Varmint

“Oi varmint! Doncha see we’re growing here?” one of them shouted down in her weird accent. She was tall, towering over us so high she all but blocked the precious few rays of sunlight we could reach. The bright golden mane on top of her toned trunk looked almost leonine.

I could hear my huddled companions whispering crazily to each other. “What’s varmint?” “Varmint? What’s that?” “Haven’t the foggiest, must be another one of those alien words.”

‘Why are they whispering? They were always so loud and proud,’ I wondered. I craned my stalk upward and addressed the sequoia-sized aggressor, “Yeah, and we were growing here too. Long before you at that, so remember who you’re dealing with.”

That’s when the whole brood of brutes bent down toward me, trying to scare me with their sternness. Their already bold colours - blood-red, ice-white, midnight sky-blue, flame-orange and many others - nearly glowed with indignation at me. I was sure if they could grow thorns they’d have gladly hacked me to death. Another spoke, almost sounding like she were gasping from disbelief. “Sorry? You dare speak to your superiors like that?”

 One of my comrades, Shasu, nudged me and whispered, “You’ve got them angry now. Just apologise and promise not to do it again.”

“Yeah, before they call their aliens on us again,” Yoru agreed, stalk bent downward like a wilting vine. I was disgusted; Yoru had always been so boastful about how no-one could silence him no matter how tall, strong or numerous they were. I shook my bud at him, and he drooped ever so slightly more which straight away told me he knew what I meant.

Turning back up to face the parasitic newcomers, ignoring the tightening in my veins, I spoke again. “Yes I dare to speak to you like that. WE are the first inhabitants of this land. We’ve been here for God-only-knows how long. You, tulips, showed up, like, 5 summers ago. Yet you’re hogging the sunlight and the growing space and the soil’s nutrients and the water that was given to us free? And your alien helpers who planted you here…”

Just then I had a flashback of my parents, as they were ripped out of the soil. Their screams and pleas for help were deafening. Those big unearthly paws came back to me as vivid as ever, unlike any animal paws I’d ever known before - opposable toes, no fur, no claws yet powerful and vicious enough to remove entire bunches all over the patch.  

“Merciless barbarians.”

“That’s right,” one of the male tulips said, his ice-white petals sending a cold shudder down my stalk, “and we’re getting a good deal from them. You’re the ones they keep uprooting and leaving to rot into new topsoil, not us. Accept it, they’re gods and they favour us. We’re the chosen ones; you’re the wretches of this land. Your glory days are past. Accept annihilation you filthy weeds.”

“Right on partner! Preach!” screeched the leonine one. “Show them dirty varmints their place!”

“You even impose foreign names on us now. Varmints? That’s not our species name,” I said. “What does that even mean?”

“Unwanted pests,” sneered the icicle-topped one. He laughed frostily, and all the tulips joined in. Some cheered him on, but I wasn’t finished talking. I stretched up toward him as high as I could, our leaves ready to smack or scratch each other down.

“Take heed, tulips,” I warned, making sure to express my full disgust at their species name. “We are not weeds, or pests, or varmints. We are dandelions. Whatever those aliens, your so-called “gods” can do is nothing compared to what the real God - the creator of us, you and the entire world - can do. They rip us out, but He made our roots deep and our seeds fly far and wide. Neither you nor they will ever finish us off; our kind will always come back again and again.

“When you first came you were just like us, just wanting to survive and grow. But now the aliens like you and take you – like pets – wherever they go. And I’ve heard them use that word weed, they use it on any plant they don’t like. What guarantee do you have that you won’t become a weed?”

“We got purtier flowers!” cackled a third tulip, her petals a luxurious violet with streaks of jet black. ‘She would be gorgeous,’ I thought, ‘if she weren’t so up herself.’

Then a strange sound rang through the air. Clumps of grass began to scream in agony as two huge paws crushed them against the soil, paws that looked kind of like hooves but longer and stronger. Hearing the sound of my grass friends’ leaves snapping, smelling their juices wafting in the wind, was nauseating but it was about to get worse. The alien stopped right in front of us, bent down on his knees, and… oh merciful God! Those eyes, blue and icy like the white tulip!

Of course the tulips were laughing maniacally, cheering and egging him on to do whatever he came to do.

“Goddamn dandelions, back already. Well not anymore. Same for those damn nettles and clovers too, y’all will be dead and gone mighty soon.” His voice was strangely similar to the golden-flowered tulip, and I could’ve sworn I heard her blowing kisses to him. He reached into a pouch on his thigh and pulled out a strange white container. It had some kind of bold black scribbling on it, completely unintelligible to us but the symbol beneath made it all too clear. A dandelion, wilted and browned so badly it looked already decomposed.

All of us held our breath; we out of dread, the tulips out of anticipation.

He gripped the container’s neck and out shot a mist onto our leaves. Immediately I felt woozy, and my roots numbed. As I began to lose grip on consciousness I caught the tulips screaming in panic as the alien took a device. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, like a pair of long metal leaf blades joined at one end. They hooked round either side of the ice-white tulip’s stalk and snapped shut, slicing him clean in two! He yelled in pain, so much pain.

“Yes Siree, Tanya oughta like this,” the alien said gleefully…