Everyone in the village agreed; there was something
most unusual about the garden in front of the long-abandoned Humelsmith house. Not only were the flowers larger and brighter
in color than those of any of their neighbors, but even in the harshest of winters
they raised their blooms toward the sky in what could only be described as a
defiance of every natural law.
This, however, was not the strangest thing about
the tiny plot of land, for though no one would speak of it for fear of being thought
quite out of their minds, several of the villagers could swear they had heard
the flowers whisper to them as they passed by.
Gladys Weesley had been warned by a gentle geranium
not to sleep in her bedroom on the very night that a large branch from an
ancient oak had crashed through the roof, pulverizing the bed where she surely would
have been at slumber, while Delores Kiddlebaum found the comments of a climbing
rose about her sizeable derriere particularly thorny, but she never worn
horizontal stripes again.
Though the house itself had become an eyesore, talk of tearing it down has long ceased and so the
garden remains to this very day, and the children of the villagers, now adults
and having grown up playing among the precocious petals all their lives, find
nothing unusual about it at all, though they still keep their conversations to
themselves.
This post in
response to the Five Sentence Fiction prompt, “Flowers.”
