Breaking Chains

The Girl Who Talked to Flowers

In White Haven there was a girl who talked to flowers.

They weren’t exactly flower’s per say; you couldn’t grow flowers in White Haven or anything, not during winter. All she had were the mummified remains of flowers and the seeds, and only some of them were flower seeds. They were seeds salvaged from poor quality applesauce, oranges from the trash, and stolen from the rare batch of flowers delivered to patients. If someone’s flowers went mysteriously missing, then good money could have been won off on betting that she stole them. The flowers and other plant materials took refuge in a battered biscuit tin that had all it’s occupants evicted long ago.

The tin was one of the many empty boxes of sweets and confectionaries that she had accumulated over the years. The girl who talked to flowers was a collector. She was a squirrel gathering nuts, only instead of nuts she took silverware, bottles, glass fragments, string, pens, bottle caps, and a sundry of other trinkets. These were all stored in the hollowed out space of her softening concrete walls and could only be accessed by crawling underneath her bolted down bed and moving the books from the small library she had stockpiled.

Did they know that she possessed theses things? Probably. But if they did they let it go because of who she was.

Her name was Celia. But she was called many names and adjectives, so many that she had a list.

Adjectives:

Curious. Neglected. Mentally Ill.

Dreamy. Lost. Crazy.

Far off. Imaginative. Disgusting.

Odd. Sad. Elegant.

Weak.Abandoned.  Pretty.

Pale. Rejected. Faded.

Skinny. Ungodly. Childish.

Dilapidated. Vile. Relaxed.

Scruffy. Corrupt. Stupid.

Names:

Celia.

Daughter.

Sister.

Friend.

Abomination.

Freak.

Patient Two-Twenty-One.

Dreamer.

The Girl Who Talked to Flowers.

 

The last one was her current favorite. There were others, a lot of them she forgot, and some were ones that only adults were allowed to say. She wrote down the ones she could remember best, the ones that were repeated often or seemed important, or that she liked. Yes, The Girl Who Talked to Flowers was her favorite so far. It was simple and straight to the point and explained a lot, like a name should. Celia was perfectly fine but it didn’t say as much as The Girl Who Talked to Flowers or Dreamer did or even Freak.

And as the name suggested, she did talk to flowers. She kept one in pinned in her scraggly, bleached hair, and when she needed to talk to someone her flower would always be there. Granted, it wasn’t very sturdy and it was getting quite frazzled from her carrying it around for weeks, nor was it the best conversationalist, but it sufficed.

The White Coat didn’t call her The Girl Who Talked to Flowers. He called her Pacient Two-Twenty-One. Her clothes even said it. The number was printed in black on the corner of her shoulder. A declaration that she was property.

Who’s property? Good question. Too bad there wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t herself and it wasn’t the White Coat. She was ownerless property, lost and floating in a world without a place to go. Was that why she collected thing? So that she could give them an owner and a place in the world other than the dustbin. Perhaps. She had never thought about it much before. She hardly thought about anything anymore. She talked to her flowers, collected worthless scraps, and counted the snowflakes out the window. That was the life of Patient Two Twenty-One.