Author: Alzo David-West

While wars were burning, flowers were growing.

***

No one had paid much attention to the small comets that had landed on the fringes of Eurasia, North America, and the Middle East in the midst of the ruptures and revolts that were dividing and tearing up the continents. Streaming and TV broadcasts showed the same calamities everywhere—missile strikes, smoke, raids, refugees, drones, and people dying—whether in the thick forests of the Ukraine and Russia, on the asphalt streets of Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon, or in the hot desert lands of Israel and Palestine. The big media had no care for the flowers, only the body counts, mass protests, and immigrant detentions.

But on the fringes, the flowers were growing and growing quickly. They were an odd specimen somewhat resembling daffodils, but soft and fleshy, with a dripping liquid nectar that oozed from their folds. The wildlife took readily to the delicious succor—the hungry pollinators, the bees, the hummingbirds, and the other little creatures. Soon enough, the daffodils were spreading across the hemispheres—appearing in garden plots in small towns and green parks in great cities. The botanists who published on the flora classified it a remarkable mutation and, in their rarefied journals, debated its provenance—with hypotheses of its origins in, of all places, the Amazon. The speculations did not, however, change the fact that the flowers were still spreading, and they became as ubiquitous as dandelions on an undisturbed rural field and a fractured urban sidewalk.

As the daffodils proliferated, birthrates internationally, by some coincidence, began to rapidly decline. That—the declining birthrate and an increasing loss of interest in intimacy between consenting and transactional partners—was the only major news besides the wars and the protests. Really, things should have been much more concerning. The peace activists organized rallies to stop the wars while the revolutionaries led committees of the international working class to seize the state, and other groups composed only of traditional women in Indonesia and Uganda declared the fall of civilization. But surely, that was all an exaggeration, many people complained, swiping away the agony and the clamor on their smart devices and smartphones, searching for the flowers. For they had become truly quite a desired commodity with the uncertain world economy and the rising value of gold. Yet to some, the daffodils were even more valuable. Thus, the flowers became cultural fixtures throughout the globe—from Sendai to Xi’an, Jakarta to Mumbai, Belfast to Riyadh, Khartoum to Johannesburg, and Boston to Punta Arenas. The daffodils did not stop the wars, the detentions, or the drones. Airstrike bombs continued to fall. So did the numbers of children, every year, who would not have to be fed to the internecine machine.

Then, the news broke among a handful of the botanists, the men who had been tempted, that the daffodils were fertile and hybridly procreant. The flowers from the comets were not flowers after all but a species of female, strange, mesmerizing, and infectious. The brains of those others more who wanted to deeply know and enter the flowers filled up with a feeling of expanding foam, a feeling of calm, so soothing, so complete, like there was nothing to worry about in the entire world, which now moved in a pleasure of slow motions.

The flowers spread and grew into towers, and inside, new flowers formed, in the shape of small newborns.