart with immoderate squealing of tires. Two mistakes in as many sentences; she'd have to be a lot more careful if she wanted to live through this.

"I mean, I didn't see anything in my life to match it. Truly spectacular. It was like--" she stopped again as she heard him cock the pistol.

"Like what?" he snarled at her, lip trembling.

Tulip looked down the barrel of the gun and tried to think. To her deep shame, the only thing that leapt to mind was the chorus to "Like A Virgin". A quick glance at her brother's face told her that was probably not the answer he was looking for. She didn't want to say what the catastrophe she was supposed to have found so deeply spectacular was like. In desperation, she tried to change the subject to something-- anything-- else.

"You knew dad would be at Porter's for his sixtieth, didn't you?" She asked.

"But of course. One thing you could say for the old man, when he got an idea in his head, he wasn't going to change it for anyone."

"At least we can agree on that much. No one else appreciated the fact that he kept going there even after the new chef changed the menu and stopped making that duck he always liked. I thought you'd enjoy hearing that."

"I do. Even though it's not true-- they post their menu online you know. I had to check the address, didn't I?"

"How'd you get the bomb-- it was a bomb, wasn't it? How'd you get it there?"

"I'd prefer not to go into the details, if that's quite alright with you. That's the mistake movie supervillains always make. Plus I'd like to get the hell out of here before the fallout really starts to settle. I used a real clean design, but even so it won't just be the hands on your Mickey Mouse watch that glow in the dark by tomorrow morning."

"And this is your idea of supervillain banter?"

"Good point. I suppose I should be done with killing you and hit the road."

"Why me, Ted? What the fuck did I ever do?"

Ted's lip curled even more gruesomely, and Tulip was pretty sure she could see tears welling up in his eyes. The gun wavered in his grip, but nowhere near enough. He took a step closer, and the gun was now mere inches from her face. The heat on the back of Tulip's neck was increasing, and she thought she could hear the roar of a tremendous, distant fire, but she couldn't seem to will herself to look away from the muzzle of the gun.

"You? It was ALL you, you fucking cunt! If you hadn't blabbed to all your friends, I could have got all the way through high school with everyone thinking I was named after Rosey Grier instead of some fucking... fucking... plant!"

Tulip's mouth curled crookedly, but some deeply submerged survival instinct kept her from laughing at the memory. "I- I'm really sorry, Ted, I thought everyone knew, with dad being so famous and everything. I never would have-"

"Save it, sis. This is-" having cut her off in mid-sentence, Ted was himself interrupted by a diffident cough from the bottom of the porch steps. Both siblings froze, and slowly turned to their audience of one. Tulip had the absurd sensation of being in an improv comedy group, waiting for the viewers to shout out the situation for their next vignette (You're Genghis Khan's proctologist... making a complaint at an airline luggage office. Yeah, thanks, great idea...)

The elderly woman cleared her throat again. "Hello, Tulip. I don't want to bother you if you're busy, but Vernon and I are heading north and we wondered if we could siphon the gas from your father's Country Squire. That is, if you're not-"

"Trust me, Mrs. Gardner, she won't be using it," Ted sneered back at her. "In a few minutes you can call her 'Dandelion', because I'm going to fucking blow her head apart and let the pieces drift away on the wind."

"Oh dearie me, how awful. Whatever did that sweet young girl ever do to--" here she paused to push her spectacles up on her nose and squint back and forth between Tulip and Ted again. "Rose? Rosey Starkweather, is that you? Well, I'm shocked. Do you know what a mess that will make of your parents' porch? And they'd just be so disappointed to see you fighting with your sister."

Ted at last turned his attention, and the malevolent black eye of the gun, away from Tulip and towards the decrepit Mrs. Gardner. She blinked placidly at him, like a cow watching a train go by. Tulip tried to guess how far it was from the porch to the vegetable garden below. Not nearly far enough, but it was her only chance.

"My name," he screamed at her, the cords standing out in his neck, fingers restlessly twitching and massaging the gun, "is Ted!"

He never got the chance to find out what Mrs. Gardner thought of his nom de guerre, because as he levelled the gun at her lumpen figure, Tulip lunged forward with all her might and shoved him hard between the shoulder blades. He fired, wide, and windmilled his arms as he fell through the rotten porch railing and hung suspended in the air for a moment. He hit the ground with a curious sound of expelled breath and torn cloth, and wet gasps filtered back to Tulip's ears underneath the gathered alarm sirens of an entire region.

Tulip grabbed one of the columns supporting the porch roof and peered over into the garden. Her brother lay sprawled in the black earth, limbs twitching ineffectually, gasping for breath. The expression of surprise and wounded pride on his face was ninety percent attributable to the two and a half foot-tall metal tomato stake protuding from his chest, and only ten percent attributable to the fact that his clutching fingers were being relieved of their firearm by an 85-year old halfwit.
Tulip suddenly felt pretty good about having taken up some of the flower beds to put in a kitchen garden earlier in the year, against her father's wishes. At the sudden release of tension, she giggled uncontrollably.

"Jesus Christ, little brother, if you WERE a supervillain, they'd have to call you Ted Lee Nightshade." She felt like her bladder was about to release.

"Now now, dearie, " Mrs. Gardner clucked idiotically, "there's no need to add insult to injury. Your mother didn't have any canned goods, or iodine tablets in the pantry, did she?"

"If she did, you're welcome to 'em. Need any company on that trip up north?"

"Well, goodness gracious me, I don't know. Do you have anything in the way of useful survival skills to offer?"

"Uh, well, I know which mushrooms you can eat, and which are poisonous. And I can do you up an absolutely lovely tea for arthritis, insomnia, whatever ails you. My stuff's in the basement."

"That's nice, dearie. You know, your father always thought you were simple, but you've really blossomed into a lovely young thing."

User Reviews

Submitted by Coyote (user info) at 2005-02-22 07:10:33 EST (#)
Ranking: 0

Thanks Circe! I had fun writing it.

Submitted by Circe (user info) at 2005-02-22 06:36:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2

You should have won.

Submitted by youarsoghey (user info) at 2005-01-16 11:37:35 EST (#)
Ranking: 2

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