Flowers

Death Flowers

(written when i had to...)

Shake's blood boiled. He harrumphed, then walked out the drug store. Shake knew, in his mind, that someone's going to jail. He had always been suspicious, for the fertilizers smelled different. Yes, he knew how fertilizers smell like: earthly, sun-baked. These new fertilizers he brought to the pharmacist for inspection had sparked his doubt, for the aroma of the canisters stung his nose.

Yes, he was right. Glyphosate. The scourge of death. It wasn't fertilizer...

Now Shake was wondering how to return them. He want to get justice from the mischievous salesman who tricked him. And he sure will. He's not a simpleton. But it was dusk, so he might just do it tomorrow. On his way home, Shake had been constructing his award-winning complaint. He reached for the door of the house almost the same time his ultimatum was finished.

“Oh here comesh my boy.” spat an old man embedded in a worn-out couch by the living room. His long prehensile fingers perpetually enclosed a bottle of Valium. His voice was muted by 30 years of drug use.“What have you been up today? Clarinet lesshonsh?”

Shake forced a smile. He didn't want to spark the man's anger. Shake might be a horticulturist, for all he cared about, but for now, he's the musician everyone in the family thinks he is.

“I'm doing the Oboe.”

Enough to keep the man's mouth shut. Shake had his fill of sermons about him not being so musically inclined. And he doesn't want to witness another series of hyperventilating fits.

He was never musically inclined. Music was never his field. But because Dad hyperventilates whenever he's mad, Shake lived the life of a musician. Guitars, Drums, Gamelans... His childhood was a picture of him playing the piano while a menacing teacher looked on, brandishing a long stick of madre cacao, ready to strike once Shake's fingers struck the wrong note. Dad wanted Shake to learn music, like he did, like their forefathers, their predecessors. But Shake's calling was gardening, tending, and landscaping. That's why he had lied to Dad about working in a local cafe as a keyboardist, when in fact he works at a paper recycling company. It's best kept this way, Shake often reminds himself.

As he went up his room, he felt guilty learning the fact that he was responsible for the death of his plants. He looked out his window poring over the backyard, and stared at his ever withering patch of hydrangea. For him it's like the death of a friend. In comatose. Deteriorating every one second. Helpless and silent. And he was to blame for it.

The hydrangeas need the most expensive fertilizers there are, the best quality, but Shake cannot afford them. He works at slightly above minimum wage. It's January, and the summer openings in most companies start late March. There's a gardening supplies retail store nearby that caught Shake's attention, but their part-times do not open until April. Shake enlisted nevertheless. His interview is scheduled three months from now.

Shake stooped at the hydrangeas. The two remaining white conical blooms flowed with inspiration. I will land the job, he said to himself, before retiring to sleep.

The next morning, Shake looked out his window for his daily dose of hydrangea. It had been his routine since they were planted, because it gives him a pacifying feel. Now, though, he didn't feel any. Two white conical blooms lay on the ground, as if plucked. Fungi had started growing on their sappy ends. Shake felt sick.

“Oh honey, don't sweat it. Maybe you just didn't follow the instructions...” Mama reasoned out, in the kitchen.

“I have been gardening since I was 6...”

“Yes, ever since our backyard became a graveyard for dead plants.”

“That's not true.”

“Oh whatever. Give me those fertilizers. We are a family of musicians. Not gardeners.”

Shake can't find a proper reason why Mama never supported him. Is it because gardening is an expensive past time? As well as it is for girls? Or was Mama afraid that Dad might find fault in Mama's futile effort, that she follows what he dictates so as not to compromise the marriage and the family?

Shake always perceived Mama and Dad as two different persons. One gobbles pizza, the other eats lean meat in vinaigrette. Mama destroys the weighing machine, Dad floats in the wind. Although their only common denominator is music, Shake can't convince himself that Mama follows Dad's house policies.

Not until one day, Shake was looking for his shovel under the materials depository down the garage, when he chanced upon a heavily tinted newspaper-covered bottle hidden beside a stack of rusty barbecue grills, hidden as if it's something no one should see. Just some normal bottle, but what caught Shake's attention was the label showing behind the torn part of the newspaper saying: Weed Killer...

Shake never bought weed-killers. He never bought herbicides, for the matter. He plucked every little weed in contact with his plants manually, without the help of chemicals. Herbicides are sometimes non-selective, they might harm the other plants. And now, in their home with only one gardener, an alien bottle of herbicide resides down the guts of their garage. Whoever put this here? Shake opened the bottle, and a familiar smell stung his nose. He had been used to that smell; he used to smell that during tending time, every morning, every time Shake fertilizes his hydrangeas. After consulting the pharmacist about the real identity of the culprit inside his canister of fertilizer, Shake stripped the suspicious bottle of its newspaper covering. And there, emblazoned under the two throbbing words that spelled death to his plants was the deadly chemical name of the defoliant he had encountered before. Glyphosate.

Mama pondered over the dishes how her plans went out. The hydrangeas are not blooming anymore. Such a waste, Mama thought... If only Shake would live up to their musical lineage, and her other son stop thinking about journalism and do the guitars instead, she wouldn't have done what she did. But it's not the case, and Dad's nerves are splitting, so Mama started putting things on her own hands. “Weed killers wont hurt,” Mama told Dad one evening, and Dad consented. Besides, it's not to spite Shake, it's just to put him back on track.

It's not every long before Shake finds out who had been responsible for the killing of his hydrangeas. Shake had been doing the laundry, a day after he bought a new can of fertilizers from another supplies store, when he chanced upon a piece of crumpled paper shoved into the pockets of one of Dad's jeans. Shake opened up the now wet piece of paper, and a receipt unfolded before his eyes, showing the purchase of the same chemical defoliant he found in his old fertilizer.

Realizing the impending danger, Shake left the laundry, dashed up his room, and emptied the can of Mr. Surebuy Fertilizer. He knows the prank now, though for him, it's no prank. It's a call to war.

But Shake isn't the type who would be violent. He wouldn't rage to his dad's side and throw words like they're daggers. He would do some damage, yes he will, but it will be as subtle as the slow death of his plants.

A telegraph for Dad came one fine Sunday morning, telling him that some of his musical instruments will be confiscated because they were smuggled and resold. Not only that, they were also imitations, and the pirated company orders the destruction of the said instruments. Mama knew the repercussions of this, that she made ready the Valium bottles, just in arms reach.

“Thish can't be! I ordered them from a trushted mushic shtudio!” Dad ranted, his voice a silenced wisp of extinguished tobacco. “I have been buying from that shtore shince I was in college... You remember hon, when we were in the univershity?”

“Yes yes... Now you calm down. There must be some mistake, that's all...”

“And I have alwaysh trushted them, for chrishake, give me a pill, and now thish?”

“Honey, be careful, you're stressing yourself...”

“How will I calm down? Everything here'sh shmuggled material!! Thish guitar!” Dad flung a guitar to the wall, shattering it to pieces.

“Raul, stop that!”

“And thish violin! Why will I shtop?! Theshe are fake!” Dad, perpetually sobered by medication, strained to demolish the place. “And thoshe drumsh Oh thoshe drumsh! That's why they have been shounding like losht lambsh mooing!”

“Oh no you don't. Stop this Raul...”

“These costed me my life! Give me a pill! They've costed me all my salaries!”

“Here. Don't worry I'll call the shop. What's this?”

Mama, amid Dad's tirade of destroying the musical instruments, stopped to take a second look on the tablet of Valium. “I never knew Valium tablets were in the shape of Ted Flintstone...” Mama gave the tab to Dad.

For the first time in 30 years, the Valium tab tasted sweet. Sour sweet. Like vitamin tablets for children. Dad chewed on, “Give me one more...”

“Wait, let me get another bottle,” Mama replied. “I think there's something wrong with this. Valium can't look like Ted”

Mama went to the medicine box, took another bottle of Valium, opened it, and voila! More Flintstone tablets.

“Give me more!” Dad's hyperventilated plea scared Mama.

“Honey, this is not Valium! Wait, let me go to the drug-...“

“I need it now! What'sh the matter with you?”

“Just let me go to the drugstore!”

“I'm seeing stars! Give me my Valium!”

“In a minute, I will... Shake? Shake!? ”

Dad fell to the hardwood floor like a chopped off piece of meat. Three hundred miles away, a horticulturist found home.

Dad was rushed to the hospital that same day. He fell into a comatose, and his expenses had to be paid by his son who became a journalist after the ordeal. The musical instruments were never confiscated. No one ever came to do so. It appeared that the telegraph was a prank message. Mama pondered over the dishes why this had to happen. Maybe kharma, for killing the hydrangeas, Mama thought. Mama pondered, over the dishes, this time, in a white room where her husband lay in comatose, nurses in green scrubs walking by behind her like ants in the gathering.

A whole lot of death flowers were delivered to the Caliwag residence the day Raul died. Many were from famous musicians and composers, some were from relatives. To Mama, all of them looked the same: a bunch of anthuriums and violets. All looked alike, except for one lush crown of immaculately white hydrangeas standing tall and sinister amid all the reds and violets... Mama felt sick when she looked at the signatory. On the card was the slanting scribbles Mama always thought was very feminine and flowery:

“Condolences to Raul Caliwag, a great musician.

Flowers courtesy of The Gardening Store...”