The Artificial Flower

Fletcher Rabbit lived in a one room shanty on the outskirts of a forest without a name. This was just as well because given his surname, and his whole name for that matter, he didn't care much for the idea of names. He did, however, like to sit at a mahogany desk in the northwestern corner of the room playing with an abacus and staring at a large rustic chest near the fireplace. He spent the better part of his days aimlessly counting until he fell asleep in his chair, awoke, and then began again.

His last conversation had been in July of 1974 and he remembered it very clearly. Nearly 1,100 days had passed since he uttered a word and as of late, he noticed his inability to string together a sentence, even in the confines of his mind. That led him to think about the last time he read a book. Probably about 800 some odd days ago. Very little in the room had been touched or used by anyone in the four years since Avery disappeared.

Avery Plant was the love of Fletcher's life and once, on a Saturday at dusk, he made her a four course meal and he poured two glasses of fresh squeezed lemonade. She went out just before he set the table, saying that she would pick some daisies and that would be her contribution to the meal. And so Avery set off for the unnamed forest and she never returned.

Fletcher assumed that someone kidnapped her--but no one had frequented this field for many years before his arrival. For days and months afterward, each night, he would make the same meal hoping that the smell of creamed corn would somehow waft out there to the site of her vanishment and she would come home to him. He ate the same thing day in and day out and sooner or later, he couldn't even smell the food himself. Fletcher had become immune to it all.

He would sit on the porch and imagine that an animal or perhaps the forest itself swallowed her whole. On most nights, he would drift off to a deep slumber out there on the daybed, wondering how this could have happened. But on Saturdays, he would cry himself to sleep.

Though on this Saturday, after he cleared the table and wrapped the leftovers, and began the routine planning of how to create the very same diorama the next day, he smelled something odd. He walked slowly over the weakening floorboards, each one creaking beneath his feet, and he moved closer and closer to the smell. It was a rotten stench of an ice cream sundae mixed with urine and perfume.

He knew this smell. No, he knew parts of the smell. And as he approached the chest, he leaned down and put his nose right up near the keyhole of the lock. It was then and only then that he realized how long it had been since he had smelled anything, let alone something of this magnitude.

Fletcher unlocked the chest and there were the ingredients of Avery. Dead daisies and all. Her eyeballs were still opened and he remembered their last words to each other.

"Alone in the world was poor little Anne," she said.

"They found little Annie all covered with ice," he said in return.

And they smiled without so much as a single locked glance but with complete understanding.