They say she was already too far gone—that there was nothing left to save when she arrived at the emergency wing.
They had wheeled her into the operation room, the girl who was nothing but petals and thorns, ready to cut her open down to her roots.
Hyacinth had grown from the sockets of her eyes, and petals dotted around her open lips, falling from the yellow tulip that grew from her throat. Allium had sprouted from her pores, and lilies had stabbed through her ribcage, leaving a gaping wound where cyclamen thrived in her tissue. Her lungs had filled with a garden of yellows, purples, and whites, though they were all tinted red when the doctors’ scalpels finally found what was left of her skin.
One hand tightly clutched a heart-shaped card, the ribbon that once held it shut laid limp, hanging onto the foliage that grew from her fingernails. Small, cursive writing filled the page—a confession that would never reach its recipient. The blood and dew dripping from the small leaves trailed like tears, staining the red a deeper crimson.
The operation only lasted three hours before they gave up. They left her body on the operation table, the flowers and their spores bulging through the white sheet.
The doctors could salvage only one thing from her body before she was taken away—her heart, shattered by a yellow carnation stained with red, blooming with the fervor of a parasite.
Her death was announced to her family in the early hours of the morning. Cause of death: asphyxiation and strong hemorrhaging. They were not allowed to see her corpse.
That morning, her father destroyed her garden, an encore of the night’s rain wetting his clothes alongside his tears. Both he and her mother gathered the remaining growth in their daughter’s room, their son gathering everything into one pile before fetching the gas canister.
There would be no flowers at her funeral.