A Lifetime’s Collection of Indoor Plants ~ fiction by Karen Arnold

The flat is a box of green light. Leaves and stems and tendrils tumble from the ceiling, snake along surfaces, shoot up from the floor. In the corner of the room a glass cabinet hums softly, glows with a dim white light. The surfaces are jewelled with beads of condensation and furred with moss. Carnivorous plants line the shelves.

On the kitchen table there is a blue plastic folder, holding lists of instructions for the care of the inhabitants of the flat. Water the African Violet from the bottom; mist the leaves of the Maiden Hair fern; the Venus fly trap prefers live food. All the time I am reading, the room behind me is breathing in green air, sighing out warm, wet oxygen. I notice without surprise that the beds of my nails are no longer slivers of white new moon. They have acquired a faint, verdant luminescence.

The cabinet hums and glows, drips and ticks and waits. I fill a jug from a container marked “rain water, room temperature” and start to work my along the rows of pots. Tiny lizards with ruby eyes and glue pad feet scatter away from the water, skittering up the slick walls. They watch me impassively from the ceiling. I wonder how he manages to keep the lizards alive, seven floors up in the middle of the city. I wonder when he will come home. I don’t remember where the door is any more. A fingertip strand of philodendron strokes consolation across my knuckles

The cabinet hums and glows, ticks, and drips.

On the scuffed white plastic of the window sill, three heat-sedated bluebottles crawl in circles. I pick up the first two, hold them by their translucent wings, and drop them into the tiny, needle-lined mouths of the Venus fly traps and sundews. The flies do not try to escape. I draw a fingertip along my arm, leaving a silvered trail through the delicate bloom of algae that has begun to grow there. I pick up the last fly and drop it into my own mouth.

There is an arm chair beside the window, in the shadow of two cheese plants. A loamy, irresistible jungle-floor scent rises up from the pots and I plunge my fingers into it as far as they will go. The white paper of the note he left gleams in the leaf-dim light, just enough light to read the message.

Thank you for looking after the plants. Stay as long as you like.

The cabinet hums and glows, ticks and drips.

Karen Arnold is a writer and psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience. She won the Mslexia prize for flash fiction in 2022, placed second in the 2023 Oxford Flash Fiction competition, and was short listed for the 2023 Bath Flash Fiction prize. She has work in The Waxed Lemon, The Martello, and Roi Faineant amongst others. She can be found on Twitter @aroomofonesown4.