ZEITGEIST 2 FINAL

Friday, April 27, 2018 A LITERARY MAGAZINE p.9
Short Stories
always seemed to be searching relentlessly for something as important as life itself; not once had
she witnessed him blink. He was covered in flames, endless amounts of erupting fire the
sunflower knew would never die out, never subside. The heat he generated was too strong for
her. Direct exposure to this melting hot air for even an inch beyond a short while would mean
doom. Only the Protector, her only shelter and friend in this world, was able to halt this climate,
and did so whenever it returned from its trek across the skies unknown. So, whenever that
moment came once again, the sunflower would spot the pallid orb slowly emerging from the
east, en route to cover the Gazer’s view, and begin anticipating the skylight to dim. And when it
did, she would wait until it stopped dimming, making sure he was fully blind, then begin to push
her vase toward the edge of the window, where she would exit the darkness of her house and
enter the world of light. Finally, she could receive all of the light she needed to survive.
Such a trouble in order to be able to live, yet to her nothing was more worth it than
achieving that feeling of being, truly, alive. These moments, however, did not last enough to
repair the damages she suffered from spending the other portion of her life hiding in the house:
half of her petals, some turned grey though they had previously been yellow, had gone with the
wind, preferring to swim through its westward currents than to perish in the dark. Her stem had
lost much of its strength, and so had her roots, making sliding across the counter a more straining
process every time.
She turned her head to look across the counter and into her one-room house. A long seat
rested in the middle, and a couple of smaller seats littered the wooden ground, some fallen over.
A square black box with two stems protruding from its head had been placed in front of the long
seat. Who or what had placed all of this here, she could not recall, nor could she recall having
been brought into the place. All she knew, all she had ever known, was here, and only the
counter-window at that; the only way to reach the floor was to jump, and her vase would break if
she tried. All she could do was stare at the room and wonder about how this here and that there
came to be. But it was her home, it kept her safe, and for that she was thankful, though she was
aware it was simultaneously what harmed her the most. What could she do? She shifted her focus
back to the sky; her mind had begun to hurt.
There then came another gust of wind, and the sunflower turned to receive it. It was
calming down when, all of a sudden, an unexpected appearance took hold of her gaze.
Something, she was not sure what, was descending onto the counter’s edge. Upon touching down
on the surface, the object became clearer… it seemed to be a petal! A loose flower petal, she
shouted in her head, blown in from the west! She did not know what to think of that at first, for
nothing like this had ever occurred to her before. No petal, nor any other object for that matter,
had appeared on the counter for as long as she had been alive. The color of the petal, though not
as clear from afar, was unmistakably dark. Could it be, she dared to think, that one of the petals
that once had escaped her had returned? Most of those had become almost completely gray, so
that was a possibility. Had one truly returned to her, or was this just some trick the winds were