Dog Tooth Violet

Why did the memory of it always echo?

"Fetch that stick

and gnaw that bone.

Dog tooth girl is all alone.

Sit, roll over, then play dead.

If yer not good ya get locked in the shed."

They would dance around her jeering, and knock her school books out of her hands. Invariably, old man Humphries would find her a few hours later, locked in his garden shed.

Violet shook her head and exhaled deeply. If only showers washed away pain and trauma. The water pinged against the glass and steam was beginning to rise. Her radio faded from music to news, "The breaking story at the top of this hour is the latest in a string of bizarre incidents where a group of bull..."

Vi turned of the radio as she climbed into the shower. Placing her face into the middle of the stream, she let the warm flow pull her to a state of calm.

Her hair was still damp when her doorbell rang.

"Hey, you ready to hit the Saturday flea markets?" Vi's friend Cheryl asked as she stepped into the apartment.

"Almost. I was thinking we could swing by the greenhouse on the way home, I want to grab a few plants."

"Works for me, but where do you have room for more plants? You have a jungle already." Cheryl took a seat on the sofa and wiggled her fingers at Samwise, who was peering at her from behind the leaves of a large Monstera plant. The cat remained in his spot unphased by the attempt to coax him over.

"There is no such thing as too many plants!" Vi called from the bathroom where she was fixing her hair.

Giving up on interacting with the cat, Cheryl changed topics, "Did you hear? They found another group of kids locked in a garden shed with those flowers scattered all around."

"Dog Tooth Violets."

"What?"

"The flowers, they are dog tooth violets."

"How do you know that?"

Violet sighed into the mirror as she pulled her hair back, "They are a native plant, we walked through a bunch of them on our hike few weeks ago."

"You always remember the oddest details...This time one of the kids was able to give a good description of the person who did it."

"Oh?"

"Said it was a woman dressed like some kind of super hero. A white and lavender spandex leotard in like a weird hounds tooth print, a yellow mask around her eyes. Like some sort of deranged harlequin."

"Deranged? Why deranged?"

"What would you call some masked person locking kids in sheds?"

"Bullies, the kids are bullies. The reports say these kids are always bullying someone when this happens. I would call her a hero, or karma."

"So what name should be given to this super hero who fights bullying then?"

Stepping out of the bathroom, Vi looked over at Cheryl. There was something yellow on the floor by her feet.

"Dog Tooth Violet seems to be what she is aiming for."

She crossed the room and casually pushed the mask under the sofa as if she were rubbing a scuff off the floor. "Ready?"

A photo on the end table, partially concealed by plant leaves caught Cheryl's eye, "Cute, that you?"

"Yeah, I was about nine."

"What happened to your tooth?" Cheryl couldn't help but notice the snaggled top left canine that made Vi's young smile look like a half snarl.

"I had it fixed." Vi's tongue glided slowly over where that snagged tooth had once been as she pulled her apartment door closed behind them.