(Just a little twist on the old flower story)
The gunfire ringing through the small village was growing louder and louder, and Elizabeth Rollins knew it was only a matter of time before the foreign invaders reached the small house where her parents and her family dwelled. It was set back enough in the woods that she hoped it would be passed by, but nonetheless, her parents ran about, gathering their treasures.
“Elizabeth, go to my garden. Immediately!” her mother cried, trying to get together the few pieces of silver the family owned.
“Not yet, Mother!” Elizabeth cried, aghast. Her husband was to return shortly with their young daughter, whom he had taken to town to gather supplies. “I must wait for Michael and Ana. They should be back any moment now.”
Her father grabbed her roughly. “There’s no time. They might have taken cover elsewhere, I pray to the Lord. Get to the garden and wait for us. Go inside the hollow tree to be safe, and, not under any circumstances do you return to the house. Hurry!”
Despite her age, there still was no disobeying her father, and she found herself fleeing into the woods, following the well-worn path her mother had created. The air was acrid and cloudy with smoke, and she could see far-off flames in the direction of her neighbors’ houses. Trying to ignore her terror, she soon entered into her mother’s garden.
There were always flowers here, it seemed. Time seemed frozen in this lush oasis amidst the wild blueberry bushes and oak trees. Here the dead leaves ceased, and a luxurious carpet of greenery was at her feet. With a deep, troubled breath of the roses’ scent, she dove into the dank hollow of the old oak tree.
How many times in her life had she hidden here, playing hide-and-seek with the neighborhood children? Yet today, she could only stare out at the trees, while trying to keep her body from shivering uncontrollably. She could just make out the small outline of her house, and as the minutes ticked by, she surveyed both the dwelling and the path that led from it for signs of life.
But none were forthcoming.
Tears soon flowed from her eyes without her realizing.
After several grueling hours, she drew in a relieved breath. Perhaps she and her family were safe after all. Yet the moment she began to rise to venture forth, there was a large explosion, and her own house exploded into flame.
Trying to swallow agonized screams, she mouthed, “Mother! Michael! Father…Ana, my darling…I pray you haven’t returned to this…” Blindly, she jumped out, intent on rushing to her family’s aid.
She hit her head on the edge of the hollow and fell to the ground, unconscious.
When she awoke, she could vaguely make out the face of an old woman hanging over her. With a start, she sat up, rubbing at the bruise on her head. She quickly recognized the woman as Lenore, a lady she had known from birth. The woman lived deep in the woods, widowed at a young age. In other places, her healing skills would have been termed as witchcraft, but here she was beloved. She had helped the family through many a sickness with her herbal remedies, and there was no evil in this grandmotherly woman to speak of.
“My dear Elizabeth, I am so glad that you’re unharmed. You were right to stay here.”
Elizabeth gaped at her, hardly registering her words. “But I needed to help my family. I needed to go there, to stop the soldiers...”
“No, you would have been killed. You were stopped, and rightly so.”
The young mother studied the wizened woman in confusion. Was she implying that somehow Lenore had purposely made Elizabeth hurt herself?
She looked off in the distance at the smoky sky. “I can’t see the house through the smoke. Is my family…”
Lenore cast her eyes to the ground. “My dear, I’m afraid not.”
Elizabeth merely blinked, too shocked to respond. Blocking out the woman’s words, she made a mad dash through the woods and into the smoke. As she reached where the house stood, she knew what she would find, and it was just as she imagined. All that remained was a large pile of darkened planks, scorched brickwork, and twisted metal. Several small fires still burned in the very heart of the blackened post-inferno.
“Oh, no…Oh, no! I…they’re in there! I have to get them out!” She started to pull at the wood. It burned and blistered her fingers, but she did not feel it. Timber by smoking timber, she wrenched the refuse away, uncovering a small child’s twisted bedframe.
“Oh God!” she gasped. “My…baby…my…Did they get you? Are you safe?” Nearly delirious, she tried to throw herself onto the smoldering metal, but Lenore was suddenly there, wrenching her from the flames.
“My dear, they’re not in there!”
Elizabeth glanced up, almost hopefully. “But you said…”
Lenore turned away. “They are lost, yes.”
“But their bodies…”
“It’s been taken care of.”
Elizabeth twisted towards her in astonishment. “Taken care of? What are you talking about?”
Lenore gulped, and calmingly ran her hand over the girl’s shoulder. Elizabeth visibly relaxed and allowed the older woman to lead her away.
In a daze, Elizabeth found herself trudging back through the woods, following in the steps of the old woman. She was aware of their entering her mother’s garden, although it seemed only a mass of colors to her teary eyes.
And beyond the hollow tree, lay four new graves, of of which was a child’s.
“Four! All four of them!” she shrieked, feeling a newer, deeper agony than she thought was possible. She fell to the fresh earth, digging her hands into it, her tears mingling with the sand. Nothing made any sense; this was not real, and her mind simply could not accept or even process what had happened in the last few hours. Or perhaps it was days? How long had she been unconscious for all of this to have taken place without her knowing? And who had dug the graves?
“Days.”
Lenore’s voice cut into the fog of her mind, and she tried to focus on her.
“Yes, you were out for days. It was best for you. I could not have you digging through the ashes with all the enemy stragglers left behind. A young woman like you…those soldiers do terrible things, you know.”
Elizabeth struggled to make sense of what her neighbor said. “You gave me medicine to make me sleep?” she asked confusedly.
Lenore winked. “Well, kind of.”
So many emotions were rushing through the young mother that she could not summon further speech. She merely stared at the graves, her eyes focusing on the small ornate marble stone that read “Ana Rollins, aged 4.”
“Such beautiful tombstones,” something made her push out, her good upbringing never far from the surface. Then a fresh burst of tears overtook her, and she burst out angrily, “Couldn’t you have saved them?”
A humble expression came over Lenore’s face. “Me?” she said quietly, but Elizabeth suspected that Lenore was capable of far more than treating illnesses. Her mother had attributed miracles to this woman, and Lenore never denied them. As it was, there were no surviving villagers to help her dig the graves, and there were no artisans nearby to make the four tombstones that stared back at her.
“It was far too late for anyone to help, Elizabeth. I saw your house go up in flames, and I sensed the loss of your family. When you emerged from the tree, I stopped you. Your family was gone already, and I vowed I would not let you perish as well.”
“How did you see me?”
Lenore smiled secretively. “I have my ways.”
Elizabeth pondered this momentarily, but decided not to question the woman further in this vein. Perhaps she had a crystal ball or something of the like. “You couldn’t stop the soldiers?” she finally ventured.
Lenore chuckled ruefully. “How? And I didn’t know about them right away. I’m not omnipresent. I don’t know everything that’s happening, I’m afraid. And plus, there were too many to count, and they kept coming and coming…”
Elizabeth studied her. “How did you stop me? I hit my head.”
Lenore put her arms around the young woman and coaxed her from the dirt. “My dear, I made you hit your head. Then I put you into a long sleep. Now come into my house. You’ll eat, we’ll clean you, and you’ll rest.”
“No, no…” the fatigued girl weakly repelled the woman’s urging. She held her hand out to the fresh mounds of dirt. “I can’t leave them. They need me.”
“They need you to live to further their memories,” Lenore uttered. “Now come.”
Elizabeth could not resist the woman any further. She followed her halfheartedly.
“My dear, you must eat. I beg of you.”
Elizabeth was clean and freshly clothed, but she would not eat. Lenore had forced her to rest, but she did not seem restored in the least. In fact, as the days progressed, the girl was wasting away despite Lenore’s best efforts.
At every chance, Elizabeth would escape to her mother’s garden where she would lay in the sparse new grass that grew above the graves. She would occasionally speak to her departed family, usually to tell her daughter that she would always be with her.
And, at nightfall, Lenore would always have to persuade her to return back to the house. “My dear, they are gone, but you know they would want you to live,” Lenore often reminded her.
“I lived for my child and husband. Now I have no purpose in life,” Elizabeth explained quite clearly one day. There were no tears to speak of in her eyes, yet as she sat guard between her daughter and husband’s graves, she was so gaunt and pale that she seemed to blend in with her surroundings.
“Elizabeth,” Lenore implored her. “They wouldn’t want this for you. They’d want you to find someone else to love, to start a new family elsewhere—”
“But then I would have to leave them. The town is demolished, and there are no people around for many miles. Don’t you see? There is nothing for me except to protect them. What if more soldiers come and defile their resting place?”
The girl’s comment was disturbing, and Lenore tried to change the subject. “But you will die if you don’t eat. I’ll have to force you to eat.”
“Please do not. I would like to die. Then I may rest with them. “
“You don’t wish to die. Even as a young girl, you loved life. You loved nature, and your mother’s flowers…” Lenore grasped a handful of daisies without ripping them from the plant.
“And if I could live here in the garden indefinitely, I would. Believe me.”
Lenore’s mind went to work.
Elizabeth was near death, but she was more cheery than she had been since before the loss of her family. “Lenore, it’s almost time. Bring me to the garden and let me die with them. Then you may bury me so I can finally join them.”
Sighing, Lenore uttered, “No one, not even I, knows if there is anything beyond death. I fear that there is not, and if so, your family would especially want you to experience life as long as possible.” Lenore stood gazing down at what was left of the girl that lay on the bed. She could still see the love of life in the girl’s eyes, but her wish to be with her family apparently overpowered it.
She could not let Elizabeth die. She had failed the rest of the girl’s family, who had never been anything but kind to her. She had to fulfill the dying girl’s wishes.
“Elizabeth,” she took the girl’s hand, concerned at how icy it felt. “I have a way to help you.”
Elizabeth drank down the strange-tasting herbal concoction the woman had handed her. She trusted Lenore with her life, and did not think twice about ingesting it.
“That will give you some strength so you may transform,” Lenore said quietly. She watched the bedridden girl quickly perk up.
“Is that how you watched me?” the girl asked slyly.
Lenore chuckled. “You found me out. I’m a busybody, and I have a fondness for flying, so, that raven that occasionally circled your house and the village…” She winked.
“That was you? That’s how you came to help us so quickly. Even in the worst of weather…Oh…” Elizabeth gave a large shudder. “My…that feels…wonderful!” she exclaimed, throwing the blankets off and jumping to the floor without even tottering. Lenore grinned to herself as she watched the young mother launch herself through the room and out the door.
“Stand where you want to grow,” Lenore instructed.
“I want to grow everywhere!” Elizabeth cried, holding her hands out wide. Despite what Lenore had said about being a raven, Elizabeth still harbored some doubt as to whether transformation was actually possible. But then again, nothing seemed impossible with Lenore.
With an amused shake of her head, the old woman ushered Elizabeth towards an area between the child’s and the husband’s graves. “You must put your roots down first, then you may grow to the far corners of the earth, if you wish it. Now are you ready? This is truly what you want?”
Elizabeth gazed intently into the old woman’s kind eyes, and she was reassured that this change would be real. And it seemed to be the answer to her prayers.
“I’m ready. There’ll be no pain?”
“My dear, metamorphosis is a lovely experience. If it were painful, do you think caterpillars would live to become butterflies?”
“You’ll come visit me?”
“As long as I’m able.”
Elizabeth gulped. “Change me.”
With that, the woman closed her eyes, her fists tightening. As she gradually opened her eyes, her hands began to emit a greenish light. She clasped them over Elizabeth’s shoulders, gently nudging her towards the earth. Elizabeth gasped in delight, and the woman began moving her hands over the girl’s changing figure, chanting to herself. “Oh, oh…” Elizabeth exclaimed, running her own hands down her skin, which was taking on a verdant tone. “It’s…lovely…And your touch…”
“I’m guiding your body into its new form,” the woman mumbled, closing her eyes and focusing harder.
Elizabeth began to moan; the changes were more blissful than she could imagine. She could feel her very bones softening into fleshy greenness as Lenore’s hands directed her body to thin out into a stem. She wanted to run her hands all over her figure and down to her feet, but found that she could no longer bend. Her legs had fused together at Lenore’s beckoning, and shivers ran up what now was her stem. Her feet had burrowed into the soil, and the sprouting of her roots made her giggle with elated glee.
Though she could no longer trace her fingers down her changing figure, Lenore continued it for her. And whatever energy the old woman introduced with her hands sent a magnificent electricity through Elizabeth. “Wonderful…” she groaned contentedly as the ground grew closer and closer.
“You’re almost done, my dear,” Lenore purred, pulling the girl’s thin green arms into leaves. “And you’re becoming so lovely.”
And soon, with the last vestiges of a human face, a young green plant was looking up at the woman. “I can’t believe how perfect I feel!” Elizabeth cried, and Lenore smiled, removing her hands momentarily.
“Oh, don’t stop. Please finish me, Lenore.”
And she did.
Am I done? Can you hear me?
“Yes, I can hear you in my mind. You’re in the very last phase of the transformation. You are, as I call it, ‘cementing’ into your new form. Your very soul and being is adapting to being a plant.”
Why didn’t you tell me how amazing it feels? In all her life, Elizabeth had never experienced such unspeakable pleasure that she had just gone through. Everything felt different, her senses were still in existence, but drastically altered. How long will the tingly feeling last? she asked. It’s running through…all of me!
Lenore smiled again, gently fingering the new plant’s leaves. “The tingly feeling will go away as soon as the ‘cementing’ is complete. But I will tell you that every slight touch against you in plant form,” she rubbed Elizabeth’s stem, “will always be exhilarating!”
Oh, my Lord! The little plant exclaimed in gratitude.
Lenore sat with the newly-created plant all afternoon as it acclimated to its new existence. Over and over Elizabeth thanked the old woman, who often stroked her lovingly. “Bloom for me, my dear!” Lenore requested presently.
Oh, can I?
“But of course! You’re a plant, aren’t you? Just push open the little flower buds on top of your stem…”
Before she had even finished speaking, the buds broke open into a spray of bright blue flowers, and the little plant quivered. Ah, that feels lovely! I must do more! Several more buds appeared, swiftly bursting open to adorn the little plant in a shower of blue.
“Very good, Elizabeth,” Lenore laughed. “But you must stop, as nice as it feels. Conserve your strength so you may grow and spread. Take in the sunlight with your leaves and make your food.”
I am. I feel it. It’s like instant…energy. Like that potion you gave me before you turned me into a plant. She tittered, and her plant body trembled ever so slightly.
***
Through the years, with regular care from Lenore, Elizabeth spread and blossomed profusely. She stretched out her roots so that she soon encompassed all four graves in a protective blue mass. She grew through her mother’s garden, shielding the other plants and choking out any weeds.
She never looked back at her old life, and never once rued her choice to continue on in her new form. As a part of nature, she was truly happy with her existence, and she would protect her loved ones forever.
And one day, many years later, an ancient, stooped Lenore made her last visit to the garden. “Elizabeth, do clear a spot. It’s my time, and I’ve decided to join you.”
I’d love that, Lenore. There’s a nice sunny area over here that you’ll enjoy.
Elizabeth tilted her leaves away and Lenore stood in the spot that had been uncovered. “Before I change, you are still content, my dear? You’re happy?”
Lenore, must you ask? I cannot imagine being anything else. Only…
“Only what?” the old woman asked, drinking down her potion.
When you are gone, who will be left to remember us…?
Lenore’s fists were beginning to glow, but she paused, gazing down at the blue flowers. “Remember? Why, Elizabeth, don’t you know?”
Know what?
“Dearest, you are forget-me-not. Your flowers and seed will blanket the country, the world, telling everyone of your story… You will never be forgotten, for you will be everywhere.”
Reassured, the plant replied, Lenore, I thank you.
With that, a beautiful new spray of irises burst into bloom in the old woman’s stead.