Dandelions or Buttercups

Flash Fiction | 5 Minute Read

This story was written in response to this month’s prompt in Fictionistas. If you are interested in the prompt, you can find it here.

This story is a 5 minute read.

Dandelions or Buttercups

When Sara woke up her hospital room was dark and smelled bad. She recognized the beeps and hisses, the scratchy hospital gown, the tether to an IV, but she didn’t know how she got there. 

She remembered hiking. The sun was high, air brisk, sky blue. She had begun her typical trail, but, with the weather so accommodating, she began to explore a bit off-trail. It was exactly the thing Harry hated. 

“You’ll be kidnapped!” he’d say. As if there was a new wave of human traffickers interested in the menopausal crowd. 

“Har-ry! No one on Earth’s interested in taking this wrinkly old bag of bones!” she laughed, knowing self-deprecation would distract him into proving his own eternal interest in his wife.

No matter the debate or distraction’s resolution, Sara always explored alone. It was a grasp at youthful defiance to do so, not that Harry had reigns on her, but with her parents long deceased, and retirement life stealing the boss to roll her eyes at, Harry was the only one who still afforded her opportunities to give it to “the Man.” With every step off the main trail Sara reinvigorated herself with the personal empowerment of small defiances. Little joys were magnified when aging fooled her into believing there was nothing new to see, know, or experience. The changing seasons delighted her in their secret surprises underfoot and overhead, the changing leaves, the cover of snow, or an expanse of yellow where there was nothing but brown decay just a week before.

That was what Sara remembered, new blooms had caught her eye. She was trying to determine if they were dandelions or buttercups. Either was possible, but only one would be a happy find, so she crossed the path to get a closer look. 

The memory faded then, like Sara’s brain wouldn’t allow her to memory-walk to the other side of the path to see the flowers. She had walked that area enough times that she could build a memory of herself on the other side, but when it came time to remember which flowers she saw, she couldn’t say for sure. She could imagine it either way – buttercups or dandelions. There was no way to know which was true. Each flower would have resulted in a different turn of tale, one being completely native, natural, expected and celebrated, the other an invader and a sign that her precious local wild lands were being overrun by something that didn’t belong.

“Dammit,” she whispered.

A groan came from somewhere deeper in the hospital room. A clue. She wasn’t in the ICU, she wasn’t quarantined, there was no intubation tube and, from the slight wiggles of her limbs she could ascertain that nothing was broken.

Except her memory. And that was bad, almost as bad as the smell, which was a clue yet to be deciphered.

The room’s odor was overpowering, but familiar. Sara tried to find a sensory memory to cling it to. She thought again of the forest, but neither dandelion or buttercup released such a foul scent. 

What else? 

She inhaled a deep, long sniff, cut short by a cough in reaction to the stench of it. A smell her body instinctively bucked up against. 

Sulfur! Whether it was the decay or the skunk cabbage of the wetlands, any time of year there was a good chance the sulfur smell sporadically lingered in the air. It was another part of Sara’s outdoor adventures that Harry complained about. He had married into this environment she grew up in. What was a natural background nuisance to Sara was a massive intrusion on Harry’s olfactory system. 

In the dark of the hospital room the scent was both out of place and overpowering, Sara coughed again. 

“Quiet,” a voice hissed from the same direction of the groan.

Sara’s cough settled deep and shook her chest. There was no stopping it even if she wanted to. 

“Please,” the man’s voice pleaded. “They’ve forgotten about us. Don’t let them come back.”

“But–”  Sara started. The sulfur smell grew stronger and Sara’s cough rose with it, shaking her whole body as it did so. She wanted to say, “Doctors aren’t dangerous.” It came out sounding more like, “Doctors or dangers!”

“Oh god!” The man shouted. He gagged. “Dangers! They’re coming! They’re Dangers!” He began praying an old prayer familiar to Sara. His desperation palpable in his speed and repetition. 

Sara gripped the bed rails, hoping to still herself, shutting her mouth to try to contain the cough. In that tension her memory returned.

She was back in the forest, squatting down over a patch of buttercups, not dandelions, covering the ground. To the untrained eye, nothing would be amiss in this natural setting, a springtime bloom of wildflowers brightening your path, but, beautiful as they were, buttercups were an invasive species preventing the land to live and breathe. They were a threat to everything that was supposed to grow there. Sara reached down to grab two handfuls to pull up, certain her intervention was for the greater good of this land she loved. As she dug in, tendrils of green grew out of the soil coiling around her arms. The vines pulled her and spun her, pinning her to the ground into the same tight, tense pose she found herself in the hospital. As she laid staring with her face to the sky the sulfur smell grew and overpowered her as she heard footsteps approaching. 

In the hospital Sara heard the doorknob turn and the door squeak open before the lights switched on and blinded her, just as the sun had when she was pinned to the soil. In both places, as she laid there, she saw silhouettes of figures standing over her looking down upon her curiously. 

Doctors aren’t dangerous, a voice whispered within. Then her eyes adjusted and focused to see what had made the birds go silent in the forest, what had made the man in hospital pray. He had called them “Dangers.”

To the untrained eye, blinded by the lights around them, it’s possible one might think nothing was amiss, but as Sara blinked into clarity, she saw the four figures were smooth, bald, gray slender beings with giant heads and large black eyes. As one of their long, four fingered hands settled cold and clammy over Sara’s nose and mouth, stopping her cough, but also her breathing, her mind wandered back to the forest wondering how far the buttercups had grown.

Leave a Comment and Don’t Hoard this Story!

Do you have feelings about alines/alien abductions? To know me is to know this is a long standing fear. Since the moment my parents took me to see E.T. when I was far too young to appreciate it, I kind of had this fear going. What about you?

If this is your first time here…

Don’t forget to subscribe so you get all of my story hoard delivered right to your inbox every time a new piece is released!

Help fuel this fiction!

buy me a coffee!

If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter, and are interested in buying me a coffee to help fuel my fiction, you can do so at my Stop Writing Alone | Story Hoarder Ko-Fi page. Thank you for reading!