By Rachel Charney McKenzie
“I want to tell you the story of my flower shop. It sat in a quiet crevice of a wealthy, residential neighborhood. It was modestly sized but very nice to look at—a local staple. The city is not very big, so on a clear day, you could see the tips of skyscrapers towering over treetops from the storefront windows. Many of the people who worked in the skyscrapers were the same ones who lived in the neighborhood—it was consistently voted the safest neighborhood in the region, you know, even after Everything—and they came to the flower shop when formality called. Flower shops thrive on the resilience of tradition, and mine was no different. As you’d expect, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day were great for business—hospital visits and funerals alike.
“Some customers came in person, outsiders stopping in on their Sunday walk over the hill, or else a conveyor belt of regulars. But many called, especially as the summers grew hotter, the winters more biting and unpredictable. Can you give me a better deal on the tulips? I know they’re rare now, but come on, help me out here. Sometimes, they dictated notes I would replicate on cardstock in loopy cursive.
“I measured the extent of the damage this way: price markups, decreased size and bloom quality, loss of local varieties. If I close my eyes, I can still see it in my head, the news after they passed the interim reforms: reports of skyrocketing GDP rolling across the banner along the bottom of the TV screen mounted in the corner of the store, footage of coastal towns submerged underwater in the foreground. The tulip haggler on the phone saying, Now is the time to buy that piece of land we’ve been talking about, the one down south.
“Then the riots began. In the evenings that summer, tear gas canisters billowed grey smoke against a sunset so orange it looked synthetic. It was one of the last bearable summers. I remember selling peonies, the petals bleached pastel by UV radiation and already wilting, to a mom who drove an SUV and wore comically large designer sunglasses. The peonies were for her son’s graduation from the top private school in the area. It was a blissful, cool June day. As dense, shapeless masses of protestors marched through the streets just outside the store, slowly approaching the home of the government official, the target of their pilgrimage, she gestured to the door, sighed, and shook her head in disbelief. She invited me to share in it with a single, telling look. Crazy, right? Her tone so casual it might suggest some kind of expertise to the untrained ear. Looking to me for support, gesturing beyond the store walls to identify the subject of her critique. I mean, you want to protest, go right ahead, be my guest, but ruining people’s commute, or their day off, or their graduation…that’s when it goes too far. She turned to the woman wearing athleisure in line behind her, who nodded in agreement. I know, it’s like a dark cloud over the city. I smiled politely.
“There was lots of talk of light and darkness in those days. Who belonged in which category depended on who you asked. To some, the darkness counted among its ranks the rioters and displaced residents of destroyed seaside towns; to others, the landlords, insurers, and politicians who profited from their destruction. A dark cloud over the city. Looking back, I think she must’ve said those things because she was scared. Scared that struggle was making itself visible in our neighborhood, a neighborhood largely insulated from Everything up to that point, along with Everything Else that came before and led up to it. Fear, on the hill, is nothing more than the creeping, nagging idea that maybe you’re just as screwed as everyone else, an idea so destabilizing that the only way to avoid the seismic waves it sends rippling through your conscience is to start talking about things as if they’re obvious, in Manichean terms like right and wrong, good and bad, light and darkness. Fear often exceeds its mandate, spilling into the domain of moral absolutism, ricocheting off a handful of convenient targets before gleefully self-perpetuating.
“I did not share in the rioter’s rage, the tulip haggler’s opportunism, or the SUV mom’s fear. For the most part, I managed to avoid the economic and psychic ramifications of It All. I started in the shop as a nineteen-year-old student working summers to pay my college tuition. Back then, the place was owned by a chic elderly recluse, Mira, who’d been married something like six times, had four estranged kids, and boasted a smorgasbord of personality disorders. She was a bit of a nightmare but pegged me early as an injured fawn and so treated me with an exaggerated delicacy I grew to depend on. I was twenty-five when she suddenly died and left me the business and property in her will. A piece of paper, and suddenly the neighborhood on the hill was my own.
“Instead of relying on an imported supply alone, like many florists, Mira also grew genetically modified flowers in a greenhouse accessible through the shop’s back door and down a damp-smelling hallway. As soil conditions changed, ravaged by extreme weather, and vast swaths of land grew inhospitable for cultivation, the shop was cocooned from the carnage.
“I kept the staff on as long as I could. They were neither as fast nor as conscientious as the machines, but I had no interest in replacing my staff with robots. They left me as the cost of living on and around the hill became unmanageable. The no-outsiders policy, implemented when it became clear the riots were only growing bigger, didn’t help. Armed guards patrolled the hill’s perimeter on behalf of a private security firm I can’t remember the name of anymore. Looking around the shop today, you’d have no idea there ever was a staff. It’s all taken care of, everything from the watering schedules to managing inventory, even designing the floral arrangements. It’s very efficient.
“A lot of our clientele disappeared during that time. No surprise there. What was strange was the customers who kept coming, despite the tear gas, the armed patrols, the blistering heat. I remember Corinne because she always requested a note signed with her name and clipped to her bouquets. I guess that’s standard, but it was particularly important to her, I think, that there was a record of her indiscriminate generosity and compassion: flowers for the government official whose home was vandalized in the protest, whose social circle she was tied to, and flowers to the local climate justice group that organized it and that her non-profit supported, at least in theory. These ornamental bouquets were signifiers of confrontations she would claim credit for, stopping just short of setting them into motion: they were peace offerings to herself, reassurances that she was good, honorable, that she would be spared on a Judgment Day that was, in her view, somehow near enough to cause constant existential panic while remaining distant enough to still get worked up over trivialities.
“She would burst into the shop, a woman come undone. No one can drive in this city. Of course it had to rain today. Just running around for everyone, as usual. She often came to pick up her orders so she could personally deliver them to their recipients. As I rang her up at the cash, she would pause her shtick of trademark exasperation, a work of performance art in perpetuity, and observe the floral arrangement—the daffodils in their melted butter yellowness, the childlike frills of the zinnias. Then, she would lean in, take in a deep breath through her nose, and close her eyes as she stood up and exhaled, lifting her chin for a moment so that she looked peaceful and regal instead of angry.
“You must understand by now that the reason this place is still going is because of people such as Corinne, the SUV mom, and the tulip haggler, people who continued to have many reasons to buy flowers, people who could not allow themselves to see that there was a world beyond the hill because if they did it would mean something very serious, very terrifying.
“The tulip haggler, the next time he came into the shop, did not have his Bluetooth earpiece in. He glanced at the news coverage—shaky filming, clouds of dust—as he approached the cash and ordered a dozen red roses, but his lower lip quivered, and he was dressed head to toe in black, and it hit me like a low ceiling how even his pain was inextricable from his abundance. The luxury to lay a loved one to rest, to memorize which plot of earth they belong to, to look away, to mourn fully. As I watched him fish bills out of his wallet, I recalled him saying into his earpiece, We were smart to get out of that deal when we did. Baked into that statement was the tacit assumption of agency, that just as he had opted out, the anonymous Others on the screen had ever opted in.
“The SUV mom returned about a year later, a tall, baby-faced young man dragging his feet behind her, wearing a hoodie embroidered with the logo of the prestigious college a few districts over. The shopkeeper’s bell clanged as they entered. She said, Well, I’m not paying a hundred thousand dollars a year for you to skip class and protest on behalf of a violent mob.
“They went back and forth for a minute until he said, Mom just because we’re in here and they’re out there doesn’t make them wrong and you right, and a couple in the store turned around to stare so she hissed under her breath, Enough. She then flashed me a bright, toothy smile. Under her loaded questions and racially charged dark cloud imagery lay unscrutinised certainty: that violence was condemnable when it was rioters trying to break in but not the security guards keeping them out; that enclosure was the antidote, not the poison; and that her perimeter, her appeals to peace, her flowers, were symbols not of the world’s destruction, but of its preservation.
“Corinne remained a customer for decades, even after the curfew, when virtually every air-conditioned house on the hill (the SUV mom’s, the tulip haggler’s) had shuttered its doors and windows and relied on the labour of those desperate enough to cross the checkpoints each morning and evening. One of the last times she came in, a dry, desolate day in April, her head snapped back as she leaned in to smell the flowers. I thought your shop had some way to avoid this. I explained calmly about the heat stress, how the increased cost of cooling the greenhouse had forced us to sacrifice ideal growing conditions, how this had regrettably led to the same fragrance loss that had occurred in flora across the Earth’s landscape due to disrupted pollination and increased ozone levels. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Right. Scoffing, Of course. This was the era of perfunctory guilt: Corinne and her flowers, the oil companies and their donations, the media and their belated segue from fearmongering to contrite mourning. I don’t know what happened to Corinne, but I hope that all those flowers did her some good in the end. Sometimes the robots, catching my gaze with a blip in the algorithm, would ask, A bouquet for Corinne? I would shake my head and say, No, she’s not a customer anymore. After a few rounds of that, they learned: No, she is not a customer anymore.
“The only thing to look forward to was the time of year when summer turned to fall. The suffocating heat would yield, rebelling against its mandate of eternal punishment, and a breeze would fall over the hill like a cold towelette on your forehead when you’re burning up. When a whisper of air lifted my bangs off my forehead and the first hydrangeas and chrysanthemums arrived mid-September on a driverless truck, they brought with them the unkept promise of something new. Even an uninterrupted moment of quiet without the hum of the machines, sorting through fall inventory in the shop on the hill on a periwinkle Friday evening, sunset hues casting cool pastel glosses onto the petals, was a glimmer of redemption beyond mere respite.
“I must admit, I’ve started to lose myself a little; the memories I have are melded into those of my customers. Some figures have lived on with a certain vividness, but other than them, lines have begun to blur. When? Oh, I guess once I lost the staff, a few decades ago. In the end, my fidelity to the shop eroded me. I don’t know what prize I thought I would win.
“I do have this one memory—at least, I think it’s mine. It’s of my elementary school English teacher, or maybe this conversation took place between a child and her mother who came into the shop. The adult was, either way, someone in a position of authority, someone who seemed to be a well-adjusted, wise adult at the time of the memory’s inception, but significantly less so now that I’m telling the story with some hindsight and cynicism. She explained to me, after I had scraped myself on the playground, that some people are like orchids, which need very particular environments and support to grow, and some people are like dandelions, hardily persisting through tough living conditions. Dandelions can thrive anywhere. As she pressed the band-aid over my knee, smoothing it out with her index finger to make sure there were no ripples, You’re a dandelion, aren’t you? The girl looked at her mother and reflected for a second before deciding, Yes, yes I am. The analogy became gospel—for her, me, for anyone whose circumstances made it possible to take seriously, to use as a metric to parcel out the strong from the weak. The children who lived on the hill, then, were resilient dandelions because they could be, because they were on the right side of the perimeter and the checkpoints. The rest were orchids—unadaptable, sheeplike, and destined to martyrdom—because they were not.
“Is the flower shop still standing today because it is a dandelion? Every year, I grow less convinced.
“The turn to winter, if you can call naked branches shaking at the nerve endings of impassive tree trunks winter, reveals the neighborhood on the hill for what it really is: a relic of something long gone but furiously clung to, a creeping dystopia resisted only by the dizzying force of denial. The flower shop has not a scratch on it. Its commanding black awning still asserts a noble presence, but standing outside on the empty street, you can feel all that was lost and cannot be regained. You can feel the fear of those who live on the hill, who monopolize this land yet have so easily deserted it, the echoes of the protestors, many of whom are likely fugitives under the new laws, the imprint of their prophetic rage visible in the chain-linked fences and ever-thickening smog. You used to be able to see the skyscrapers from the shop, once. I know it sounds crazy now.
“When the cold set in a few months ago, I knew it would be my last time watching the seasons change. Like I said, I’ve started to lose myself in this place. The customers and I—even the ones who still try to exchange formalities as if these are just difficult times, saying, Once the military handles the problem at the border, yeah, things should stabilize—no more tulips, huh?—avert each other’s gaze out of covert humiliation. I used to take a twisted pleasure in judging them, relishing in what my observations of them told me about the world. But I can no longer criticize them without also indicting myself. A persistent nausea has parked itself at the foot of my stomach, preventing me from taking inventory with the same impersonality I once did. I don’t think I can stay in this place for a minute longer, if I’m honest. I’ve grown to hate this shop, the certainty with which it has anchored itself to the earth, the way nothing has ever moved it and likely never will. The way it watches, just watches.
“I can’t bear just watching anymore. I have to leave. Maybe I can find others who did not succumb to the immobility of bearing witness. I’ve probably missed the boat for that, but it would’ve been nice, you know, to be surrounded by people who did not know the intoxicating force of the hill, or who did and walked right off it anyways. Oh, what am I telling you all this for? Guilt or delusion, maybe? I’m out of sorts these days. I guess I should’ve stuck to the onboarding mandate: inventory, supplies, best practices for customer service . . . I don’t even know if any of the other stuff I’ve been gabbing about . . . if it even registers in your, uh, programming. Software? Sorry, that may be rude, I’m not up to speed with what’s politically correct anymore. Your brain, I guess? Your brain. I assumed you could figure out all the logistics with the data available to you once I go, but it felt wrong to just leave you the shop without explaining what it was really like in here.
“The shop was here before Everything started, you know, before the heat and the riots. Before the fence and the guards. Before you. You can’t forget that. It was here when a summer day was still a gift. Not so long ago. If anyone asks how we’ve managed, you be sure to tell them it’s because we’re dandelions, bristling fiercely against the wind. Remember that.
“I’m not as lucid as I used to be, but I hope I’ve done a good job filling you in on the place, because there’s no one else left to do it. When someone comes in, and they want to buy flowers for a party or a wedding—yes, there’s still lots of those on the hill—maybe you can try to tell them all that, okay? About Mira, Corinne, the tulip haggler, the SUV mom, the neighborhood on the hill and how it changed. It’s important that you remember.”