The Flower

“Look, the flower.” Lilian murmurs, pointing her index finger towards somewhere in the field.

“I’ve never noticed it before. Have you ever seen this type of flower anywhere else in our village?”

It’s already midnight, besides them there’s no one else around at this hour of day. Vivian stands up, her eyes following the direction where Lilian’s finger is pointing, a torch in her hand. “…No, not really, at least not that I can remember.” She narrows her eyes, locates the flower, and sinks into contemplation.

Where does it come from?

The girls stand in silence for a long while, amidst a field of rice, which have started to grow their green leaves. It’s summer again, though the weather is much cooler than usual. Dozens of bugs buzz in the bushes, making a noise so loud that the girls are forced to cover their ears from time to time. The rice leaves and branches give out a warm, humid smell, accompanied by the awful stink of the cow shit the farmers got rid of earlier that day. The wind breezes through Vivian’s right arm and she shivers slightly.

Lilian is feeling quite down. At dinner, she had a huge argument with her mother, once again, about her future. The conclusion is always the same—blankness, unknown destination—which left her mother once again so extremely pissed off.

“Why couldn’t you take your life fucking seriously? What’s wrong with you?”

“Why are you always so useless?”

“Don’t you remember the famous phrase by Confucius: respect the old and protect the young? You’ve done neither of them.”

“I’ve spent the past twenty years raising up a loser who still sucks her mother’s blood as a grown-up.”

“All you did was play, play, play. With your bunch of equally incompetent friends. You’d better pack your stuff, get the fuck out of this house, and go to live with your loser friends right now.”

Lilian keeps hearing sentences like this ever since she started to remember things. Even the most trivial thing might ignite her mother’s rage. She would scream and yell at Lilian for as long as she wants, while she remains silent throughout, her head bowed down.

Tonight, Lilian managed to sneak out while her mother left the living room to take a loo, barely escaping the upcoming beating as her usual punishment.

But she couldn’t help it. Everything changed after that drowning experience. It happened on the day she turned twelve, during a day-trip she took with several primary school friends to the beach at the border of their village. Thinking if it now, Lilian couldn’t remember what happened exactly, only that she was hit by a gigantic wave while swimming towards the further part of the ocean. She was a decent swimmer, but still her body immediately froze after seeing the tall, translucent wall ascending right in front of her.

It was a magnificent wave, the type that one would appreciate and fear simultaneously. It hit her hard in the head, and she passed out within a few seconds. She remembered vaguely of being swallowed by the wave and left alone in total darkness. When she woke up, out of some unnamed miracle, she found herself floating on the surface. With all the strength that was left inside her, she struggled back to the shore.

That was also when Lilian began to have that nightmare.

In the nightmare, it’s always dark. She couldn’t see a thing, but feels suffocated as if she is drowning underneath the currents of a long, seamless winter river, her body gradually engulfed by the chilling, fluctuating fluid.

Yes, that feeling of suffocation.

She strives to combat it, useless. It overwhelms her, dragging her deeper and deeper down the water; she strives to breathe, yet immediately as she opens her mouth gulps of water would rush in, run down her throat, fill up her lungs until she chokes and chokes.

Then she would wake up all of a sudden, coughing severely, sweating all over, breathing with immense difficulty and a pain in the chest as if she really did drown just now.

Therapy was useless. Doctor Miller, whom her mother declared as the most professional in the town nearby, could not figure out a thing. He kept on blabbing theories, quoting extensively from Sigmund Freud, for instance, by claiming that her dream is nothing more than her brain trying to fight against that traumatic experience of drowning. It weaves similar dreams as a way of acting out that trauma, until this experience is both physically and psychically overcome.

To Lilian, this was pure bullshit. She knew he would never understand, despite his snobbishness and his so-called rich experience in the field.

So she keeps drowning in her dream, every day, at the same time: 3:30:30 a.m.*.

It’s curious, why it happens at exactly that time.

Could it be something “supernatural”?

Could it be that “someone” is trying to convey a message to her?

This was one of the theories proposed by Vivian, who is superstitious in many ways because she always believes in magic. Every time her imagination runs riot Lilian would respond with a sneer and a shrug.

How could magic be real anyway? Isn’t that something that is invented by adults to fool little kids? After all, there is a solution to every trick performed by the magicians. No matter how impossible it seems.

Lilian finds it hilarious to see how rapturous Vivian becomes whenever she talks about magic or those supernatural beings like ghosts, angels etc.etc.

But tonight, something changes. Not because of the way they talked or behaved, but because of the flower. That flower. Lilian knew it must be the reason.

What is that flower?

They searched across the internet, and found nothing.

Taking a closer look, it’s a very peculiar flower—entirely white, even the stem, the leaves, the roots, are all spotlessly white. It’s hard to tell how many petals it has, since they all seem to connect with each other seamlessly, so that when observing the flower in a distance, it resembles a small sector of waves. The roots spread across a large portion of land, and the entire area looks white.

No, it would be hasty to describe the flower as white, because it’s in fact semi-translucent.

Originally, they suspected it to be some sort of artificial flower that was made of ice, probably by some kids who played in the field before they came here. They soon dismissed such speculation as impossible: Here they are, in the middle of summer, with some thirty degree-Celsius.

Most importantly, the flower seems to be alive. What’s even stranger is that, though both were sure that they’d never seen it before in real life, Lilian reckoned it to be familiar after taking a closer look.

She realized soon that the flower comes from her. From the inside. She could always sense something growing inside her ever since she started to have those drowning nightmares, although the growth has been extremely slow that it remains almost undetectable. It’s only after she observed the actual flower tonight when she was suddenly seized with absolute certainty that it was her flower. The thing that keeps growing inside her.

It grows out of her body, out of her countless nightmares, and metamorphoses into a real, living one, sparkling in the dark.

Lilian never believed in magic. Now, standing right in front of her very own flower, with Vivian and the moon (the moon is full tonight) as the only two other witnesses, for the first time in her life she starts to think that perhaps there is, after all, real magic in the world.

She also knows, from somewhere deep in her heart, that she’ll not be having that nightmare anymore when she falls asleep tonight, after an entire decade.

The two decide to linger on for a while. They look into each other’s eyes, with a silent, mutual feeling they know that tomorrow nothing stays the same. Then, hand in hand, they slowly walk towards the flower, and begin to dance around it, humming the melody of “Edelweiss” together, laughter jiggling through the air.

The flower, as if sensing their presence and the sound of music, slightly shivers, and glows ever more ferociously under the moonlight.

*One night Lilian woke up again at 3:30:30 a.m. with a sudden urge of saying something, yet words remained stuck in her mouth and simply wouldn't come out. She grabbed a piece of paper from her desk and scribbled down something which looked like a poem:

That black, gruesome eagle returns

again

Every night at 3.30 A.M. 30

SECONDS

as I drift into somnambulism

it’s an utterly

evil creature who tears

my chest apart and pulls

out my red juvenile heart

and gulps

it down its throat and

screams with its

red bloody mouth WIDE OPEN—

now, the poor little girl is left

alone in her gloomy,

silhouetted room

with no heart

the black eagle had

stolen her heart

She watches FEAR&PAIN pervade her veins as the

clock in her bedroom blinks

with its dark eyes

: “aye sir, she feels nothing—”

: “she cannot even scream—”

she’s reduced to a heartless doll

tied up with cotton strings

immersed in her doll house

wearing her usual smile that is

no longer a smile

Disclaimer: Edelweiss is NOT the type of flower the two saw in the field, even today they still have no answer.