I'll Turn into a Pumpkin After Midnight

Bright yellow flowers surrounded them as they took their afternoon tea, like little trumpets on wandering green vines. A garish loud clash with Cornelia's red locks. Cornelia Gauri of Mahukar was the first born daughter of a King, which by all accounts meant she was a bit of a waste of rank, despite his own unending affection. He had apparently loved her mother quite excessively, to the degree that even her stepmother thought better of treating Cornelia with unkindness.

Her stepmother was if anything very accommodating of Cornelia. She apparently looks a lot like her elder sister, though they shared little relation asides from country of birth. Which given the math meant a lot. She supposed it made her feel like a niece rather than a nuisance.

This meant that when they had tea together it was less awkward than it would otherwise be, even in the rather unique royal garden.

"I wonder why papa insists on growing pumpkins rather than something more ornamental." Cornelia asked. She didn't disagree wholly with their appearance, it was simply odd to her having gone to other noble gardens which often beheld very different flowers, or cuttings from the royal stores explicitly to appeal to her father, who for whatever reason was often very proud of such appeals to his ego.

Her stepmother took another sip to wet her palate before laying out a tale…

She's tipped backwards in a fashion that she found daunting, her red locks tied up now down but not yet unpleated, or even unraveled, In a dress she found over-confining for a creature that wasn't sessile. She didn't have much time. Until winter, whenever that was, and after midnight, the time cut in that mammal fashion she wouldn't see but to judge.

Woozy in new feet, as much as shoes, and manners and form, the Flower leads her prince away with attention, "dear me." she says, and with the smallest of motions she is led forth from the room and onto a couch well used to nauseous noble women.

This little nook went unmentioned by the fairy, but it seemed a sensible accommodation for those expected to wear over-starched court gowns. Though rather than leave her to her purpose, the prince saw fit to gaze upon her ill-form with the attention and curiosity of a child.

He'd filled her dance card single handedly, if she'd had a dance card, and she was rather sick, even if he was fit enough to tilt her this way and that.

"I've stolen your evening." she says to him.

"No, no, I've lost it on my own terms. I'd say." and yet she finds his attention confusing. Surely he could see her discomfort. It seemed odd that her ill-health was not taken as a demerit given the nature of more complicated animals. That her weakness was not a point of null selection. And yet, as if she'd had no chaperone he kisses her…

"It was rather a shock, my sister with the prince. But the gown was all wrong! Still, I'd not been so graceful as to hide properly."

"You didn't."

"Of course I did. Had he the ego to move forwards she'd have a witness, and had he not then I'd at least know what was what."

"What happened next?"

"Well, your father might have the ego, but your mother. She simply smiled at me."

She looked over at her gardener's sister, a pretty face with little use, and not a feature in common with her. The Flower didn't think much of her, but she was always careful not to trample her lower vines, and as such she also found little to complain over.

She didn't get up from her perch, but she did gesture to her with hopes that they could talk, given they shared something partial to a root. Luckily the prince had such regard that he allowed her this privacy, even in passing.

Looking deeper at her face the girl decided, "You're not her."

"My gardener?"

"Your gardener?"

"Yes you know her? Correct. I've been given her form for the moment."

"But how?"

"On a fairy's request of course, what other reason would I have?"

She was the belle of the ball, as requested by her benefactor, and it was up to her, the Flower, to find well where to take root. She'd looked up at the prince and saw a face that was oversized and ugly. in colors cut in untidy and muted directions unlike that of her own natural perception. While looking over at her gardener's sister she saw only confusion. She wondered why it was that animals such as humans bothered or blathered on about vision when theirs was honestly so poor. Still even in her dulled perception, these faces, these voices, everything was familiar.

It wasn't anything for her to discuss, but the girl was less unfettered by the notion. A Flower given womanhood by magic, fairy magic, and all to woo the prince, or barring that to grow far away from their garden…

"It was only after I'd known she wasn't my sister that I'd thought to befriend her."

"Why only then?"

"Well, to put it simply. My mother was a wicked stepmother."

"Ah."

"Yes. I was awful back then. I think if it had been my sister I'd have caused a scene, but knowing that she wasn't made it harder to treat her badly."

"That doesn't really explain it. What was the secret?"

"Well she was rather honest with me, but your father wouldn't know for some time. And really, you can at least be as patient as him."

At this Cornelia could only sigh and take another bite of pie, before gesturing for her stepmother to continue…

It was only so much time before her chaperone signed off on their marriage, an excessive arrangement for the time, at least according to other nobles but he'd felt need to pamper her given her limited connections.

It wasn't a very level match given the other options, well-connected, and just as pretty. But the Flower wore her gardener well at least by appearances, didn't make a peep, and was weak enough in her new body that his desires were piqued.

The fact that she wasn't aggressive in her affections, if they could be dubbed affections, was also likely a point of interest.

That was the theory anyway. The Flower didn't really see the appeal of her current form in human senses, and she was rather certain he was hallucinating if he did. Not to say she found the gardener unappealing, it's simply that her body and face seemed more appealing in their utility, and the Flower being a naturally sessile being didn't quite understand how to use her body that way.

While this didn't matter to the prince, whom like many men of the time seemed to prefer sessile animals, it made the Flower uncomfortable as it seemed kind of impertinent for a body that could move to not move simply because the sit and wait method was deemed sexually appealing.

She supposed it was unfair of her to go on with the man, prince or no, when she knew well enough that the seeds within her truest form, the ones that could seed, were already fertilized. But that was rather the point.

The fairy made an offer, and the Flower took it up. Mostly to find a better garden than the ones her gardener had access to. She wanted her sprouts in beautiful places, and ultimately a year was nothing for creatures that had the life resources to cultivate things like her.

She never bleeds in her time with the prince, and loved or no, by any normal nature she should likely be barren…

"Okay so they married obviously. I know that people were still talking about it even after your wedding."

"Well of course they did. It was a rather big deal. She was basically from nowhere, a red haired love letter of a woman."

"And now you speak like you married her."

"What a joke."

"Well it kinda is."

"You know well enough how long we had her don't you?"

"Yes. I know."

"Well I didn't know how long we'd have, but we spoke often during her reintroduction into society. She was a princess, and I'm pretty sure I'm the first to learn of you, asides her maid." Cornelia couldn't be certain of such a thing, but of course her stepmother would say so, it was common, so common to claim such knowledge of the deceased…

His silly face much clearer and yet much different then, nose to her Center, though far from her Pistil, on the wet morning of her first bloom. Only for him to be shoed away by her lovely gardener. A few hours later, when the world was a bit less damp a little wasp came to the star trumpet of her form with a leg of pollen and she was fertilized.

When she looks at the prince, in finery that for a human must have to be inviting, she remembers an ineffectual pollinator first and a man second. For a minute she thinks this cruel, to see only the failures in a man, but truly, would it have been better to see him as simply the pollen of concurrent Stamen?

She's made love in both ways now, a distance tied closed by wasp and fairy alike, she only sees him in the ways flowers see, with human eyes and yet she carries in both fashions.

"Do you think she was weak?"

"She wasn't my sister. And she. She tried. But she only had til winter. And by then, you were due."

It's a great terror pregnancy. A flower might be fertilized only the once, and then with little fanfare the entire mass of petals wilts, leaving a bulb which fruits as a polyp of sweet fragrant flesh. It's the end for a flower, the perfect clean and useful end. But a mammal by its function is meant to carry on farther, care and keep what is made, to feed and grow and nurture, and yet by common knowledge such a feat is just that.

And the weakness of her form promised such consequence, even without the fairy's magic calling the shots. And yet it would, and she would need to place herself rightly if she wanted her end of the bargain.

Maybe it was madness that as she paced she worried, and that as the strange miracle child found its right posture within her that the soft form she’d lived in made sense. For what would the human reconstruction of an annual plant be other than this?

She manages to bear down in the garden, just well-enough when nobody is watching, though its a close thing. And once it becomes known, her husband for once is in full color. ..

“So what, she escaped her midwife? Her doctors?”

“Well yes.”

“But why?”

“Well she wanted to have you here.”

“Here? In the garden? Why didn’t she just say so?”

“Now Cornelia, do you really think your father would’ve allowed that?”

Cornelia made a face, and despite her obvious difference of opinion in regard to the King her stepmother went on…

Full color meant a lot of things, for one he was livid, his wife giving birth in a garden, no doubt filthy compared to herown bed. And for two he was vivid, his colors actually seeming familiar all at once. It’s a rare thing for a father of any rank or species to witness their child’s birth, such a thing is rarer still for flowers, but that’s more a partiality of life cycle. By the time new life germinates from the fruit, small plants like the roots which fed her would be dead, tossed away as garbage, not even the part which could bring forth volunteers.

And flowers like her though, they transform themselves. No longer gossamer petals, bright with veins, they bear down as fruit, swollen and root withering in mass…

“So I was born here.”

“Yes.”

“Cause my mom went mad?”

“Well no. She wasn’t mad. No I don’t think she was. But it was just winter. And I don’t think she knew how to explain.”

“That’s silly.”

“It kind of is, but it is human. Even if she wasn’t.”

“Wait, how was she not?”

“Well I thought that was rather obvious.”

And at this Cornelia gawks, “However did father avoid the scandal?”

“He’s a King, nothing he does is a scandal for long, and in any case nobody wanted to admit that any princess, not even a contested princess, was really a pumpkin. At least in any literal sense.”

Looking around at her nieces and nephews, bright yellow stars and at this point generations removed from herown mother, for even Cornelia’s short life exceeded hers. She also thinks about how much squash she’d eaten in her life, in desserts, dinners and otherwise. But Cornelia remembers something important about plants. Rarely does a fruit rot so far from its roots, dead or living, and surely her relatives wouldn’t mind the cycle to which they were conceived.