The Corpse Flower

she told me this years later, near the end, in the small warm room where she kept her pressed flowers under glass. a botanist all her life, fluent in the Latin of things that bloom and things that poison. her hands were still precise, even then.

she’d loved, and travelled, and lived a good deal before the illness narrowed her world to that room. but the winter that year was the coldest on record. she was alone in her Paris cottage when the old fever came back—malaria, caught long ago in some hot country she’d loved, coiled in her blood and waiting, the second recurrence that year.

bad water, or worse luck.

the fever took her mind out of the frozen courtyard and set it down in the desert. that horizon was empty, scorched earth meeting a bleached sky. trembling in the heat-mirage of the nothingness. and then the fever brought her back into the present. outside, the willow hung naked, its tendrils dripping toward the frozen stones. a single wilted rose stood in a vase, some forgotten Valentine.

the desert and the courtyard bled together, and the parasite whispered its old lies. inside her, the jungle raged. and through all of it—the fever, the hallucinations—the flower.

because that was the one she never saw, the Corpse Flower, the bloom she’d given her whole science to wanting, the once-in-a-decade unfolding of it, deep in the steaming Sumatran green, that immense, rotting thing she meant to stand before just once, and witness. she could see it now in the fever, taller than a man, breathing out its reek of rot, but it was only the dream.

the sickness had caught her for good, and she never travelled again. she told me she got close enough, in the delirium, to smell it, and that was as close as she came.

the frost on the glass,
the jungle blooming inside—
a flower, unseen.