The Gardener and the Ghost Flower - Act 3 of 3

Morning came. The village stood silent as many of the villagers were now buried beneath the dry dirt. Windows gaped like mouths mid-scream.

The farmer’s progress, the first flower to grow in years, had collapsed under the weight of the villagers’ greed and ignorance.

As the sun rose in the filthy sky, it illumined the barren land.

Under the hazy, depressing sunlight, the gardener found the ghost flower trampled in the mud.

He knelt once more. He dug deeper this time. With hands raw and reverent, he buried the broken flower into the soil, hoping it would grow again. Hoping a seed yet remained.

"Rest," he whispered. "Rest until they remember this is all that is true.”

As time passed, the ground grew angry from what man had done to it.

A small plot of sick soil formed where the ghostly flower was buried.

Time passed. Only the gardener remained.

Eventually, the farmer became fertilizer, decaying into the parched earth. The plot had become the farmer’s tomb.

No one remembered the village. No one remembered the villagers. No one remembered the farmer.

As more time passed, all of man’s progress, and the consequences of his progress, faded.

The sky became blue again. The air became fresh again. The water became pristine again.

There were no birds in the sky, no animals in the ocean, and no humans upon the earth.

Yet the plot remained.

From the plot rose a porcelain hand.

Eventually, when the Earth grew into its former glory, a group of humans discovered the plot in a remote land part of a New World.

A man with a scroll decreed the porcelain hand and the plot it rested on was his by order of a political system disguised as a religious one.

“By order of the church, this belongs to me,” he declared, with pride.

Over the years, the man became a shell of himself as settlements, villages, and communities arose around him.

One day, the idle man had a thought: “What if the porcelain hand was opened so that it may receive. Surely, if it could receive, then perhaps it would give.”

He reached for the hand. Something inside him melted away.

The man’s eyes sunk, his skin turned pale, and a black shroud covered his body.

He heard a voice in the edges of his mind.
“Feed. Feed me sloth. Feed me greed. Feed pride. Feed me gluttony. Feed me lust. Feed me wrath. Feed me envy,” the voice whispered.

The man stood idle. Then, mechanically, he returned with a gluttonous child.

“Yes, in the soil. In the plot,” the man said, expressionless.

The boy knelt in front of the plot. An apple appeared in the dirt.

“Bleed the apple of gluttony,” the voice whispered.

The man carved a grin under the boy’s second chin. His heavy body slumped into the soil. The plot swallowed him whole.

Aware of what he’d done, the man recollected his thoughts, glanced around at a world he didn’t remember, and took his life over the soil.

But it was too late.

The plot whispered to someone else.

And someone else answered the call.

And the plot demanded more blood.

And more blood came.

And thus, the plot thickened.