Meat-Eating Orchids Forgive No One by Alorah Welti
I was driving with a migraine, which they say not to do. I had lost count of state lines. The ribbons of white paint on the I-90 failed to mark the hours. The highway would occasionally clot with cars, thick with construction—but it hadn’t for a while. The setting sun was an ice pick in my eyes, in my skull. I remembered hearing somewhere that the Egyptians called death westing and the word stung in my mouth. I took an exit with a gas station and started filling up my old Chevy, just to have something else to do. The sky looked like fire.
A girl, maybe 20, started pumping her gas on the other side, humming “Heart-Shaped Box” like she was unique and didn’t reek of weed. Queen Anne’s Lace flowers were everywhere there—they were already starting to dry and curl up like bird's nests in the heat of that terrible summer. The smell of gasoline made me wince. My eyes, unfocused, fell on one flower growing from a crack on the side of the pump. Suddenly vivid, I watched it like a predator.
Out of the purple-red center, Queen Anne’s bloodstain, a bud became a pearl became a skeleton. The flower sagged lower and lower under the weight of the growing thing. I took my fingers off the trigger of the pump—click. The off-white bones, connected by some invisible fascia, fell onto the dirty cement. I gasped, and it writhed, lungless, like a preemie. I looked at the girl; she seemed mildly interested.
“You know what that means, don’tcha?” She put her nozzle back. My look of alarm answered her question. “The end of the world’s comin’.” Her drawl made my head throb. An elderly man on the other side of the station said “Isn’t it always?” I scooped up the miniature skeleton. Light as air, endlessly fragile; I set it down on the passenger seat of my Chevy.
“Be careful what you try ‘n’ save.” I drove away, into the sun, my heart beating itself to death.
Title is a line from Nirvana’s song “Heart-Shaped Box.
“This was the first flash fiction piece I really wrote (and finished). I wrote it after I got COVID and became fascinated by Kurt Cobain. I initially wrote it based on a writing prompt on Twitter—something about the end of the world and a gas pump attendant. I didn’t share it with anyone in my life but I quietly submitted it to a few places. All rejections. I still like it, but it may be too strange, or too real, I don’t know. Do what you will.”
Alorah Welti (she/her) is a Minnesota-born feminist, synesthete, poet, and artist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Allium, Cutbow Quarterly, lavender bones, Lit. 202, and elsewhere. She lives on stolen Mohican and Wabanaki land in Massachusetts with her family. Her Twitter is @alorahsky.