My flash fiction was influenced by the book I was reading for my English III Honors class, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. My story is about a man who finds himself in a witch’s yard and is cursed to turn into a sunflower.
James, Planted
James didn’t know what to anticipate when the witch cursed him, but he didn’t expect it to be like this.
He had lost his favorite red glove to the wind earlier that day and tracked it down to the witch’s backyard. The witch of the neighborhood spent her days in her backyards staring into her swirling silver pool as if she could read the waves like print in a book. Perhaps she could, but nobody in town knew for sure what really went on behind the jagged picket fence around her hovel and the chipped pink exterior of her house. The most they saw of her in the daylight was a swish of her emerald cloak as she walked to the trade center to buy exactly three pink berries and an ounce of goat’s milk. She had caught James climbing her fence trying to find his glove in the mess of overgrown green vines and roots that wove over one another like thick tentacles, pulsating with the life of the garden.
James knew from the moment he locked eyes with her as he was digging around in the bushes of her breathing garden that the witch was not to be debated with. He thought about telling her that he was lost, or that he didn’t know if she was home or not, but even James knew that was a futile case. He had lost his glove and he had trespassed, and now he must face the consequences. The witch’s eyes shifted from dark burgundy to a light blue when she muttered an incantation under her breath as James closed his eyes and braced for impact. He thought he would lose a thumb, a foot, even his wife as he prepared to open his eyes and see the results of her curse.
Yet when he did, nothing changed. He felt life course through his toes and fingertips as usual. When he looked up to see if the witch had made a mistake, she had disappeared. Only the gentle hum of her garden filled the muggy silence surrounding him. Assuming he was in the clear, James picked up his glove and hastily hopped over the fence into his own garden, his wife waiting on the other side.
He planted his feet in his garden as he brushed off his corduroys, his feet sinking into the soft heart of the earth beneath him. He breathed in the familiar smell of daisies, sunflowers, and daffodils. Despite being separated from the witch by a mere plank of wood, James felt safety in the arms of his own garden bed. He stretched out his arms wide, reaching out to touch the familiar stems of his tall sunflowers, his hands wrapping around the green stalks finger by finger.
As he breathed in the life of his garden, James felt a tugging at the end of his fingertips. His eyes snapped wide open as he watched his fingertips turn green. Then his hand, his wrist, his arm flushed with green. He could feel the coldness of the green carry through his veins and send shivers wracking through his body. When he went to let go of the sunflower stems, his green hands had completely thinned and fused to the stems, fingertips into vines, fingernails into leaves. His racing heart stopped beating out of his chest and fell in time to the breathing of his plants, his head swaying back and forth on top of his green stem neck.
If he could move his feet he didn’t know, because James’s mind was overcome with tendrils of green. His legs blended together into a mess of tangled green and brown, the roots choking his toes until they disappeared completely into the dirt. A calm breeze ripped through his yellow-petaled hair as his body caved to the wind. His wide eyes prickled with brown seeds emerging from the whites of his eyes, pushing their way through the surface like a baby’s teeth. The last thing James ever saw was the red of his glove on the ground in front of him before his sunflower body anchored into the ground, searching for life.