THE FORGETTING FIELD
Caroline Ratajski
In the Regency and Victorian Eras, flowers were assigned meanings, which could turn a bouquet into an elaborate message. Many flowers were assigned multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings, so if you were trying to communicate with a lover through the language of flowers, you had best hope that you were both consulting the same flower dictionary. The more common flowers were defined in fairly standard terms. For example, a red rose meant romantic love, as it still does today, while the mimosa represented chastity because its leaves close at night and when touched.
Prior to the Victorian Era, floriography was used in art, literature, and common culture all around the world. In the 1600's, Turkish people used flowers to convey meaning much like the Victorians did two centuries later. The Bible makes frequent use of flower symbolism. In Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Ophelia famously recites flower meanings: "Here's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there's pansies, that's for thoughts."
In 1818, Louisa Cortambert (using the pen name Madame Charlotte de la Tour) wrote Le Languge de Fleurs, the first flower dictionary, which kicked off the Victorian craze. Artists made use of the symbolism of flowers to enhance their art, and lovers made use of it to declare their feelings.
In this story by Caroline Ratajski, flowers have meanings, and hungers, and desires that humans cannot begin to imagine. These flowers have made their own dictionary.
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Chrysanthemum, for loss.
We flowers eat what we are hungry for.
The two-leg stoops, takes a knife to the blossom base. The blade is dull and it tears rather than slices, but we have no hole for screaming.
This one’s guilt comes to us when it presses our childmaker to its mouth. It had pollinated with more than one, and loss followed. We have never understood the two-leg fixation on pollination.
But this flower does not hunger for lost love. We have eaten much of the darker feelings, the ones that turn inward and slice with sharper stone than this two-leg carried. It took a petal between its teeth and tears it from us, disappearing it into the body.
And with a small taste, we remember, and for one last time, it remembers too. More than remembers. It relives.
We see the memory it wants gone almost immediately. It is slightly aged and sitting just at the top, rubbed smooth like a stone in the river. It has reviewed the memory often. But that is not what we are hungry for.
Too long we have gorged ourselves on the two-legs’ bitterness, taking their pain into this field, our act of mercy. We fed so fully it has faded us. Our blossoms are not so vibrant as they once were, purple and red faded to grey and brown. Other animals do not come to us anymore, and we wither.
This one has a sadness for another two-leg, but also a great happiness, buried beneath. We feed on that instead, pulling this one through the happiness of a bright spring day when it was fresh and new and the world was full of possibility. Laughter and long hair and cool water on bare toes. It asked for forever and the other agreed, and in that bright day forever was real.
And when we are finished, the memory has vanished.
Now all the two-leg has is a notion that it once had happiness, but the light inside is gone. It cries out, one hand clutching the flower to its chest, the other digging fingers into the dirt and wrapping them around cool damp roots. Sharp grit digs under its nails, tearing at the soft flesh of its hand, leaking its red water against our roots.
We drink, the warm iron as sweet to us as honeysuckle to the two-legs.
It eats another petal, and we feed more on its past joy.
It is so desperate to forget the pain it eats another petal, and another, until the flower is gone, and all that remains is its grief.
Then it sinks into us and wraps its not-legs around us, and it weeps.
Eventually, we will devour this one’s flesh as well.
#
Harebell, for grief.
The first to eat did not know what we could do. We did not know it ourselves. It stumbled into us, weeping, broken, mad with hunger, and it ate of us for the simple sake of having nothing else.
Its pain was deep, a cavern hollowed out inside. This one had seen too much, lost too much, and its soul curled into itself, a flower wilted from too much dark. Its sorrow came over us like an early frost. Our feeling was one of sympathy, of a desire to console. To take the pain away.
And so we did. We sucked it free from that one like the serpent’s venom from flesh. It cried in anguish, a thing we only wished to spare it, and it tore at us. But once we had eaten our fill, that one’s pain was gone. All that remained was a memory of pain, like a knotted scar in treeflesh, growing over what had been clawed away.
It pressed the blossoms and leaves to its mouth, holding the soft pink bud to our own buds, but not eating of us. Over and over it did this, water streaming down its face, and finally it whispered, thank you. Thank you.
Although that one’s pain hurts us, although some of us had wilted from it, we were able to bring life to what was near-dead, and for that, we were happy.
Because the days were young, and full of chaos. And once, we were forgiving.
#
Peony, for happiness.
Many seasons passed before the second one came to us. It had a desperation like the first, and we saw the many times it tried to still the red sap under its flesh and return to the earth. Gladly, we took its pain.
Even for the third, we were glad. The fourth. The fifth. This was a good thing we were doing, though our bright blossoms were fading to dull brown and grey. This was good. We were helping.
But we were also growing tired. And the pain these two-legs came to us with was increasingly trivial.
Their grief and anguish fed our soil, until we were nothing but bitter weeds.
#
Anemone, for lost hope.
The first time we ate of joy felt as if we were bursting through soil into sunlight and rain.
For a time we were careless, and we gorged. We were like the two-legs, taking all and giving nothing. We devoured the joy and peace, leaving only rage and grief behind. The two-legs would tear at us, rip us free from the earth and scatter us to the air. But there were so many of us and so few of them, and their joy kept us alive.
We did not care that all they had was grief. They should find some gratitude, for at least they had something.
Because sometimes we would continue to eat long after happiness was gone. These husks were forever trapped among the flowers, knowing little else but how to breathe. With time they would grow thin and gnarled like dying weeds before dropping to the soil, lying still. They would feed us yet more.
And we were so hungry.
Like the two-legs, we gorged, and like the two-legs, our abused supply began to dwindle. Word of the misery spread, and fewer and fewer came, leaving only the desperate ones, who were so empty of joy that there was little for us to eat.
We tried to stop consuming memories altogether. Return to what we were before the first two-leg came. But that time had long passed and we could no less keep from eating of them than we could keep from turning to the sun and shunning the weak light of the stars. Soil and rain were not enough for us. Perhaps they never were.
Balance was needed. Feed enough to keep ourselves alive, release enough to keep their hope alive. And as we found, even their grief could feed us.
So we carry on, eating enough to survive, drawing strength from these beasts. The other animals have learned to stay far from our field, but not the two-legged ones. We do not care, so long as they continue to return, clutching their small blankets and necklaces and photographs, their metal sticks that fire stones to kill, so long as they come, we can survive.
When we dream, we dream of teeth of our own. We dream of drawing our roots from the earth, of stalking our prey as we have been stalked, of devouring the world until nothing remained but dead grasses.
These can only remain dreams. Because so long as we know moderation, we will survive.
#
Forget-Me-Not
But we are so very hungry.