Fiction: Plant Life by Matt Goldberg

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When I went out to the backyard patio for some basil, I noticed that growing in my garden was a flower with a face. He’d sprouted up next to the herbs I’d planted in late spring. The flower’s face looked familiar. He looked like some guy I knew named Jake.

“My name’s not Jake,” the flower told me, after I called him Jake. “It’s Daffodil.”

I leaned in for a closer look and caught a whiff of him. Slightly sweet with a hint of lemon. “Yeah,” I said. “But you look like a Jake.”

“That’s not for you to decide.”

I didn’t necessarily agree with the flower. If he was growing in the planter box I’d built, shouldn’t I have some say in the matter?

But I wasn’t sure how to ask that question without coming off as a jerk, so I didn’t. The flower wasn’t paying attention to me anyway. He was staring straight into the sun, arching his stem, unfurling his petals to soak up the light. His leaves were textured. They seemed like they had a layer of fur on them, which was odd, since flowers didn’t have fur as far as I knew. I rubbed one of his furry leaves between my fingers, and he spun his face back around at me.

“So, what’s with the fur?” I asked.

The flower’s stem shuddered, and his face bobbed from side to side. “It’s not fur. You act like you know me, but you don’t.”

“Whatever,” I said.

I remembered the reason I came out to my patio—to make some pesto—and started snapping off basil leaves from the plant next to the flower. He flinched each time I did it.

“Just be chill,” I said.

The flower made a pfft sound with his little tongue.

“What’s your beef with me?” I asked.

“I didn’t ask to grow in your garden.”

“Tough luck,” I said.

The flower went silent, and I kept on gathering basil. The sun eventually dipped behind some clouds, shading us from its glare. It felt good to be out of the heat.

“Nice weather,” I said, hoping it would lighten the mood.

The flower stayed quiet, so I tried again.

“Have you been lonely out here by yourself?”

The flower rustled the lion’s mane of yellow petals around his face. A few drifted down to the soil. “Why do you insist on talking?”

“I was just trying to make conversation.”

“Does the quiet make you nervous?”

I didn’t want to admit that it did. “I just thought you’d want to talk to me is all.”

The flower curled his petals over his face. His voice came out muffled. “Narcissist.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. I gathered the rest of the basil and slammed the patio door.

I forgot about the flower for a while. That’s natural—I had other stuff on my plate. Work. Trying to date. Those two things consumed most of my life. Who cared about some flower? With the air conditioning in my house, I barely even noticed that we were in the midst of an extreme heatwave. So I was pretty surprised the next time I went out to the garden to find that all my plants had dried up in the sun, their supple stems turned to reedy husks. The flower with the face made a crinkling noise when he looked up at me, his eyes droopy and bloodshot, his leaves a desiccated brown. As much as our previous interaction annoyed me, I didn’t want him to die.

“Oh no, Jake!”

He didn’t have the strength to correct me. I hosed him down. Then I stood out in the hot sun and watched the water soak into the soil. The flower with a face took in the moisture, his roots converting hose-water, which wasn’t even potable, into the miracle of life.

“Why didn’t you call out for help?” I asked, once the color returned to the flower’s face.

“That’s not what plants do.”

“But you’re different.”

“I’m me,” the flower said.

“Who even are you?”

“Daffodil.”

“But you’re not a daffodil,” I said. “I looked it up. You don’t look like one.”

“What’s this need of yours to be in control?”

I stopped to consider it. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just the way I am.”

“Why not just sit here a while?”

The sun was still high in the sky. I wondered how it would feel, being confined in my garden like the flower. So I sat there, baking in the heat. The flower and I didn’t say anything to each other. We didn’t have to. It wasn’t a talking kind of mood.

Eventually, I got up, remembering that I had the gift of mobility. I re-watered the flower for good measure, then went back inside to my air-conditioned house.

Not long after that, the heat broke and it stormed. I didn’t forget about the flower this time. I donned my rainboots and went out to hold an umbrella over him. I leaned in close and took in his light, lemony scent. The rain pelted off the top of the umbrella and slid away from us.

“Stop that,” the flower said, our faces almost touching. “I want the rain.”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course you do. What was I thinking?”

“You were thinking like you instead of like me.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a flower, but it was beyond the scope of my imagination. I collapsed the umbrella. We took in the rain.

After that, I began to visit the flower each morning before I had to start work. We didn’t greet each other. I just stood next to the flower box and watched the sun rise. It was peaceful.

I played Mozart for the flower because I saw a social media post saying that plants grew better if they listened to music. But it turned out not to be true.

“I don’t have ears,” the flower explained.

I did a double take and realized he was right. His face had all the other hallmarks of a face—a mouth, a nose, two eyes, even eyelashes and eyebrows—but no ears.

“How do you hear me then?” I asked.

“I’m a flower. How should I know?”

“You’re a marvel. That’s what you are.”

“I’m nothing special,” he said.

A light breeze was going and, combined with the fragrance of the herbs and the pleasant warmth of the sun, a lot of my senses were aroused at once.

“Hey, Daffodil. Would you consider me a friend?”

He drooped a little. “It’s complicated.”

“Why can’t it be simple?”

“Nothing ever is.”

Even if the flower didn’t consider me a friend, I thought of him that way. I guess you could say he was becoming important to me. I wanted him to know me better. I’d been dating someone around that time and it was going pretty well. So one morning, after she slept over, I took her out to my backyard patio. I wanted the flower to meet her.

“This is Alison,” I told him.

But he kept his petals closed around his face and didn’t say anything. He looked like a normal flower, and Alison made a sound that was almost a laugh.

It seemed like she thought I was making a joke, so I tried to play it off like one, which went over okay. I hoped she didn’t think I was a weirdo, but it was hard to tell with those kinds of things. Mostly, the whole interaction felt like a missed opportunity.

“You made me look bad,” I said to the flower, after Alison left.

The flower tilted his face away from me and toward the sun. “You made you look bad.”

“I guess I was hoping you’d impress her.”

“You don’t need me for that.”

“I wish that were true.”

Things wound up petering out with Alison. But that was all right. There would be other dates, but as far as I could tell, there was only one flower with a face.

I continued to visit him each morning. More and more, I enjoyed the communal solitude of these visits. We’d become content to just be near each other.

This went on throughout the summer and fall, until the weather began to turn. Where I lived, it could get cold pretty fast. I asked the flower a question that had been bothering me.

“Do you ever wish you could leave my garden?”

The flower paused. He had a habit of pausing for minutes at a time. I learned that I didn’t need to fill the silences. “I can’t even conceive of leaving,” he said, finally.

“Aren’t you afraid of the season’s changing?”

The flower did his equivalent of a shrug, which involved him tilting the two furry leaves closest to his face. I think he learned how to shrug from me. “That’s just how it is,” he said.

“I can put you inside, you know. In a pot on the windowsill.”

“No, that won’t do.”

I wanted to protest, but I knew I couldn’t persuade him. His way of thinking was so different from mine. I couldn’t even say if what he did constituted thinking. But I tried to understand his decision as best I could, and once the weather got cold, he slowly wilted. I offered to set up a portable heater out on the patio or put Saran wrap over him, which I read online was supposed to help plants trap heat. He wouldn’t accept any offer of help.

“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you want to live?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” the flower said, softly. I saw the glitter of a tear leak out from one of his eyes. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just the frost of the late November chill.

I touched his cold face with my hand, brushing aside the last few remaining petals. He closed his eyes, and I kissed his cheek. He was furry there, too.

I stood over the flower box watching Daffodil until the thin light of the sun dissolved behind the clouds. The wind had picked up and it seeped through the light jacket I was wearing. The air smelled like nothing. I didn’t know what it meant for a flower to die. They didn’t have hearts or brains. They had roots. I didn’t even know if he was a seasonal or a perennial. There was so much I wouldn’t ever understand. The hardest part was being okay with that.

Matt Goldberg’s fiction has appeared in The Normal School, SmokeLong Quarterly, Porter House Review, The Razor, Philadelphia Stories, Vast Chasm Magazine, Bending Genres, Maudlin House, and many others. His work has also been anthologized in Coolest American Stories 2022 and won first place for the Uncharted Magazine Sci-Fi and Fantasy Short Story Award, judged by Ken Liu. Matt earned his MFA in creative writing from Temple University and lives in Philadelphia, PA, with his partner.