Melancholia

Remnants 10 - Beautiful Girl, Beautiful Daisy

"Do not pluck the flowers." It was such an easy rule to obey. Yet she deliberately disobeyed it.

One fine spring day, Mary was jogging in the public park. Soon, she arrived at her favorite place of the park, a huge garden, and just noticed a new field of flowers that wasn't there before. So beautiful were the flowers, tulips, roses, carnations.

They would perfectly appease John, she thought. His favourite "cellophane flowers of yellow and green" could never beat the real, genuine flowers. As she approached the flower bed, she noticed a sign planted in the bed, written on it, "DO NOT PLUCK THE FLOWERS."

"What an idiotic sign this is!", she thought. "This is a public park, we should be free to take whatever we want." So she plucked some flowers, one from each colour.

"That should be enough," she said, walking away, headed for John's house.

Ah, the beautiful garden of John. John was an avid gardener, and he always had a green thumb. Curious about the quality of the flowers she picked, she compared them to the ones in John's flower bed. After comparing, she decided that she might as well give the flowers to John, even though they were not as beautiful. So she went to the front door. However, she suddenly shrunk to the size of the other flowers, not realizing that at the same time, her feet were being buried underground.

"What's happened with my feet?" she thought, dropping the freshly picked and shruken flowers on the ground, trying to pull her legs out of the ground.

"They're stuck!" she exclaimed, when all that was happening was just the melding of her feet and lower legs into one, root hairs emerging from her feet.

As she was pulling her feet out of the ground, the rest of her legs started to fuse together as well. The more it fused, the more it turned green. As it fused, her pants also got ripped off, shredding naturally into a few thousand pieces, revealing her green skin.

"Ah!" she screamed, trying to pull her fusing legs apart. "This - this has to stop!" Unknowingly though, as she pulled, her hands changed to, her fingers merging into one, becoming webbed and eventually like a leaf. Her hands also green, she couldn't quite differentiate her legs and her hands when she was pulling. Eventually though, her legs was a stalk, a stem of green, a healthy green - for a plant that is.

"What's going on?" she asked, her hands expanding, engulfing her now green arms and turning her entire arms into leaves. Two leaves on each side, one unified stem, roots deep in the ground, she was quite the plant.

"I'm... a plant?" she asked, looking around her weirdly shaped body. Her bottom sure looked like a plant, but above her waist, she was still human. But that was about to change.

Slowly, her body shrunk horizontally, reaching the size of her "legs". Her breasts also merged with her body, flattening too. Her upper body also became green, the same shade as her legs. Once completed, her shirt shredded as her pants did.

All left of her humanity was her head, her hair, a nice shade of yellow. "Yellow?" she thought, the wind having blown strands of her hair in front of her. Yes, her blonde hair now yellow, she felt weird as they suddenly stood up on end.

She couldn't reach her hair to touch it, as her leaves wouldn't allow her to. Her hair split into various parts, all around the hair like a lion's mane. Once they split perfectly, they combined into beautiful yellow petals. Able to feel what happened, she tried to look at her petals, but as they moved along with her head, she just couldn't see them.

On her green "neck", green leaves, sepals formed as well, her overall look set. Only, her face was of human skin, not cellulose as one would expect.

"I'm... A flower." she had realized for it was quite obvious by now. "Yes. A beautiful flower. I'll be the most beautiful flower in an instant, she thought, her face blushing dark yellow, gaining that colour permanently.

"Ah." she thought, looking at the sun. She was indeed attracted to the sun, the enticing rays of sunlight, her delicious preprocessed meal. "Wait. A flower shouldn't be able to talk," she said out loud, checking herself. "Or hear."

And as such, her mouth disappeared into her face, revealing dark yellow disc flowers in a semicircle below her nose. Her ears also turned into green sepals, going down to her "neck" as well.

Unable to talk now, she thought to herself, "I do smell quite nice today. Smell?"

So her nose disappeared too, the disc flowers appearing higher up on her face, leaving only her eyes intact. She looked at the blue skies one last time, closing them, her eyes fading away, replaced by more disc flowers. Now she was complete, a beautiful yellow daisy in John's garden. As she was done, her mind slowly faded away, now just an ordinary flower. A beautiful flower, was she, though just one of many. She will stay, stay and later be pollinated, breeding more daisies down her line.

The next day, the gardener came to the park. "Ah? Who plucked my flowers?" John muttered to himself. "Never mind, for they who plucked the flowers will become a perfect replacement."