The Flower Failures

by Katherine Williams

Santa Maria leaned forward, her knees pressed into the soft dirt, and crushed another of the marigold buds between her fingers, saying to Niņa, "I've found another one; that's fourteen this morning." Niņa shook her head and clucked her tongue, and Santa Maria shifted her weight to the right to reach the flowers at the back of the bed. It was hot this morning, too hot for working, but they had customers waiting in town and it couldn't be delayed. As far as Santa Maria could see, the empty white sky bore down upon the open land like some grievous weight, pressing on her back and driving her hands further into the flower bed. Her fingers found another of the diseased buds and pinched it from the stem. "Fifteen," she whispered, and the bud popped between her fingers.

Niņa sat down beside her and wiped the sweat off her chin. "Where's Pinta?"

"I don't know; I haven't seen her since breakfast." Santa Maria looked down at the marigolds and took her scissors out of her pocket. "I imagine she's in the shed, mixing up today's batch. Have you looked there?"

"I haven't looked anywhere. I was just wondering where she was, that's all." Niņa, older than Santa Maria by nine years, was already starting to exhibit the signs of the chronic arthritis that had debilitated their mother. But Santa Maria's fingers were still as nimble as when she was a girl, and so Niņa had reluctantly passed the critical task of gathering the flowers to her.

Niņa was watching her out of the corner of her eye, Santa Maria could tell. Her sister never did trust her to cut the flowers right, even though Santa Maria'd been doing it for three years and had only injured a few of the healthy babies out of the thousands she'd harvested. She reached down and quickly cut the first one, exactly in the right place, just to show Niņa she knew what she was doing. Niņa sighed and looked away, and Santa Maria cut three more and put them in her basket. The flowers glowed orange and yellow in the bottom of the basket, unnatural and vaguely disturbing, like the eyes of jaundiced children.

"How many today, do you think?" Niņa was watching her again, but not really seeing her this time, so Santa Maria didn't mind. She settled back on her heels and squinted at the contents of the basket.

"Well, yesterday there were forty-three, so I figure about the same today, maybe a bit more. This weather's been helping; they're blooming like crazy." She looked at the next plant and put down her scissors to pinch off another malformed bud. "That is, if we don't lose too many more. Sixteen." She squashed the bud and threw it onto the paving stones, then took up her shears again. "Why don't you go find Pinta and see if she's ready for these. I'm almost done."

Niņa stood up slowly, favoring her stiff joints as she walked to the small shed at the back of the yard. Santa Maria turned and watched her enter the shed, then come back out and wave, mouthing, "She's in here, I've found her." Santa Maria looked back down at the flowers and cut another perfect bloom from the plants and put it in the basket with the others, ignoring with effort its small breathless cry as it separated from the stem.

She'd discovered the babies quite by accident, seven years ago. Actually, it was closer to nine years but she didn't tell her sisters that, she felt it might make them hate her for keeping the secret to herself for so long. She'd been weeding in the annual bed they planted every spring on Mama's grave when she heard the cries. She lifted her head and glanced about her for the source, but there were no babies within hearing distance, their house was too far out in the country for that. No, it was much closer, and much smaller, and it wasn't until she bent back to her weeding that she heard it again, right next to her ear.

She kept her head very still and listened, looking at the ground. When she heard it again, it seemed to emanate from her mother's grave, low to the ground and very faint. She slowly turned her head until she was looking directly at the marigolds nodding on their stems next to her face. She couldn't really believe what she was hearing, yet it was definitely coming from the flowers. Before she knew what she was doing she reached out a finger and touched the nearest blossom. The crying started anew and spread to the other blooms until she felt she was nearly suffocating in small cries and chokes and newborn sniffles, all coming from the marigolds on her mother's grave.

From that day one, she knelt by the flowers at least once a day, little by little unearthing the enormity of her discovery. She found that the flowerbabies, as she decided to call them, liked the sun and rarely cried when the weather was good, but on cloudy days they whimpered and grizzled until she couldn't stand it any longer and retreated into the house to escape their cries. They didn't like it when she weeded: that almost always threw them into full-blown tantrums, but she weeded anyway with balls of cotton stuffed in her ears, because she couldn't bear the thought of Mama's grave covered with weeds. But what they liked the best was when Santa Maria knelt down in the dirt and put her face right in amongst them and sang to them and told them little stories of April rain and butterflies. Then she could actually hear them laugh and giggle in their high-pitched infant voices, and it made her smile, thinking of their happiness.

She began to take careful notice of their growth, finding that the largest and healthiest buds bore the flowerbabies with the heartiest laughs and the best dispositions. One day, before she realized what she was doing, she reached out and plucked a deformed bud from its stem, and then watched in horror as it wriggled and twisted in her palm until it finally died, several minutes later. She determined never to kill another one again, but soon she found she couldn't bear the shrill screams of the disfigured blooms that emerged from the diseased buds. The poor things were in constant pain, she could tell, because they were the ones that never ceased crying, even when she snuck out of the house and sang lullabies to them in the dead of night. So she took to plucking the ill-fated buds and then squashing them between her fingers immediately. She hoped it was a merciful end.

Things might have gone on like this forever if it weren't for something that happened two years after Santa Maria discovered the flowerbabies. The sisters were expecting the minister and his wife for dinner, and Santa Maria and Niņa sat with the visitors in the parlor, laughing and talking. When Santa Maria walked, smiling, into the dining room to see if dinner was ready, Pinta was setting the first course on the table. Santa Maria stopped abruptly in the doorway of the room, watching her sister with her heart in sudden spasms. Pinta carried out two more salad plates and set them on the table. It was a beautiful salad, green and fresh, but what caused Santa Maria's shocked silence was the garnish, the wonderful contrast of the yellow and orange from the sprinkling of marigold petals over the greenery on the plates. She almost fainted, thinking of it, but she breathed deeply and sat down at her place at the table and ate the salad with the others. Actually, it was quite delicious, and Pinta left the table with an armload of the empty plates, blushing from the minister's praise.

It wasn't until all three sisters and the minister's wife discovered their unexpected pregnancies the next month that Santa Maria made the connection, and told Niņa and Pinta about the flowerbabies. Of course, the sisters couldn't let the pregnancies continue. On the next full moon Pinta concocted a potion of herbs and oils and they aborted the babies, kneeling together on the bathroom floor and crying softly in each others arms. The minister's wife, however, gave birth the following spring to a beautiful baby boy with yellow eyes flecked with orange and gold, and fine brown hair the color of rich, fertile earth, and that's when Santa Maria had what she called The Idea.

She got up from her knees beside the grave and carried her basket to the shed, opening her eyes wide as she stepped into the gloom. The smell in the shed always reminded her simultaneously of wide open fields of wheat and the cramped spaces of the church confessional. Niņa and Pinta looked up briefly from the large pot that simmered over the small stove in the corner, and Santa Maria said, "Is it ready, yet?"

"Almost," said Niņa, and the steam from the pot curled around her head like a halo in the shadows. Pinta added a few more spoonfuls of sugar to the mixture and Santa Maria took the flowers over to the pot, waiting for Pinta's nod of approval. It was Pinta, the most proficient cook among them, who had turned out to be the best at making the tea. Somehow, Niņa's came out strong and bitter, and Santa Maria's smelled of spoiled milk, even though they all followed the same recipe. When Pinta leaned her head over the pot and breathed deeply, drawing the steam down into her lungs and holding it there, Niņa and Santa Maria held their breaths, too, waiting. Pinta finally let her breath out, all at once, in a whoosh that stole the steam from around their heads and carried it to the farthest corners of the shed, and she nodded, smiling.

"One of the best, I think," Pinta said, then she reached for Santa Maria's basket. "It's time for the flowers, now." She took the basket, then looked at Santa Maria and Niņa. "Do you have your cottonballs in?"

"Of course," said Santa Maria, too quickly. She really did hate this part, when the blooms were added to the brew. She couldn't understand why they all had to be there when the flowerbabies were cooked, but her sisters had insisted they do it together. Somehow it made them tighter, accomplices in some dirty deed, even though they knew they were really helping, that scores of women would conceive darling little babies with yellow eyes and earth-brown hair because of what they did there in the gloom of the potting shed. It was almost shameful, like having your slip show in church, only much worse, but at least they did it together, with cottonballs shoved down deep in their ears to dampen the guilt.

Pinta held the basket over the boiling liquid, then quickly, without hesitation, she dumped the flowers into the pot. Santa Maria folded her arms over her chest and watched the flowerbabies swirl and sink into the tea. The tea immediately began to change, the color of the marigolds diffusing through the liquid and turning the brew from nondescript brown to a pale, almost iridescent yellow-orange. She closed her eyes, imagining that she could hear the flowerbabies as they died, just to make herself feel some of the grief she'd felt the first time they did this. But the cottonballs worked as they always did, and she heard only the familiar, hushed roaring in her ears, like some great sea off in the distance. When she opened her eyes again her sisters were looking at her with steam-haloed concern on their darkened faces.

"I'm sorry, I just got dizzy for a minute," she said, trying to smile, but Niņa took her by the arm and led her outside into the brightness of the morning sun and left her there without a word. Santa Maria stood there for a minute, the sun settling around her shoulders like a old blanket, warm and familiar. Then, glancing behind her to make sure Niņa had gone back into the shed, she strode over to Mama's grave and knelt down by the marigolds.

"I'm sorry, I'm really, really sorry," she whispered, and the flowerbabies gurgled and laughed at the sound of her voice. A warm breeze skipped across the yard and the blossoms bobbed and danced in the wind, and Santa Maria could almost hear them forgiving her as they always did, even when she was killing them. She lay face down in the dirt next to the grave and pressed her cheek into the sun-warmed loam. Her eyes closed, she ran her hardened fingers through the moist, rich earth and stroked the leaves of the flowerbabies and gently touched their petals, and when her fingers encountered a withered bud she plucked it and crushed it between her thumb and forefinger, without thinking twice.