Flash Fiction: Flowers

The way I write is usually to churn out as much as possible and hope that whatever I end up with is sort of good. I think I learned this from NaNoWriMo (which I dropped out of this year, actually. Long story), but still, it's kind of useless to write so much and never share any of it.

I have been sitting on this for a while. In fact, I've been sitting on a lot of things for a while. However, because this one I really have no intent to send anywhere, I figure that, after a month or two of waiting, I should post it here.

Here goes nothing.

They gave me flowers. I remember that much. I remember being so surprised at the flowers. Not just a daisychain, either, but a full assortment. They were actually very pretty when they put them on me, in all those gorgeous springtime colors, and the woman who fixed it on me had even gone so far as to wipe the blood off my chin. I'd bit my tongue when I had heard my name, I'd bit it hard, hard to keep from screaming or saying anything dumb and now blood ran down my face and my mouth tasted like raw meat. The taste was only making the airy feeling in my head and fading vision worse. It had dripped onto my tunic and down and down until I had a red river falling down my front. The flowers could only mean one of two things, as there were only two things one did with flowers like these: they lay on things that were either buried or burned.

I guess I'm glad I don't remember the rest of it, the axe hacking into me or the beauty and pain in being burned. Instead now I just watch the fires in their little homes, and I watch the big one every year. I watch the cleaving and the blood and the burning as I watch the girls make the pretty wreaths, whispering about boys and parents and songs, and, in the faintest of whispers, who was next, who was next.

I think if I was too angry, I would not keep my flower crown. I would not go back every year to watch the singing and the burning, even though every time I smell the smoky flesh I cringe and sometimes even weep. If I were too angry, I wouldn't be there, all the time, to greet my new family, my fresh fellow ghosts.

 Any comments are welcome, I guess.