​The Flowers

Written & illustrated by RG

You know, I never thought how dangerous one flower can be. Imagine a flower—my world is scared of a flower. Now before you assume anything, let me explain. See, I’m from a world where water is everything. Everywhere we go, there’s water. We don’t have roads; we got water. Now, I know y’all wondering, how does that work? Well, to get around places we gotta swim. To go anywhere, we gotta swim. We got boats, ships, submarines, and etc., but cars and planes don’t exist, at least not yet. You can imagine how much fish we eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

See, we had a peaceful life. Nothing really out of the ordinary happens over here. We always hear stories, and the stories were all the same. You know, a kid goes on an island where everything was a dream come true, and the kid stumbled upon a flower garden in the middle of the island and thought it would be a good idea to pick a couple of these beautiful blue glowing flowers and bring them back to his sick mother. And so he did—brought them back, gave them to his mom, and the next day the mom was missing, and so was the kid. And that was the end of the story. Never got it, but at the end my mom told me, “Don’t go near the forbidden island.” Which at that time, I was pretty stubborn and did not believe in superstitions like fairies or mysterious disappearances, so I told myself I’m going to check that island out someday, no matter what. And that’s when my whole world changed.

The island wasn’t as I expected it to be. I thought there would be monsters, or—well, I honestly thought it would look dangerous. How I got on the island? Well, you see, my people didn’t really go close to the island. They had warnings posted up around it, so it was pretty easy. I waited till no one was watching and snuck right onto the island. One thing I noticed was that there were a lot of blue glowing flowers around, so I didn’t quite go in the middle. I stayed close to the edges of the island, behind the rocks, where no one could see me. I played around, loved the smell of the whole area, and there in my mind I remembered the story of the kid picking a flower that was glowing blue. So I tried picking the glowing blue flower, but it wouldn’t budge. I pulled and I tugged, and no matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t come out the ground. So I started digging it up instead, and I got it.

If you guys would like to read more let me know. Thank you for taking the time to read my short story it means a lot to me.