Symbolic Suffering

Rose

I grew a garden full of roses. I realized when I looked back through the kitchen window out into the rainy storm that my roses were torn.

Through them grew knives sticking out of the ground. Their blades were honed and double-edged as if they were meant to hurt when I would eventually want to remove them.

It wasn't what I pictured. It wasn't what I had intended to do, so I blamed it all on the moon. I thought maybe if I only left them in the sunlight forever, they might have survived the fire. Maybe then they wouldn't be so sharp.

I tried again. I seeded new roses and picked the old ones. They cut me deep each time I went to exhume another one. To hide the scars, I wore my sweater all summer.

No one noticed my curious garden or my peculiar fashion. They didn't notice anything at all. So I took them apart. I planted them under the garden bed. They stained my white roses red.

One shot to the head, and the writer was dead. He thought nothing good of me, so to the garden he went. He wrote rumors that I had been hiding something in my field of flowers. It wasn't a secret he was dead.

I know my standards and manners are nice, so I keep my plate clean before I wash it off in the sea. They think I'm absurd when I think they're obsessed. They watch my every move like I'm an unknown species to them as if I came from the planet pluto. They think my garden shouldn't bloom. They know of them men who lay under them and nurture their flowering bloom.

Instead of sulking in their gaze, I make my way to my roses. They withered away with no water to take. I ran to the sea and put it in my pocket. When I came back, my roses were already dead.

Death stood by them, brushing his skeletal fingers over them. Playing with their corpses as I stood there frozen. I watched as my 17 roses turned to knives again. All my work to turn sharp. For me to get hurt again.