spring has sprung (in a flowerbed of lonely, empty stems)

It’s the first day of spring here in Wellingville, but for Merryrose, it’s just another day.

The morning breeze tickles her nose as she steps outside with her nose up high, her sleek, small purse slung over her slender shoulder. Her heels strike against the concrete like hammers against stone, as if she’s trying to break the pavement underneath her weight.

Of course, Merry is too caught up in her daily routine—getting up, getting dressed, getting to work, and getting through the day as fast as possible—to notice that something in the sweet-scented springtime air is off. The sun shines, sure, and the trees rustle in the breeze, and the birds chirp their morning song as they glide through the sky, their open wings spread wide.

But the wilting flowers hang low, their petaled heads craned towards the soil, drooping in a synonymous slump. The grasses seem duller, browning at the tips instead of glowing their luscious sun-bleached green. And instead of the familiar scent of cool dampness and blossoming blooms, of sunshine and sweetness and new beginnings, the springtime air reeks of nothing but a shroud of swampy, fermented decay.

—

Merry’s pointer finger has been bothering her all day.

It’s a strange sensation, something between a warmth and a pressured pinch against the flesh of her left fingertip. It’s not really a pain, but more like a physical restlessness—an itch, of sorts, that can’t easily be scratched. It keeps twitching and twitching against her keyboard, a sudden, irritating tick out of nowhere.

Merry has always been anxious and rather high-strung, and her body often reflects that. She’s been told she’s always wringing her hands, or tapping her foot, or doing something with her body that suggests general worry or dissatisfaction. So it’s nothing too strange, surely, or too out of the ordinary.

But it is… off.

“It’s just off. It doesn’t feel like spring.”

Silently, Merry raises her eyes to the ceiling in an ultimate test of patience.

Wilma is Merry’s youngest, loudest, and most annoyingly enthusiastic coworker at the call center. She has a shiny blonde ponytail and blonde bangs with the tips dyed blue. She wears pinstripe pantsuits that look like they’ve been cinched tight at the waist, and she’ll talk to anyone, even if it’s just to herself.

“Don’t you think, Merry?”

Unfortunately, today, she’s not talking to herself. Sitting right across from her desk, Merry is in her direct line of fire.

“That’s natural,” Merry says to her matter-of-factly. “It’s only the first day of spring, after all.” The phone rings, and she picks it up, tucking it professionally under her ear. “Mordshire Services, Merry speaking. How may I direct your call?”

“I know it is,” Wilma speak-whispers over to her, all hushed and adamant, “but—”

Merry holds a finger up to her lips, eyes narrowed at Wilma.

Wilma falls silent, something akin to a pout on her red-painted lips.

—

By the time Merry leaves work, the sky is dark and clouded, and it’s pouring. The wind is vicious, chilling her to her core in her thin button-down and skirt. Her feet shake with the force of the powerful, gusting winds, threatening to send her flying back, and her shirt is so soaked she’s scared her bra might be showing. She should’ve brought a chance of clothes, or at least a jacket. But all the jackets in the house are Brian’s, and she hasn’t touched them since the breakup. She’ll just park closer next time.

“See?”

Merry startles, barely holding back a flinch.

It’s just Wilma, shouting over to her a few feet away in the grey-cast parking lot. Her ponytail blows wildly behind her as she points her key at her own car to unlock it.

“What is this weather?” she moans. “Where’s spring?”

“Spring comes with rain!” Merry shouts back, her voice forced. Her right foot wobbles dangerously from a large step, and she just barely escapes a humiliating slip into a massive puddle. She’s never wanted to go home more in her life. “Tons of rain! It’s normal!”

“I guess so!” Wilma calls out mournfully, struggling to get inside her vehicle. “Get home safe, Merry!”

By the time she reaches her car, slamming the door behind her, it looks like a tornado’s on its way with how blackened the skies appear, casting shadows on the rain-slick ground. The grasses shiver under the domain of the cold, stark darkness above. There isn’t a single flower facing upwards towards the sun.

After a long exhale and a few minutes of staring blankly at her steering wheel, Merry brings herself to check her phone.

Brian called three hours ago; she won’t be responding. He texted her, too. Apparently, she’d left her laptop charger at his place. He wanted to know if she needed it back—fat chance, Merry thought bitterly, that he actually gave a shit. He just wanted to talk to her again and was looking for an excuse. Perhaps fucking his secretary had already gotten old.

Her pointer finger throbs with that odd, strange sensation yet again, causing her entire left palm to shake. She feels it in her hand like an insensate vibration, and she ignores it all the way home.

—

The next morning, Merry wakes up to a pale grey sky and a supple, pliable shred of material the exact shade of her flesh next to her pinkened left finger on her bed, like a wound that had been peeled off in the dead of night and was already healing, slowly but surely, on a hand made anew.

—

The boss’s boss, the big man in charge, comes to work that day, a jolly old bald guy with a cane and a pair of small round glasses. He takes to Wilma immediately, praising her “customer service” while looking almost directly at her tits at every moment he could steal.

Perverted as Merry can tell he is, he seems earnest enough about his compliments. Only semi-bitterly, Merry wishes he were here every day to observe how little Wilma and her B-cups put those adept people skills into actually doing work.

“Same old scary face, Mer,” he says cheerfully to her on his way out. “Smile a little, why don’t you? You’re a great worker, I hear. So smile!”

Merry offers him a smile that feels more like a grimace on her face as he’s escorted out by their boss, who’s never looked more stressed in her life. She lets the expression fall the moment he’s out of earshot.

“He liked me!” Wilma gushes to her friend, a short, chubby secretary with beaded cornrows and a radiant smile; she’s so nice that even Merry can’t pretend to dislike her, but she always forgets her name. “He really liked me!”

Shielded by the laptop in front of her, Merry scowls at her screen.

She’s always been very unlike her own name. She rarely smiles at strangers if there isn’t a need to, which there rarely is. And life hasn’t given her very much to smile about lately, anyway.

Cautiously, suddenly struck with the paranoid feeling that someone might be watching her, Merry lifts her palm up slightly and glimpses down at her pointer finger against the keyboard.

The flesh of her fingertip is still pink, and it feels almost raw, the skin sore and flushed and strangely soft like a baby’s.

—

That night, it’s Merry’s arm that begins to feel strange.

It starts on the casual drive home. She drives with only one arm that evening, her fingers wrapped tight around the top of the wheel, wanting to move so fast that she can’t even think, blitzing her way down the highway. She even cracks the window a bit to feel the cold wind blow back her hair, despite the rainfall.

Brian texted again, this time under no petty, bullshit pretenses. He wanted to talk, and as she feels right now, Merry would rather die right here and now via the county’s most historically vicious car crash than ever talk to that scumbag again.

Five years. Five years of building a life together, and he’d thrown it all away for some head twice a week from a twenty-two-year-old girl, fresh out of college. A decade younger than Merry—a decade and a half younger than him.

Fucking sicko.

Her hand grips the wheel tight as she reaches seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour, barreling down the highway. Strangely, she’s the only car on the road, which is rare around this time of night. Her eyes stray out the window to the ocean over the bridge. The water looks grey-blue and still, the grasses long and browning and unkempt, and there’s no flowers in sight. Wilma’s whiny, dramatic voice rings out in her head—where’s spring?

It’s fine. Everything is fine. Everything seems dark and dull and meaningless, but it’s all just fine.

Merry is fine.

She has a job, and a loving family that’s coming to visit in the next few weeks, and a good iPhone, and good food, and clean water, and a home all to herself now. She doesn’t need a boyfriend. She isn’t in high school anymore. She doesn’t need to rely on male validation, nor on any meaningless, codependent connections with others.

In fact, as she is now, she feels very much like the absolute opposite. She didn’t need people at all. People were not to be trusted. Everyone, all of them, are as dark internally as the stormy sky above her now, and as selfish as one’s worst fears make them out to be. Everyone’s a ticking time bomb, waiting to blow up on another and leave them stranded and all alone. Even Brian, her very first boyfriend, who she loved for all these years. Even Melody, her best friend of nine years, who moved away last year and cut contact with her without a word of warning or explanation.

Even Merry.

She was under no pretenses that she was any different. She could feel her own coldness when she looked at others, or when she looked in the mirror. She was only more aware of it, and it made it easier to accept in the end.

People will always disappoint you. Even your best friend, even your significant other—even yourself.

To her disdain, she feels a singular tear sting in her right eye.

In that moment, her arm throbs so starkly, so very suddenly, that she nearly jerks the car into a nearby ditch.

It doesn’t happen again, but her arm feels strange and heavy all the way home.

—

“It’s just so bleak this year,” Wilma says to the office the next day, frowning at her laptop. “Spring is the season for new things to blossom.”

Merry doesn’t grace her with a response. She isn’t blossoming. She’s deteriorating. Her arm feels like it’s a part of another version of herself, and it’s all she can think about.

She’s breaking apart at the seams, and stupid Wilma has no idea.

When the day is done, Wilma stops her at the door. “Merry! Lisa and I are going to dinner later. We’d love if you would join us?”

It’s posed as a whimsical, almost desperate sort of question, like she already knows the answer.

“No thank you, Wilma. Maybe another time?”

“See, I knew you’d say that, but hear me out—”

“Maybe another time,” Merry says shortly.

She can see the exact moment Wilma gives up; the crease between her eyebrows is the tell. “Okay, Merry.” She puts a hand on her shoulder. “See you tomorrow?”

It takes everything in Merry not to shrug it off. “See you tomorrow.”

—

When Wilma leaves, rather forlornly, Merry slinks over to the bathroom and checks her phone.

Brian hasn’t called.

He hasn’t texted, either.

That’s fine.

Everything is fine.

It’s better this way.

This is what Merry wanted.

Isn’t it?

Merry stomps out of work a half hour later with limp, swollen hands. She adamantly ignores the way they tremble on the wheel on the way home, even as she clutches it with both hands, her long nails curled tight around the leather. Her arm aches, too, just as it did yesterday, with that strong, aching strangeness of a prickle.

Everything hurts.

It doesn’t hurt, but it’s off, and it’s new and it’s a scary, isolating sensation, so in a way, it hurts all the same.

Merry doesn’t even glance outside the road; it’s too depressing. Springtime must be dead this year. Someone killed the spring and let a sad, desolate, lifeless season take its place. This isn’t springtime rain, like she told Wilma it was. It’s an utter downpour, a vicious storm with lightning flashing in the ominous sky. The trees look empty and barren; all the birds are gone.

There may not be a single flower left in all of Wellingville County.

In that moment, Merry has an almost absurd daydream. She pictures herself and another, someone nameless and faceless, genderless too, down on their hands and knees in the soft springtime soil. They wear sun hats to keep the sun’s shining rays off their heads as they dig for room in the ground with their hands in the dirt. The person beside her presents a flower, a pretty red one, and places it in the center of the hole. And Merry sees her own hands, her normal hands, hands fully confident and sure and intact, covering the hole back up with soil, planting the flower in the ground so that it can grow, grow, grow into something beautiful and bright and new.

She comes to with a blink of surprise as lightning flashes before her windshield and shakes her head, a broken laugh building in her throat. What a ridiculous, pathetic fantasy. What is she, the Lorax?

Her arm aches.

Her palms shake.

Her finger twitches violently.

Merry grits her teeth at the sudden pulling sensation against her pointer finger, this time stronger than ever before, as if someone invisible is tugging on the raw, pink skin.

She can only half-watch in silent, horrified disbelief as a long, thick flake of skin peels back from her pointer finger, replaced by redder, darker, more vulnerable flesh. And when it falls, it does so lightly and slowly; it sways back and forth all the way down, and it floats into Merry’s lap like a fallen leaf in the autumn breeze.

—

When she gets home, Merry stares at her face in the reflection.

She looks horrible.

Her eyes look hollow and swollen, and she’s thin, too thin. Her flesh looks all but flayed off of her cheeks, hanging on by a thread.

Her finger is red and swollen.

Her phone goes off.

Brian.

She scrambles to it desperately, peering over anxiously to see.

Wilma.

Merry stares at the name of her coworker on her screen as it vibrates, almost violently, on her windowsill.

Behind it, the sky is dark like it’s winter. Opaque grey clouds hang low in the sky, drifting ominously by.

Bzzt.

Bzzt.

Merry walks back to the mirror.

Bzzt.

She lets the call go to voicemail.

“Hey, Merry, it’s Wilma.”

Birds dart low as they fly behind the window, speeding past the rain-flecked glass.

“I know I may be overstepping a boundary, but… I heard about the breakup. I know how close you and Brian were, and… I’m sorry.”

Merry’s cheek tingles.

She reaches up to scratch it.

“Please don’t take offense to this, but… I know you don’t have many friends. And I know it’s because people think you’re… difficult, or unfriendly.”

When she pulls her hand back, her own flesh is caked under her nails. But her face pulses, itches, aches for more to be taken off and away.

“But I don’t think that, Merry. I think we’re all so different as people, and so particular, and I think that’s okay.”

She’s scratching with both hands, now.

“Please, come to dinner with me. Just me. Talk to me. I’ll shut the hell up the entire time, I promise. I’ll just listen to you.”

Merry feels like she could stand there forever, scratching away at herself, clawing at her body until there’s nothing left.

“Please, Merry.”

Frustration building up in her chest, Merry grabs the phone and picks up the call.

To her immediate surprise, Wilma is uncharacteristically silent on the other end.

It’s almost reverent, the quiet that stretches between the two.

And something about that quiet, about being given the chance to be heard, makes Merry’s anger die in her throat.

“Merry?” Wilma asks hesitantly.

“Take me to dinner.”

It comes out as a demand.

“Is your address the same?”

Wilma’s only been here once, parked outside her house for an emergency tampon. She’s treated Merry like a god ever since.

“Yes,” Merry says quietly into the receiver.

“I’m on my way. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Merry?”

“What?”

“It finally looks like spring out there.”

Ridiculously, tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. “You think?”

“I know. Go look!”

“You’re stupid,” Merry says weakly.

“You’re stupid,” Wilma says, the joking inflection made all too obvious in her voice. She must think Merry is so sensitive she needs only the most obvious of cues; maybe she isn’t wrong.

“Wilma?”

“Hm?”

“I’m sorry. For—”

“Don’t be. I’ll be there soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

Wordlessly, Merry hangs up.

She slams the phone down on her desk, staring at her reflection in the mirror.

Her face, strangely, looks… different, all of a sudden. Nicer. She looks pretty, almost. The fallen skin of her face is nowhere to be seen. The pink flesh of her left fingertip, the swelling pressure of her arm, all gone.

Eyes red-rimmed, she turns her head to stare out the window.

The sky is blue, and the clouds are white and puffy, and the birds swoop across the sun past the green, swaying trees. And there, three houses down, sits a small red flower, its bright petals craned radiantly towards the shining sun.

—