“Our landlord just died,” said my neighbor sorrowfully.
“Really? That’s a shame,” I said, today's rent money in hand.
He mimed wiping a tear from his eyes, and grinned widely. “On the other hand, he didn’t have any relatives or anything like that.”
Our little charade of mourning over, I perked up. “So?”
His smile widened even more. “So if we keep quiet about it, there’s a good chance that we won’t have to pay rent anymore. We send the bare minimum for the property tax and live until the government finds out.”
My eyes widened. “Wait, did he really not have anyone in his will?”
“Not a soul, that I know of at least. And from the rent I know he probably wasn’t very charitable.”
“Well, we can always feign ignorance when a cop or a lawyer comes sniffing around,” I said, slightly worried about this whole plan.
“Exactly! Now, help me carry the body into the cellar. He’s got a meat fridge that’s mostly empty, so we should be able to fit him in there.”
“Wait, what?” I asked, rather shocked. “Can’t you carry him yourself?”
Emerging from the cellar, our work done, my fellow lodger suggested that we celebrate the wonderful occasion by splurging a bit.
“It does sound nice,” I said, pondering it over, “but I don’t have the money.”
“Ah, but you're still thinking about rent,” he said. “Come on, you’ve got the money now! Come on, just this once. Get a little something to spruce up the flat.”
I decided to buy a new rug, using a little bit of the rent money; I wasn’t nearly so sure as he was about the spending, so I didn’t go all out.
“What, are you afraid the old devil will come back to life? I mean, I wouldn’t put it past him, but he’s been in the meat fridge for hours now. And it locks from the outside,” he said.
I held my rug defensively. “Well, look, I can always spend the money later. It’s better than getting,” I paused to look at his single purchase, “a flower. A flower? I didn’t know you were the type.”
He looked at the pale white bloom contentedly. It was about as big as a quarter, but still beautiful for its small size.
“Hey, I just wanted something to remind me of the old codger’s death whenever I looked at it,” he said jokingly.
“Suit yourself. I’d rather not think about him that much, honestly.”
He adjusted the plant’s orientation on the windowsill for about the fifth time today. It had been only an hour since we had gotten back, and we had decided to cook supper together. I had been planning beans and rice, but at his insistence we had also gotten a steak. I didn’t buy it, so I wasn’t quite sure if he had stolen it from the cellar or not, but I decided not to raise the question.
Now he was looking at it from different angles, trying to see how it looked in different lighting.
“What place do you think it looks best in?” he called from his bedroom.
“Why don’t you help cook supper?” I retorted, checking to see how the beans were doing.
“Hey, I got the steak. Besides, I helped cook last time.”
I got up from my chair by the oven, and walked over to the plant. It looked fine, I thought, but maybe it could do with some more light?
I opened the windows, letting the cool autumn air in. The plant stirred gently in the breeze as it tasted for sunlight.
“What if it falls out?” he asked nervously. I checked the distance from the edge of the sill.
“It should be fine. Look, I can get a bigger pot for it. That should stop any drafts from knocking it over.” There were a bunch of old flower pots in the cellar, left by the deceased landlord’s wife, who apparently had been much nicer than the man himself. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I took a few.
After supper, when the outside air was much cooler and we thought longingly of our warm beds, I closed the windows and adjusted the now-replaced pot’s position on the sill.
It might have been just me, but the plant already looked much larger.
The next day, when I came home from work, I could see some bits of green sticking out from my neighbor's open window. It seemed like he had moved it much closer to the sill, because I didn’t remember the plant being that visible when I left.
I saw him carrying another pot to his room. Apparently, he was starting up a real hobby.
I visited him again on Thursday, three days after he bought the plant. From what I could see from the outside, it was growing vigorously, with some few green tendrils stretching nearly two feet down, a little bit away from touching the top of the window below, which was boarded up after the previous tenant left.
The room was awash with green. There were a good ten pots worth of new plants, ferns, little trees, tiny shrubs, and a couple others which served as beds for the offshoot roots of the original flower. I sneezed, pollen tickling the inside of my nose, and took another second to take the indoor garden all in.
He looked at me proudly.
“Wow.” I blinked. “How much did this cost?”
“Not as much as you would think. I was thrifty,” he said, rather pleased with himself and the state of his wallet. “Have you seen the flower yet?”
It took me a second to find it, because I was looking for the same quarter-sized bloom.
“Wait, what? How did it grow so big?,” I asked, astonished.
It was now about the size of a dinner plate, great wide petals almost lighting up the room. It was like a white jewel nestled in a pillow of green. The rest of the plant had grown similarly, with a great fringe of leaves almost blocking out the window, and clusters of roots spilling over the sides of the first pot and trailing into others.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve been talking to it a lot recently; maybe that’s it. It is impressive how it manages to grow so fast. I guess it's just that dedicated.”
We had dinner again on Friday; it was in my flat, since his was choked up with even more plants, now mostly offshoots of the white flower. I wondered how he could sleep, since he didn’t appear to have much room left in his bedroom. I think he might have moved his bed into the kitchen, or maybe not; sometimes I would pass by his door and hear him talking to the plant late at night, so it was conceivable that he slept by it.
I never found out, because the next time that I went in was Wednesday; I was visiting some friends over the weekend. He had gotten rid of all his furniture, moved it out into the hallway where I had to step over it. I had seen vines reaching from his window all the way to the ground, so I had some idea of how much would be in his room. The scale still took my breath away.
It was like a jungle in there. There were plants on the walls, pots all over the floor, vines crawling and creeping over everything, coating every surface with shades of green. At the center of all this was the flower, bright white and the size of a sink, petals curving into a gentle bowl. The reflective half-glow of the flower surrounded my neighbor’s head like a halo of moonlight, as he stared at it passively, whispering praises and gossip and philosophy. He turned smiling as I came in.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
I nodded, awed by the transformation the room had undergone, and by the sheer size of the flower.
He stepped gently over the pots, and took my hand. He pressed something into it.
It was a small seed.
“Here,” he said. “In case you want one too.”
I nodded, enraptured by the glory of the flower behind me. It wasn’t just the color, but the ornamentation, too; it had clusters of florets that poked out from behind wide frilled leaves, parts orchid, parts rose, parts exotic and spiraled, parts thin and lithe filaments. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to have one as well.
My gaze wavered, and I looked at the seed. It was plain and brown, of a weird shape, and its prosaic plainness snapped me back to reality. I still found it beautiful, but I decided that the flower seemed a bit too hard to deal with. Besides, I could look at this one whenever I liked.
“It really is a marvel,” I heard him saying. “How determined must it be to grow that fast, to push forwards with such speed; nothing is really futile if you put effort into it, I guess.”
He laughed.
“That’s what you get when you talk to your plants, I guess.”
The next day I couldn’t get out of the building; there was something blocking the door. I wandered the flats for a while, wondering if there was some kind of police raid going on due to failing to report the death of our landlord. Eventually I came to my neighbor’s room; the door was open, and a mass of leaves and roots spilled out. Stepping gingerly over the foliage and the pots which covered the floor, I made my way towards the flower. By now it was as large as a small table, the kind that might seat two or three people at most; a glossy marble countertop, like some nymph’s coffee table. He still sat perched before it, basking in the reflected radiance, face pale in the weird light.
He barely turned to me, keeping one eye on the brilliance of the flower.
“What is it?”, he asked tersely. He had apparently been rather absorbed in his observation of his flower.
“I can’t open the door downstairs.”
He turned back to the flower. “And why would you want to leave?”, he asked.
“Well, I’ve got my job to attend to. I don’t know about you, but I’ve only got so many vacation days, and my boss isn’t the most understanding.”
“Maybe you’d feel better about it if you looked at the flower some more,” he intoned.
I gingerly stepped through the vegetable mess over to the flower, which obscured almost the whole window. I peered behind it, looking for police officers or something similar.
Instead, I saw that the entire front of the building was covered in thick vines. That was likely the reason why I hadn’t been able to open the door.
“Hey, are you sure that it’s allowed to have a plant grow like this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel like this may be a violation of the rental agreement,” I said.
“Our landlord’s dead. You want to report me, good luck.”
I shrugged, looked at the plant again, and walked out to get some pruning shears. I thought there might be some in the cellar.
Walking back up to my room, shears in hand, I decided that the best way to start pruning the plant was to start cutting some of the roots off; that might make it possible to push the door open. I had almost made it to my room before I heard my neighbor calling for me. I doubled back, and struggled back into the room.
This time he was staring directly at me.
Enshrined and silver in front of the holy blossom, which was beautiful as a lily and as hadean as asphodel, he smiled benevolently, and looked at the pruning shears in my hand.
“Drop the shears,” he ordered.
“You’re not my landlord.”
The friendliness seeped away from his voice.
“You are going to do nothing to my flower.”
“Try and stop me. It was okay in the beginning, but look at this! It covers the whole room, the whole front of the house, and now I’m going to lose my job because I can’t go to work. Look,” I said, suddenly tired. “It’s a nice plant. I’m not saying it isn’t. But you can’t just let it grow everywhere.”
His face was hard, and he turned back to the huge bloom for a moment. I started to walk out of the room.
“Wait,” he asked. I turned around as he walked into the kitchen, stepping daintily over his plants as he moved for something in one of the drawers.
“This flower- this marvelous flower,” I heard him say from the room as he rummaged around for something, “is a symbol, a demonstration, of what can happen if you really put your all into something. This isn’t some supernatural freak accident; this is a symbol of what we can become if we simply strive.” I heard him stop rummaging, having obtained the thing he wanted.
“We should all strive to be more like it,” he continued.
“So it would be a shame if you killed it,” he said, leveling a pistol at my head. His tone was icy, and he was again silhouetted by the glow of the flower behind him.
“Think- one day we could all live in its glory. A provident jungle, a forest of bountiful opportunities, a symbol to aspire to, a flower to block out and replace the sun. So get down into the cellar, and stay there until the world is safe in the flower’s embrace.”
He looked almost saintly in the half-holy silver light, eyes reflecting the cold glint of the weapon he held.
“Why do you have a gun?,” I asked.
“It’s amazing what you can buy when you don’t have to pay rent.” He smirked.
I was marched down to the cellar, shears still in hand. I didn’t even try to use them.
The door shut and bolted from the outside. I was trapped.
After a few hours of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to look for some food. I couldn’t find anything else edible that was out, but the meat fridge still had some food in it.
I opened it. There was a satisfactory variety in the foodstocks contained therein, with sausages, ham, various other cuts of meat salted and unsalted, and a human corpse.
I looked at it for a little while, letting some more of the chill out of the fridge.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t died, you know. It’s all your fault, really.”
The mostly fresh body, kept from rotting by the chill of the fridge, stayed silent, eyes sightlessly staring at the cured ham which had been his similarly mute conversation partner for the last two weeks.
I grabbed something which looked like it didn’t need much cooking and started cutting it up, using my pruning shears until I found the old cutlery set. I ate and settled back.
I could probably survive a while on the meat in here, maybe a while longer if you counted my old landlord. I thought back on the plant, growing and flourishing despite having less dirt and sunlight than it probably needed. I’m not even sure if my neighbor ever even watered it.
I stood up, having made my mind.
If I’m going to die, then I’m going to take as much of this plant with me as I can.
I picked up one of the old pieces of lumber which had been left in the cellar and tried to pound the door open. It took me an embarrassingly long time, although that might be attributable to the fact that I tried to break down a door with a ram while being as quiet as possible. I waited for about a half hour afterwards, lingering by the door, making sure that I wouldn’t be ambushed by my neighbor when I tried to get out and kill his houseplant.
When I decided that the coast was likely clear, I went up to the ground floor and started cutting. I cut roots, I cut small offshoots of leaves, I broke windows and cut the roots. I even managed to clear a path outside, and cut the roots there. I considered running out for help, but realized that I wasn’t going to get any. I was just going to call the police down on us. I thought about it for a second more before I made up my mind.
This was my apartment. What’s more, this was a free apartment. I’m not going to let some plant take over it.
I crept slowly up the stairs, till I made my way into my neighboring flat, filled to the brim with green and the soft eerie shine of the flower. He wasn’t there. I sighed with relief, stepped forwards, and snipped the flower clean off. Then I pushed the pot out of the window after quickly checking for pedestrians below.
It didn’t have time to hit the ground before the bullet hit.
I fell to the ground, gasping raggedly, nearly numb where it had punctured, as I heard the shatter of the flowerpot.
My neighbor stood in front of me, gun raised and still smoking, face tight, shaking with holy rage.
“You’ve ruined this.”
He stepped closer.
“You find a miracle- a wonder- a sign, and then you kill it? Are you really that uninspired?”
He stepped closer, shaking even more.
Then he straightened, stood still, smiled.
“I was in your room, you know. Do you know what I found there?”
I shook my head feebly as I looked at that terrible man, looked at his face weird and inhuman in the silvery glow of the dying flower, looked at his eyes and saw only the reflected light of the miraculous white bloom.
He pulled a plain brown seed of unusual shape out of his pocket.
He twirled it around between his fingers, turned, and left.
I bled out on the floor.