Buttercup: Flowers From Beyond
CE Savage
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Buttercup
Flowers from beyond
A ghost doesn’t haunt a house. It haunts a person.
Frank had read this somewhere, somewhere he couldn’t now recall. It was shortly after everything had started and he had been sure he was losing his mind. He still wasn’t sure that he wasn’t losing his mind but at least others had seen the little yellow flowers that started appearing shortly after he had been released from the hospital...
The first flower had been easy to explain, at least until he thought more about it. It appeared very early one morning on his doorstep after he had wakened , sweat-soaked, from a nearly sleepless night of tremors and screaming visions of horror. It had been right before dawn and he had stepped out onto his small front porch to clear his head.
In the frosty morning air centered perfectly on the weathered wooden landing was a small, perfect, bright yellow flower. A buttercup Frank had thought. Maybe- he wasn’t sure, but he seemed to remember his mom pointing them out to him as a child long ago.
Maybe it had blown in off the meadow nearby? Frank had recently moved to the home left him after his mom had passed away. The cottage was situated on the outskirts of town and there were woods bordering the property and a pasture that would likely hold these kinds of flowers- in the late spring. But he had found it in March.
Frank remembered stooping to pick up the tiny perfect wonder. Somehow this tiny token had created a bright spot in a sea of gray.
Since then the flowers had appeared in odd places at odd times. Once next to the lamp beside his bed after another endless night. Once where he kept his father’s service pistol. He had gone to retrieve the .45 caliber pistol to see what condition it was in, at least that’s what he had been telling himself at the time. There on the lid of the pistol safe, kept inside a locked cabinet, had been another single splash of golden color.
And it wasn’t just flowers. His therapist insisted that Frank keep a daily journal but for some reason, Frank found it difficult to write about anything of consequence. He subconsciously put it off for days at a time. Then, somehow, the cheap little lined notebook he was supposed to use, started appearing wherever he was. He found it by his coffeemaker, on his bed, and even on the seat of his old truck. He couldn’t get away from the damn thing. Finally, after he found it resting on the toilet seat when he had to pee in the middle of the night, he announced out loud, “Okay, I get it!”. He was mildly annoyed, but he did start writing.
The events even followed him to work. He was lucky enough to find a job close to home on a loading dock. Moving pallets around all day wasn’t mentally challenging which suited him just fine. His bosses were solid, supportive, and no-nonsense and mostly just left him alone to do his job, but his co-workers were like grit in his grits. They were mostly younger than he and completely clueless about the world at large. This didn’t bother him so much. He could hardly expect them to be different than he would have been if he hadn’t joined up. What bothered him was that they treated the job like an extension of high school and saw his quiet demeanor as an invitation to fuck with him whenever possible.
One or more of them had thought it would be great fun to glue his lunch box to the break room table. That was bad enough. But then they had to ruin his lunch with a massive dose of hot sauce poured over the food he brought from home. Frank could feel the heat bubble up inside him like lava. His hands had started trembling and his vision narrowed. Amid the juvenile laughter, Frank had left the break room that day and wandered into the small park next to the industrial center where he worked. In the tepid spring sunshine, he sat on a bench and started through the mental exercises his therapist had given him, trying to calm down, but nothing had worked.
Frank had finally given up and had just decided to go back to work to put his notice in when a small, beautifully patterned, cornflower blue butterfly landed on his knee. As Frank studied the delicate creature he could feel the shield of anger melting away around him. At first, the butterfly seemed to behave like he would expect, alighting and then moving off. But then this one didn’t. It hovered and danced around him. Even briefly using his nose as a landing strip.
As Frank stared cross-eyed at the tiny being, he realized- the world is full of idiots, but it’s also full of unexpected wonder and beauty.
That was last week. And he was getting a little worried as he sat drinking his Saturday morning coffee. It had been days and there hadn’t been a flower or any sign of her. Her. Yes, somehow he had decided the spirit was a ‘her’. He couldn’t define why exactly. Sometimes when he fought his way out of a fevered restless sleep he could feel a small, cool, soft hand on his forehead. Sometimes when he entered a room he caught the faintest possible hint of jasmine. Probably just his imagination or wishful thinking, but he was getting the foreign feel of a feminine touch from this elusive spirit.
But where had ‘she’ gone? Maybe the butterfly trick had exhausted her otherworldly energy? Frank had no idea how this was supposed to work, but he imagined that if communicating between worlds was easy there’d be more of it happening.
Maybe she had simply tired of him and moved on. Frank could think of no reason why the spirit had picked him to begin with. It wasn’t like he was exceptional in any way. He knew it was too much to expect but her small gestures were like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man.
Frank was startled from his musing by the chime of children laughing. Sometimes the neighborhood children came into his yard to feed carrots to the two horses in the pasture next door. He had tried unsuccessfully to play the grumpy old fart but he had never fooled the kids. It didn’t help that their parents had known him since he was a boy, long before he went away to never really return.
He carefully pulled the curtain back to see what they were up to. Not carefully enough, as a little blond-haired pixy saw him peeking out, peeled away from the gaggle of other children, and ran to his front door.