Flash Fiction: A Bitter Rose

feeding frenzy

There was a woman who was also a gardener and lived in a happy neighborhood where people walked their dogs and rode their bicycles. The gardener tended a patch of land, behind an old shed painted yellow, where she raised heirloom roses and loved them dearly. Neighbors on their evening strolls or morning power walks stopped to admire the roses in the morning and evening light. The gardener loved the “over the picket fence” conversations with fellow green thumbs, and giving advice to those who aspired to be. 

One year the gardener decided to share her beautiful roses with her friends, so she transplanted a few of her favorite rose bushes to a specially designed bed closer to the sidewalk. She painted a sign with bright green letters, and staked it securely into the good soil: Neighbors, please take a rose or two to brighten your day.” The gardener sat at her window and watched children, elderly ladies, and couples stop to take home cuttings. 

The next year she refreshed the sign with a new coat of paint and offered roses once more to her dear neighbors. But word got out about the free flowers and people came by and took more than “a rose or two.” One enterprising soul harvested every single rose, and sold them at her floral shop, turning a 100% profit. At the end of the season, her beloved rose bushes were decimated. 

This so distressed the gardener that she decided not to set out the sign the following year, but unfortunately, the people came anyway, including the enterprising shop keeper. The gardener wept when they said  “What did you expect after you gave away roses for free?” She dug up the sidewalk rose beds and threw the violated rose bushes in the garbage. She didn’t even want to salvage them, so bitter was her heart. 

The next spring the gardener quietly tended her beloved roses behind the old shed painted yellow. But oh, when those greedy  thieves didn’t see the roses where they ought to have been, they trespassed and trampled down the lovely beds in search of what they felt entitled to. 

That  last year, the roses did not thrive and struggled, neglected, beneath mats of bindweed and beetles, no longer so tempting. The people walked by, searching for any sign of a well-tended rose bed. She sat at the window, joyless.

“At least I am safe,” she said.

Oh Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm, That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out they bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

-William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 39th Plate, c. 1789