Tulips

i.
The day after death, the flowers appeared.
A line of them; three crimson tulips standing proud and serene in the corner of my room, each surrounded by a little frayed halo of darkness where the carpet had been split. Fragile sapling tongues bejewelled with crowns dipped in blood.
Nobody watched me before: now I am watched. There is something conspiratorial about their existence, as if they have been sent to observe me, and whisper secrets behind my back. They stare like the blank eyed statues of angels you find in graveyards; immutable, wholly absorbed in their vigil. I don’t like to take my eyes off them for long in case they move.
The nurses don’t seem to notice my visitors: they bustle in, take my temperature, check my pulse, feel my forehead. To them I am a procedure, one of many that must be completed over the course of the day. No point in asking questions, prompting friendship – they know I woke up mute, and that my voice is just one of my missing parts. When the ritual is completed, they leave without so much as a glance at the tulips, their skirts rustling like autumn leaves.
The tulips are too much, their colour too sudden – they hurt my eyes. Against the white hospital walls they’re like blood drops on snow – sacrilege. I tried to hide, shoved my head beneath the sheets and pressed myself flat against the mattress, but it just reminded me how deflated I now was; how empty. Like a cut-paper doll, ridiculous, pressed between the eyes of the tulips and the eyes of the nurses.

And I have no face – I have wanted to efface myself.
But it is frightening, living as a shadow.


ii.
At night, they scream.
Every night they seal themselves, close up their buds, and wail wordlessly into the darkness. It frightens me, this inner crying. It’s as if the voices aren’t theirs but are coming from within, inside the petals, closed like fists.
Mother once told me that flowers are the reproductive organs of plants.

Oh God, what have I done?
I bury my head beneath the pillow, try to block my ears, but it’s no use. I’m screaming inside too.


iii.
Before they came, the air was calm. Breathing was a rhythm, in out, in-out, inout like the clockwork mechanics of a machine. No sentiment; no fuss. But the tulips filled it up with noise. Now my breath snags and catches in my throat, my tongue feels dry and swollen. I’m breaking down, I know it.
I stretch out, supine, on the bed, feeling my bones sink down into the mattress like roots into earth. I would like to stay here forever, a permanent part of the furniture, immovable and silent. I could haunt the ward; wrap myself in white sheets like a corpse. Scare the doctors to death. Here they’re so used to doling it out, like medicine; it would be nice to turn the tables for once.
Or I could just lie – lay, passive tense now, remember, now it’s all out of my hands - here and melt into the sheets. Let my blood seep into the floorboards.
Perhaps that’s why the tulips glint like rubies.


iv.
I keep my eyes fixed on them. I know they’re up to something; playing some game with my mind, working their twisted magic on me. Their whisperings have turned into sinister spells, a chanting that undulates like the beat of my heart. My second pulse – two again, I should be happy – but choking; my throat’s constricted and I’m retching, retching. Retching air because I’m already empty, oh God, so empty, nothing else left. From fruitful to barren. The blossoms died and withered inside me, and now they’re sprouting out my throat: I’m screaming flowers – crimson like blood.
I saw red, couldn’t take it any longer. Leapt out of bed and pitched a jug of water over their heads, watched it seep into the carpet, turning it black. I thought it would drown out their awful voices, strangle my awful new tongue.
Murder, cold and blue.
Like you, baby.
My baby.

The tulips rotted, shrivelled, their petal heads collapsing in on themselves, their screams caving in. I fell to the floor, pushed my knees to my forehead, clutching my sides, crying hollow words. Shrivelling too.

* * *

A short fiction prose-poem inspired by the poem of the same name by Sylvia Plath and Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' - both texts I'll be studying next year.