Attic flower

The Flower

They said that it was impossible.
They said she was crazy.
She'd shown them.

She'd lived for eight years underground. Solely to escape them. She was so tired of their snide remarks and their insulting insinuations about her sanity. She was fine. She was happy.
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She sipped her coffee at the dining room table, looking at the nondescript stone walls, searching for patterns and portents, even though she'd stared at these same walls every day and seen nothing.

She felt calm, at peace. But, unbidden, memories of her former life surfaced, the life she'd had before she'd moved to the underground.
Perhaps a walk in her undergarden would restore her sense of balance.

Her undergarden was the place where she found peace and tranquility. It was a garden, where she got all her green food, or rather all her food, as she never ate meat anymore.
Not, of course, because she was vegetarian, but simply because good meat was hard to find underground.

Her garden was green. A lot of green. She thought green was a healthy color, so she promoted green in her life wherever possible. She painted most of the walls in her bathroom green. She had green bedclothes. She tried to make herself green too. But people don't turn green easily. That's because so many of them were unhealthy. Well, she knew better. Once she had managed to make her complexion green for a few minutes before she had blacked out.
She assumed this was from the poor ventilation, so she had installed a new set of vents leading up to the surface world. That had seemed to fix the problem. 

She went through her hallway, which was shaped like a triangle. Triangles were such great shapes. She loved triangles. And tolerated squares.
But not rectangles. Rectangles were ugly. And circles morose. She had had to throw out every single circular thing she owned when she moved down here; they had been fine at first, but then they had started whining, complaining constantly about the dark, the cold, pining for the sun, and just in general being down.

Anyway, here she was at the garden. She had laid it out meticulously, making a pattern of interlocking triangles and squares. She had spent months working on it before she moved underground. And carefully implemented it. But then, she ...
What had she been talking about? Probably nothing important.
She waltzed around the garden, inspecting the tomatoes, which had been looking a little down. She adjusted the UV light and hoped that they would work out.
"Yes, that's better," they said, stretching forth their leaves to catch the light.
She smiled tenderly at her tomatoes. The plants were her children.
The earth was her home. She was back at peace with herself.

But wait! What was that? A flower? She did not allow flowers in her garden. Self-absorbed and narcissistic pains in the neck. She was not going to let this one live.
On closer inspection, it was composed of three triangles and didn't seem to be singing it's own praises.
Maybe this one wouldn't be so bad. She passed over it and went to inspect her peppers, but found herself drawn back to that darling flower.
Why did it captivate her so?
She'd find out by scientific examination.

She picked the flower up by the roots and transplanted it to a small pot. Bringing out her microscope, she brought both items back to the kitchen table, and started studying. She was intrigued by the color of the petals, but that wasn't what she was captivated by.
Of course, there was the whole 'triangle' thing. But that wasn't enough to account for her obsession. She called it 'obsession' for that was what it was, and she knew it, but she was powerless to stop herself from it. It was simply how she was.
The stem of the flower was a lovely dark green. She liked that. But again, the color of the stem was not enough to explain her fascination. Perhaps the way the components looked together as a whole?
No, it could not be the whole. There was always some part that was distinct that made each thing recognizable. That was what she had learned from her time aboveground, and that's what she was going to apply. But here it seemed inapplicable. No separate part of the flower made her thrill with joy the way the complete flower did. It could be because the flower did not say anything belittling, but that didn't seem right in some way.

What was it?

She would find out if it took her the whole night. Or day. She cared little for surface time.

She studied the flower from every possible angle. Nothing. It remained positive, serene, and silent in its pot.
She complimented the flower. Silence.
She poked and prodded and pried the stamens apart gently to see the inside of the cup. Nothing was there but flower.
There didn't seem to be anything. Only silence. And the silence, which had once been her ally an friend during the dark time of her life, now turned against her and oppressed her with its gravity.

"I will have your secret, you cursed flower!" she screamed, pulling the flower apart.
These were the first words she had spoken in over eight years.
There. It was done. She had divided the flower into parts, and now she could conquer it.
She shoved the pistil under the lens of her instrument and pored at it in a frenzy, but then reality hit.

"What have I done?" she paused, and answered herself: "I destroyed a thing of beauty."
She crumbled to the table, microscope and slides falling to the floor as she lamented the flower.

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Morning came. Not that it showed any trace of it under the ground in the kitchen of the woman.
And neither did she register the difference. She lay on the table, just as she had the night before, yet with one difference.
She held an empty bottle of fertilizer.

And she no longer breathed