Excerpt:

FRAYED PETALS

I hope you enjoy the following short story I wrote. It follows the fantasy pattern of the previous one. If you’d like to read it in a more comfortable format—one I personally find more enjoyable—you can visit the link I’ll leave at the end. Enjoy the reading 🙂

Have you ever, as a child, been told this phrase? “Every time you do something bad, a fairy dies.” The version my grandmother told me when I was little was that for every bad deed I committed, a rose would wither. I remember my terror well; roses have been my favorite flower for as long as I can remember. I could not allow such a beautiful being to die.

With that trick—born of my grandmother’s deceitful temperament—she kept me in line throughout my childhood. If I spilled a glass cup or protested an order, I would run in search of a bud from her national rose garden, full of shy blossoms that, in a way, reminded me of myself: unwilling to reveal themselves fully to others.

The torture consisted of tearing the petals apart while I watched. My crying lasted longer than expected; truthfully, an inalienable obsession bound me to those plants. By the age of five, my tantrums over killing a flower had ceased. My mind, already deflowered of the budding innocence of early childhood, hardened my attitude—or rather, accepted the fact that the culprit was none other than her. The idea did not die there. That thought—of acting kind and compliant at all times—followed me for the rest of my life.

I had forgotten that cloistered stage of my life until her arrival. My father was never one to give me flowers; distance meant we rarely shared time together. Usually, his birthday affection came in the form of money. This year, however, he innovated: he gave me the money, true to habit, and a few hours later the surprise arrived—a huge planter with a rosebush in full bloom. A large fifteen swayed in front of it, staked into the soil like a sign.

The insipid planter was just another ornament amid that tangle of leaves covered in crimson petals, whose fragility was reflected in the opacity of their enviable translucence, transforming sunlight into an iridescent red through their primary virtue. Its speckled corolla unfurled sober fans of red with enviable restraint. A note hung on the back: “May these roses reflect the path of your life, my daughter.” An unrecognizable signature rested in the lower right corner.

Despite the initial surprise, my relationship with my father did not improve. When I told him about my reaction, he seemed confused, as if he had done nothing of the sort—it was not news to him. In every conversation he lost the thread to work calls and contradicted himself, feeding my desire to ignore his calls and live in peace.

The months passed, and the flowers shone as if it were their first day of life. Something anomalous surrounded them. I had a vague idea of how flowers worked—strange, considering my obsessive behavior toward them—and I could say with certainty that their vitality was not ordinary. At times, the gleaming red hue seemed to swallow all other colors in the room.

One day, I argued with my mother over trivial matters. It escalated into something far more serious—a fight born from nothing, with consequences far greater than that skirmish deserved. I said horrible things in a burst of anger fueled by her prejudices. Even so, I spent the rest of the night awake, regretting my cruelty. Aware of my extremism, I gazed at the dull planter with the defiant flower atop it, seeking comfort. Instead, I found myself more disturbed: on one of the largest and most beautiful roses, a petal hung in a dichotomy of black and gray, like the trail of ash. The image brought back my grandmother’s phrase: “For every bad deed, a rose petal crumbles.”

I did not delay in apologizing to my mother, and by dusk the withered petal regained its vigor.

I decided to set a plan in motion—to test my absurd hypothesis. The next day I behaved normally. School posed the same old problems, and the gloomy mood of wretched Mondays engulfed everyone equally. At lunchtime I went to the cafeteria. Francis was there, as always—a kind, simple woman with whom I had forged a friendship. I ordered exorbitant amounts of food and paid as usual. Instead of real money, I used counterfeit bills we had once made for a dramatization. Doña Francis didn’t notice.

When I arrived home, an indescribable anxiety crept into my chest. I turned the doorknob with a naïve, almost foolish fear. The rosebush resting on the counter showed no difference from that morning, but upon closer inspection, another petal on a different rose had withered.

The idea grew ever more real. An innocent phrase had become a fantastic experience.

With my theory confirmed, I confessed to Doña Francis—though with some distortion. I emphasized my mistake of mixing fake bills with real ones and told her I would repay her. Smothered in shame, I minimized my role in the act.

Unlike the previous time, the flower did not recover its freshness. It kept its hollow, mourning color—more withered than before. There was no doubt: the rosebush was special. Over time, it became my rudder and steering wheel, as if God spoke to me through that indifferent plant. Its presence was irrefutable proof of God’s watchful eye upon me. He judged me without mercy or respite; my days were sweetened when the invaluable red petals returned, and my smile vanished when God severed the flower for my actions. “If the flower withers completely, will I no longer be able to go to heaven?” I carried that question through endless monologues on the lonely nights of my adulthood.

The vicissitudes of time pushed my worry first toward indifference, then into the core of my way of thinking and existing. Those around me, true to their forward-looking nature, set about planning my future. I enrolled in a university far from home, far from my morning judge. There I tasted the freedom I had repressed in my hometown, deciding never to return to the decrepit house where I had grown up. I finished university almost without blinking. When the academic burden lifted, a new space opened in my life. The profession I chose was far from what my family expected, yet perfectly aligned with my interests.

I savored the years ahead to the fullest. I surrendered to a pragmatic hedonism inspired by Epicureanism. I traveled, wandered, met all kinds of people. And when I least wished to return home, a chronic illness ravaged my body. Contradictions flooded my mind. The distance I had drawn between my kin and myself seemed cruel from this new perspective. I ignored calls, missed birthdays and graduations. In retrospect, that was the price of my freedom.

Standing once more in my home, I apologized for my indifference. My mother forgave me quickly; my grandmother had been lying cold for some time. My guilt only grew, stopping only when I entered my old bedroom. There, guilt turned into suffocation. My memory tried to erase the old vegetal executioner, whose petals no longer resembled wilted leaves but rather fabric frayed by the fineness of the bud. “How much evil have I done in these years for it to look like this?” With illness, guilt over abandoning my family, and the precarious state of my morals reflected in the flower hammering endlessly in my mind, I resolved to redirect my life.

After a few days bedridden, my most altruistic side took over. I signed up for every kind of volunteer work.

I collected trash from the river. The next week I helped the local parish tend to the sick. I distributed food to the less fortunate. Nothing worked. The stain remained in my soul; I felt it deep in my bile. The nearly bald rosebush, surrounded by dust and ash-colored petals, stood as proof.

With the doctor’s bleak diagnoses, I intensified my efforts. My routine would be surrendered entirely to charity. I joined an animal shelter to rescue dogs, cats, and all manner of abandoned or rejected pets. Weeks passed, and of the once-exuberant rosebush, only a sad remnant remained, with a single flower retaining its former purity. “Why doesn’t it work?” I asked with bitter disdain.

The illness weighed on me as heavily as when I had arrived home—a reminder of my limited time in this world. Without time to recover, I joined charity drives for the disabled. The petals remained gray and withered. “It doesn’t work.”

I gathered enough of my personal belongings to make a large donation to the homeless. The flower drooped closer and closer to the ground. “Why doesn’t it work?”

I used my knowledge to teach the town’s illiterate. As I did, the plant bent its stem further.

In a final, desperate attempt, I turned to every humanitarian organization imaginable. I planted trees across a once-barren wasteland. “Not a speck of color,” I murmured upon seeing the rosebush.

I volunteered full-time at the nursing home for a week. “Nothing.”

I promoted campaigns against poaching in the region. “It doesn’t work.”

I volunteered in housing construction. “NOTHING WORKS.” With mind and body at their limit, I stared at the insipid planter holding a frail stem. With all the effort in the world, I crawled beside it.

—WHY DON’T YOU GET BETTER? —I screamed in frustration.

At that instant my mind clouded. I staggered without reason and smashed my head against the floor.

When I awoke, a long conversation with the doctor—laced with reproaches for my disregard of my own well-being—led to the diagnosis. The conclusion was that my condition was irreversible; at best, I had three days left if God were merciful. I dared to think it was all a bad dream. I repented of every mistake, cried with my family, offered a thousand apologies, stopping only when my eyes burned unbearably. When I felt I was in the final seconds of my life, my reflections surfaced. “What will become of me in the afterlife?” There was only one way to answer that—while still alive.

—Could you bring an old planter from my room that has a rosebush in it? —I asked the doctor as my last wish.

Time became unreadable. Minutes or hours passed. The doctor entered carrying the ugly, minimalist container, stripped of all herbal beauty.

—Where is the rose?

—What rose? Inside the planter there was only dust…

… "

–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at fictograma.com–