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It starts with wild dandelions, which is nothing short of insulting. It’s not that impressive of a flower: it’s little more than a common weed.
So how fitting, Eve thinks, when she finds herself staring down at the bathroom sink. The toothpaste congeals around the crumpled petals, wet white weighing down sun yellow.
Eve blinks. Then she thinks, You asshole.
She rinses the sink clear, but the dandelion sticks halfway down the drain.
“Well, we’ve got your scans back. It’s Hanahaki, just like we thought.”
The doctor is nearing retirement. Eve can tell, not necessarily from the man’s age, but from the way he floats around the office. There’s a lightness to his step, an aura which says it won’t be long before he no longer has to deal with the aches and complaints of patients.
He hands her the x-rays. How ghostly to see the tendrils of flower roots crawling over her ribcage.
"It’s spreading quickly. As you know, there’s no medicinal cure for Hanahaki,” The doctor says. He leans forward in the swivel chair, elbows resting on knees, pulling that face which every doctor learns to master: I wish I didn’t have to tell you this.
Eve looks down at her hands instead of the doctor's face, counts her fingers.
"Untreated, this disease is fatal. The flowers will spread inside your lungs –"
"– suffocating me from the inside out. Yeah, I know," Eve calmly interrupts.
She turns her hands over, gaze tracing the lines in her palms. Where is the life line? Is it that one, the shortest one? Oh, she should've seen this coming.
And maybe she had, as a child. What was the recurring nightmare she’d used to have? Something about a hooded stranger chasing her down a dark street with the taste of blood and rose petals in her mouth?
The doctor laces his fingers together. He sighs quietly, sympathetically, pausing to allow his patient a moment for the earth to shift beneath her feet. Too bad he doesn’t know that Eve is an expert at keeping her feet on the ground through the very worst of earthquakes.
His hands remind her of cat’s cradle, that old game on the playground with stretchy multicoloured bands. How strange. Maybe she should buy some on the way home.
“I must advise you to talk to the person you love. Whatever the outcome is, it’s your only hope of a cure,” The doctor softly advises.
Eve flips her hands back over. There’s a line of dirt under her nails: she’d coughed some up on the car ride here.
Not a good sign. Fast progression of the disease indeed.
“The person I love is dead.”
Eve hears it, the sharp intake of breath before the doctor replies. Unprofessional, she thinks. Then she feels a spark of amusement race through her soul. Ah, how alike they are. She never knew she’d feel a brief connection with this unremarkable general practitioner.
“I, well.” His soft voice pauses to exhale. His hand shifts against his knee, lost. “I’m sorry. It’s very rare that it would happen like this. How long has it been since –?”
“Three months. But I didn’t know for sure until a couple of days ago. They finally found her body in the river. Well, found…”
Eve shrugs, leaning to the side to look past the doctor. The sky is clear blue today, white clouds shifting low over the trees. The sunlight glimmers against the tarmac; it still smells like rain.
“They were doing a clean-up thing – you know, removing litter. Her body got caught in the net, so I’m told.”
“The news must’ve been hard to hear.”
Eve shrugs again. “I guess. I’ve had a long time to come to terms with what happened.”
“The discovery brought everything up for you again, I assume.”
“Well.” Eve looks back at the doctor in a sudden, sharp movement; he’s very good and doesn’t flinch.
His water blue eyes keep hers without a smidge of discomfort. Water blue, a clear blue – not the dredge colour of the Thames. No, far from the colour Eve dreams about.
“I think that’s probably what triggered this, right? The symptoms,” Eve explains, gesturing to her chest.
“That would make sense,” The doctor softly agrees. Admittedly, the gentleness of his voice is beginning to grate. She knows they have to do it – they’re trained to speak like this when telling bad news, probably – but still, it’s irritating: he’s speaking to her as if she’s on her deathbed this very morning.
But perhaps she is. He can read those x-rays better than she can.
And he’s reading them again now. He rubs a hand across his chin.
She can’t help but wonder if he has a wife, a husband? Does he touch them and hold them close? Has he ever picked up a knife and pressed the point of it against the gentle swell of an abdomen?
When he thinks about love, would he recognise it as the decay inside Eve’s heart?
“This growth looks like it’s been here for a while. It would match up with the timeframe of your loss.” He slowly places the scans back onto the desk. He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, thinking, as he looks at the computer screen.
Eve gazes out of the window again. A pigeon is inching across the carpark, neck bobbing in and out as it walks around, looking for food.
Eventually, the doctor looks back at Eve. His face is resigned.
She looks away from the pigeon. Smiles at him emptily. Hopes he does have someone at home.
“So how long have I got?” She politely asks.
Eve’s mother, Eun, doesn’t take it as a death sentence in the way her daughter does.
“He said to go out and search for love to balance out the pain. That isn’t a hopeless situation, Eve,” Eun scolds over the phone.
There’s the sound of a door sliding open. Eve closes her eyes and imagines her mother walking outside onto the patio. In a second she’ll hear – yes, there’s the crunch of the pebbles. Soon she’ll reach the back of the garden, sit down on the swing seat beneath the honeysuckle covered pergola.
Ah, honeysuckle. Eve reaches over to the empty side of the bed and feels for this morning’s retch. The flowers are flat and wet, coloured bee yellow through the rose specks of blood. It was like her body knew her mother would call.
“I can’t do that. I don’t know how.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Eve. Nobody is saying you need to get married again. All you need to do is seek some light,” Eun lectures.
Eve opens her eyes, looks up at the ceiling. She blinks. Marriage. Well, of course her mother thinks this is about Niko. She doesn’t know anything about –
Well.
Her mother is a traditional woman. No need to risk her health over something as insignificant as the truth.
“You’re right. I’ll get back out there.”
And the lie falls from her lips as easily as it’d used to do back when she was a teen. There won’t be alcohol at the party. Benjy and I are just friends. I didn’t cheat on that geography exam – my teacher just has it out for me.
Faint sounds of a cat mewling, her mother’s distraction as she coos at the family pet. Eve momentarily mutes the phone whilst she sits up, curling over as her lungs shake and constrict. Her throat crawls with bile and rotting blades of grass; her tongue tastes like dirt.
I didn’t mean it, you bitch, Eve bitterly thinks.
“Honeycomb is much better, you’ll be glad to know,” Eun informs happily. More cooing as she arranges the ginger cat on her lap. “It was stress thinning his fur, but your father and I bought a plug-in which releases relaxing pheromones. It’s so nice to see him calm again.”
Eve puts the phone on speaker, resting it on the windowsill above the bathroom sink. She looks at her face in the mirror. There’s a spot of blood at the corner of her mouth; she uses her thumb to spread it across her lips.
What had she done with the lipstick blade? She can’t remember. Had she lost it in the divorce? Her thoughts are interrupted by a sharp, stinging pain building beneath her ribcage. Great. Something is starting to burrow roots into the bone.
“Mom, I have to go,” Eve grits out.
Eun is too distracted with the cat to realise her daughter’s pain. Eun intersperses her pleas for Eve to call soon with distrait cooing to the cat.
The phone line disconnects just before Eve folds in half, fingers slipping against the sides of the basin, as she coughs and heaves up a cherry red fountain of petals and blood. She inhales a painful breath, ribs aching as the plant roots finish their journey through the bone and erupt rebirthed through the other side.
The pain is blinding. Spots dance behind her eyelids: the colours swirl into the shape of cherry blossom petals.
A glance down at the sink.
Poppies.
Of course.
It hasn’t rained in weeks. The earth is bone dry: the government is worried about a drought.
Eve isn’t worried about that. All she worries is that the gravediggers will struggle to make a dent in the parched soil. She worries about this the entire walk to the chosen burial plot.
But as it turns out, it’s an unnecessary issue. The shovel breaks the ground after some violent hacking persuasion.
“I’m not having a service. I just need the hole dug,” Eve says, when one of the gravediggers gets a little too nosey. “And I want to borrow a shovel when you’re finished.”
The guy gives Eve a look, but with fresh cash in his back pocket, all he does is shrug and get on with it.
Whilst they work, Eve wanders up and down the uneven grass between the gravestones. The graveyard is on a slope, facing west, so it’s always a little dark and cold until the afternoon. In the past couple of years, the church had fallen on such hard times that it had to close – forget about paying for a gardener.
It was a good deal, all things considered. Cheap enough that even someone as financially reckless as Eve could afford it.
The guys are experienced, but shovelling by hand still takes time. Eve sits underneath a tree with a book, fills her mind with mindless drivel whilst her throat occasionally tickles with a flower root crawling up to brush against her molars.
“So, uh, the one you’re burying –?”
“The morgue is bringing the coffin this afternoon.”
“Right, right.” The guy wipes sweat from his brow. He squints up from where he’s standing inside the plot, nose scrunched up against the midday sun. “And uh, with lifting –”
He pulls a face, looking her up and down like he’d quite enjoy watching such a small woman attempt to lift a coffin all by herself. His friend turns away to hide his smile, disguising the chuckle with a cough.
“They’re sending a couple of people to help me.”
“Ah. Suppose that’s good then.”
When the job is done, the guys leave sweaty, their breath coming in heavy pants. Eve stays behind, walking around the empty hole as if she were some sort of grave expert. Her breath is almost as heavy as the gravediggers’, but hers is due to the flowers bunching around her ribcage.
She thinks she made a good choice with the stone. It’s flat, square-shaped, granite coloured. She kept the inscription simple: she’s never been a poet.
When the burial staff arrive, Eve is on her knees, eyes streaming as orchids tumble down into the grave. It’s a waterfall of pink and white, of lavender and tangerine, of cardinal and cerulean. The staff are polite enough to stop at her side, standing with the coffin on their shoulders, cheeks flushed in the summer heat as they pretend not to see.
It’s a pitiful thing to die of this disease.
Eve stands up, wipes her face clean of the broken petals. She can taste them, soft and sweet, wedged in between her back teeth.
“Probably should’ve waited to do that until after the box was down there, huh,” Eve jokingly offers.
It falls a little flat, but the staff all crack weak smiles. Eve moves aside and lets the professionals lower the coffin down with a sheet. It reminds her, briefly, of being a kid at her great aunt’s funeral. She’d been fascinated by their uniformity, their expertise. Back then, the thought of death hadn’t even crossed her mind.
Humiliatingly, her mouth keeps refilling with flowers. She has to keep turning away, spitting out petals and stalks, occasionally heaving and choking on rotting leaves. One of the men catches her eye after she’s swilled out her mouth for the third or so time.
“Happened to my grandma,” He says, adjusting the sleeves of his long white shirt. “After my grandfather died,” He clarifies, when Eve says nothing.
What should she say to that? She can feel her throat closing up again, more blossoms racing upwards in their desperation to erupt. She grits her teeth and swallows, lungs straining as she forces the flowers back down.
The man looks like he regrets saying anything. Eve doesn’t have the energy to feel bad about it.
Eve nods. She picks up the gravedigger’s shovel, wipes the sweat off the handle with the corner of her t-shirt. She didn’t bother dressing nicely, couldn’t handle the idea of wearing something formal. She hates black suits nowadays. The one hanging in her wardrobe is the same one she wore to Bill’s funeral, and it felt a bit too shitty, even for her, to wear it today.
So she begins to shovel the dirt into the grave and she pretends not to notice how the burial staff go back to the van but don’t leave. Half an hour passes by, and she’s barely made a dent as her breath is coming in short, sharp, erratic bursts. Whenever she bends down too far, she feels the edges of thorns pressing against her lungs.
Roses.
Asshole.
She’s too tired to fight when the burial staff return with their own shovels. They don’t make her stop, and for that she’s grateful.
In silence, they fill the grave, and every now and then Eve vomits more flowers into the hole, layering her grief within the earth. In a strange sort of way, she thinks it’s nicer than if she’d thought to buy a wreath.
A few weeks later, she awakes one morning struggling to breathe. Slowly, she turns to the side, lifts her head, and heaves the mulch of petals straight onto the floor. Coughing, she brings a hand to her mouth. As expected, her fingers come away red.
Time to get up.
The park is quiet at this hour. A few committed joggers pass by, panting as they make the most of the cool air. Eve is the obvious anomaly, the woman walking past in flip-flops and sleep shorts. On impulse, she picks up a stick from the grass. Maybe people will think she’s walking a dog.
She’d always wanted a dog as a kid, but they’d never had one. Your father’s allergic to fur was always the official party line. But she’d found out as an adult that her father had no such issue, and it was actually her mother who hadn’t wanted to spend her life vacuuming dog hair off the furniture.
Did you ever want a dog? Eve internally wonders. She examines the stick in her hands – dark brown, firm, a little bumpy but no jagged edges: a good fetching stick.
She wishes she’d thought to get a dog. She could’ve got one from the shelter.
Could’ve, should’ve. Too late. Whatever.
A few moments later she has to stop, bending down to grip at her knees as a coughing fit takes hold. She shuffles to the side of the path and spits the pink daisies into the grass. At least it’ll look nice with the white, she thinks.
Although her lungs are weak nowadays – beautifully decorated inside, she’s certain, but weak – she decides to follow the side-trail off up a small hill. She takes her time, walking slowly as she takes in uneven breaths.
With every inhale, the roots tighten around her ribs, the petals scratch against the insides of her lungs. It’s getting worse, she knows that. When she eats, she can taste the smell of the flowers– it’s something to do with how taste and smell are so interlinked, according to the internet.
At the top of the hill, she’s relieved to see an empty bench. She drags herself over, hand clutched to her chest as her heart struggles to pump. Sagging down onto the seat, she groans at the pain.
Got to breathe. In, out, in, out. How is it possible that the air smells like flowers too?
And not just any flowers: like dandelions. Dandelions. But it’s a little more than that; it’s mixed in with the wet, musky stench of mud after a thunderstorm.
Fucking bitch, Eve tiredly thinks.
Slowly, the sun comes up. The horizon glows orange, the clouds tinge salmon pink. Despite the odds, Eve continues to inhale, heartbeat eventually slowing to a regular pace. Ah – maybe not today then. Fine. She’ll have to stop and get some wine on the way home.
The flowers haven’t gone anywhere, though. With every breath, she continues to feel them pressing against her ribs. Her lungs must be entirely covered by now: they must look like a private funeral bouquet.
She toes off her flip-flops, places her feet flat on the grass. She digs her heels down, feels the dryness of the earth beneath her skin. What’s it like to sleep down there? It’s not too dark, is it? The coffin she picked out is comfortable enough, right?
Here comes the coughing again: it hits her suddenly. She falls to the left, hanging over the arm rest as red carnations and thick strings of blood rocket from the back of her throat. There’s a brief pause, a lull in the heaving, before she’s curled over again, and this time a thick stream of ruby roses fall out.
Pain, sharp and stinging, piercing the roof of her mouth. Grimacing, she reaches inside to pull out a singular thorn, tiny and unassuming. She runs her tongue along the roof of her mouth, prodding uncertainly at the inflamed skin. Eating anything is going to make it sting like a bitch: great. But it’s not like she’s been great at keeping much down lately.
She lifts up the edge of her shirt and wipes her mouth. It stains the bottom of her top red; suppose it doesn’t matter. Consider it an homage to the woman she lost.
She coughs again, sounding much older than she is, weak and scratchy: pitiful. Nothing to be done. Too bad.
Then the pain flashes hot through her lungs, sudden and strong, as her vision blurs white and the smell of a rose garden infuses every sense. And then it’s gone, just like that, and the pain returns to the usual bearable ache. She coughs again, only once, and spits out a singular white chrysanthemum, the edges dipped in spots of blood.
And it's really very beautiful. Not that the other flowers hadn't all been beautiful too, barring the drenching of blood and bile. She holds the chrysanthemum up towards the sun, watches as the light shimmers across the petals. The sunlight dusts it a faint golden yellow, a loving illuminating kiss.
Pain again. Roots spreading sideways, up and down, diagonal and criss-cross. Blossoms bursting around her liver and thorns prodding the edges of her stomach. The smell of wet dirt in her nose. The back of her throat tasting like dead things in summer.
But it’s okay: there are far worse ways to go.
At least she’ll look pretty when they cut her open.