The Poppy Alternative

Prologue

Michael Fairhew always loved poppies. In spring the sleepy, brilliant red heads would nod at him in docile recognition of the new season, filling the field as if they had always owned that place. There had been a large shack in that field once, standing on churned earth soaked in decades worth of blood, the air forever reeling from terrified cries. The animals would traipse in a line, eyes rolling to reveal the whites, thighs and flanks fattened from that year's best scrap pickings: grunting pigs and lowing cows, lambs bleating on legs that had not quite lost their spindle, every one of them awaiting the final cut of the butcher's blade. Generation after generation of Fairhew men had watched those helpless beasts with hardened eyes and weather-beaten frowns. Little Michael had stood there too, feeling the mud bleed through his grubby trainers and wondering what the point to all the bloodshed was. In that respect, he was different from the start; he did not feel the same way that every single Fairhew man had felt for centuries, and he could imagine them staring down at him from the halls of his Pa's farm with the same cornflower blue eyes and unruly auburn hair.

When the fire had come, Michael was glad.

One little spark had reared up and devoured that bloody shack, tearing away at the beasts and wood and steel like they were all paper dolls dancing in a hearth from Michael's memory. After that had come the ashes, dancing through the years and down the path of Michael's hazy recall and swirling through the air, until Grandpa had wheezed and coughed so hard his false teeth came out and Ma might have scolded Michael for running outside to look, but it was so very hard to remember.

A lifetime ago.

That had been in childhood, when Michael had watched nature reclaim the site of the horror, and as winter rolled around into spring he had seen the first paper-tissue heads of the poppies rising from the soil, striving for the pale sunlight. He had been fascinated- even at six years old, kneeling with one poppy head cupped in a tiny palm, he had been fascinated.

"I want to be poppy," he had whispered then, and as a little boy he had said many things that were never going to happen and told many lies, but in that moment he had been stating a fact and he had known it. After all, hadn't the little girl come next? The pretty little girl with blonde hair that fell in waves down her back and dainty cheekbones and wide, almond-shaped eyes of china blue. Her name was- and still is, Poppy: Poppy Fairhew, born in the poppy field on that numbing summer day, with Pa watching his odd little son and smiling that special smile adults keep just for little girls, and boys under the age of ten.

"You can't be a flower, Michael," he had said, and so Michael had run away. Michael was not afraid when he ran, or even upset, he was just confused and did not realise then that his father had put a sneaky 'a' in front of Poppy. Pa did not understand, of course, but Michael did. He understood perfectly well that he was going to grow up to find Poppy sleeping inside of him, he knew that he was going to be pretty like his mother, and it was this that he yelled to the acres of wide, inviting Northern countryside rolling all around him as if daring those fluffy clouds to tell him otherwise. Then he had gone home for tea, because he was a little boy of six, and he was hungry and for that golden time, life was so painfully simple. It would not be for many years that Poppy would open her eyes lying in that same field, and taste the morning dew on her lips and know that life was so simplistically complicated.