Flowers || by Patrick Hogan

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MY MOTHER CALLED IT FERTILIZER.

Really, it was just ash from her cigarettes.

My father, the florist, the botanist, the gardener, he had pots all over the house. And where there weren’t pots, there were old shoes, or suitcases. Cooking pans, hollowed-out books, anything that could support the base amount of soil necessary to grow something. Anything.

For my mother, it meant unlimited ashtrays.

These are the only two activities I ever learned growing up. Some fathers play catch with their kids. Some mothers teach their children how to read. I learned how to make oxygen. And how to destroy it.

When I was born, they feared I was allergic. To anything, All of it. Everything. Long bouts of sneezing and coughing started right after I came into the world. The combination of herbs and spices and houseplants, all swirling their pollen at each other, mixing and matching and combining with smoke was too much for my infant sinuses to handle.

In fact, the cigarettes are why my father started gardening in the first place. To cover the smell of smoke, he planted peace lilies and English ivy. When my mother started getting stomach pains, he grew ginger. When my mother started getting treatment, he grew guarana. He even grew tobacco for her when the doctors insisted she quit smoking but she refused.

When my mother finally died, my father wilted.

So I took up my parent’s two favorite pastimes. The garden started in the house, but not everything can grow indoors. I had spent enough time watching my father to know how to lay out everything and soon there were rows of seeds surrounding the house. As they grew, though, I barely noticed them. Cigarette in one hand and watering can in the other, all I could see were the sections of the lot that were still empty. And so row after row was added, pushing out toward the old wooden fence that marked the property line.

Each flower and herb and vegetable required different amounts of water, and so I watered them each with a personal touch, dragging out watering cans and buckets and hoses to each according to their need. Most of my time was spent in the garden. I always had water with me and could wander through the growth with ease and grab food from a vine or a tree or the ground almost anywhere.

My favorites were the flowers though. I watched as the bees landed inside them, doing their invisible work. More and more, I planted flowers instead of vegetables, admiring the beauty of the yard.

When the garden reached the fence, I uprooted the vegetables to make room for more flowers.

When those came in short supply, I uprooted the house.

At first, I used planters, but there was not enough sunlight to reach all of my plants, so I removed the roof. When the space between planters was better utilized for housing my flowers, I tore up the carpet, chiseled away at the tile, dug up the foundation to expose the cool earth below. After I removed the walls, the house was ideal for living things.
    I stood next to the pipe that had once protruded from the side of the house, the one that fed water into the hose, the only remaining evidence that a house had ever stood, smoking a cigarette and admiring my handiwork. I had dug up every rock, leveled all the land, planted seeds between seeds between seeds to make use of every available space.

I took a deep breath. The air smelled sweet, sickly, filtered through a hazy trail of smoke.

I had taken to laying among my flowers, soft as they were, hugging my body to sleep. There were small indents all around where I had tried to find the perfect bed. I had not yet tried the sharper plants, doubting their ability to provide comfort, but found some undisturbed tulips littered among patches of red roses and prickly pears, even some thorn-bearing shrubs, and closed my eyes to rest. When I awoke, the smell of smoke had overtaken the sugar in the air. My eyes followed my hand where a cigarette had been, to where a small fire had caught on a pedal, to the blaze quickly overtaking everything.

Before seeing it, I knew the hose would be melted. My only source of water.

As if noticing me, the fire began to make its way toward the unburned flowers behind me. I made for the fence, running along it, knowing that it would be the last time I ever saw any of those flowers.

Along the fence, I searched for something I knew wasn’t there because I had never seen it before. I had hoped that keeping my eyes to the ground for so long while planting meant I just hadn’t noticed a gate in the fence.

No such luck.

I stumbled over the wavy leaves of a calathea plant in order to get enough height to clamor over the fence. I lost my balance, expecting to fall on hard, unwelcoming, unplanted ground. I braced myself for a few seconds, just long enough for me to realize it was too long.

As I opened my eyes, a softness overtook me, coupled with a light tingle. I had never felt so weightless. Smoke billowed into the sky above me. Bits of fence were being consumed, but I couldn’t focus on it too long as my eyes started to burn. I opened my mouth in response to the pain and it filled with water, but not like the water I was used to. It was bitter, like the taste of skin.

The wind pushed and pulled the fragrant smoke down to me. I instinctively felt for the cigarettes in my pocket, wet and soggy and useless. The salt dried my tears before they could come, but I felt like crying, knowing that just out of reach, above the cliffs I had descended, there was nothing I could do to preserve the life I had taken such care to create.

I felt like a failure, never wanting to plant again, never wanting to risk the destruction of what I had promised life, had helped to flourish, and then neglected in the worst way.

There I remained, floating in the water, unable to soak in anymore, feeling dry and pruney, staring at the fire as if it were the sun, wanting to look on even as it hurt my eyes.

As night came and the only light came from the glow of the embers I pushed myself down, daring myself to go deeper, to hold my breath a second longer. It was empty, empty as anything had ever been empty. Empty.

It was empty until it wasn’t.

Until I found the bottom and the rows of seaweed and coral.

Until the water was so encompassing that I needed only to provide the seeds.

And so I dug.


Image Credit: ©National Geographic


MEET THE AUTHOR:


PATRICK D. HOGAN is a writer and musician from the foothills of Yosemite, CA. He has received a BA in english and philosophy from CSU Fresno and is an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts. He is also a cofounder of Gutslut Press.

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