It was against my better judgment, picking up that phone. I was in the office, and had drifted away in thought when the chatter on my desk radio caught my attention. It was a trivia question. They were looking for the solution to the question, "In what type of establishment was the first stock exchange founded?" I thought it was a silly question. Everybody knew that. I figured that the phone lines would probably be swamped by the time I finished dialing the number, anyway. That's when I heard my co-workers debating the topic. One said it was a restaurant. Another thought it was a bar or a pub. The third said it was a bank.

I picked up the phone and dialed. I got through the first time. I was the right caller. I had the answer: "It was a coffee house." They congratulated me. I had to ask what it was I had won. Two tickets to this weekend's showing of Gladiola Days at the Orpheum were mine.

I was going to give the tickets away. I should have. I told my wife I was going to. She convinced me otherwise. She said it would be good for me, that I could use a little culture. I asked her what kind of beneficial culture resides in a musical about singing plants. She said I obviously needed to exercise my imagination. Memos and contracts and letters were rotting my brain. I did not want my brain to rot.

The first half hour of the show was truly bizarre. I kept snickering, my wife kept jabbing me in the ribs. I couldn't understand why everybody thought it was so serious. At one point, I nudged the fellow to my left, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment that he, too found the whole thing preposterous. He turned to me and shook his head sternly, as if I were a child making armpit noises. So I hunkered down in my seat and focused on the lead character, a Mum of all things. She sang woefully about the evil that would visit the garden at night, a four legged beast that would crush and dig up and throw about poor, innocent, flower children.

"Never again will I stand by and allow a dog to uproot a flower garden!" I professed to my yawning wife as we drove home.

Honey, I think you missed the point." She responded with an air of concern.

"Did I? Did I miss the point?" I had never second guessed my wife before, and it felt good. "What, pray tell, was the point that I missed?"

"It was a story about what happened in the Nineteen-Thirties to a small band of natives in southern Mexico."

"It certainly was not! Did you see any natives in the play? Not that I recall! No ma'am, it was a story about the daily tragedies that occur in flower gardens."

"Flower gardens?" She seemed confused, and a little amused.

"Yes?"

"Honey, there wasn't even a flower garden in the show."

"What? Gladiola Days? Did we see the same show?"

"Apparently not." She looked out the window, indicating the conversation was over. The rest of the drive home was silent.

I awoke to my alarm as usual at six o'clock. I wandered into the bathroom, and began brushing my teeth. My mind wandered away from the abstract images of my sleep to those of the performance the night before. Suddenly I was stricken with a coughing fit. I coughed, and I hacked, and I wheezed. When I finally regained my composure, I noticed there was something strange in my mouth. I spat it into the sink. At first I thought it was blood, and I panicked. My wife awoke to my shrieking and entered the bathroom. She found me huddled in the corner next to the toilet.

"What on earth is going on in here?"

"Ohhh, the sink! Look in the sink!"

She looked. She peered closer, and stuck her hand in. I was disgusted to find her picking my discharge up.

"See? It's blood!" I was petrified.

"It's not blood," she said with curiosity. "It's a rose petal."

Over the next week my fits became more and more severe. A visit to the doctor produced a big bill, but no results. My illness continued to develop.

Then came the dreams. In the first I was a Dandelion. I stood in a great field of green and grew towards the sky. Days and nights passed in short succession. I watched the sun move from horizon to horizon. I felt this great urge to repopulate the earth with my kind so that they, too, could see such beauty.

Time slowed to a crawl, and I witnessed the merciless destruction of millions of my kind. There were ghastly shrieks all around. The beast then began to bear down on me. I was enveloped by darkness, beaten by wind, and slaughtered by the great whirling, twirling death. I awoke sobbing, mumbling, blubbering that the lawnmowers must be stopped.

I made a visit to a Psychiatrist later that week. It was going well until I erupted into another coughing fit. It wouldn't have been so terrible if it had been as it was before. On the final wheeze, I was not left with one solitary petal; instead, it sent a cloud of them into the midst of the room. My shrink, I think, was wondering about his sanity at that point as well. He told me we should both go see a colleague of his. I told him I would think about it, and left.

I walked the seven blocks home, working over in my mind the recent happenings. I began to wonder if I didn't have some sort of virus. Perhaps there had been something in the air at the Orpheum. Perhaps I had contracted something from the tropical fruit arrangement perched atop the woman's head in front of me. And perhaps all of this had been a simple delusion, inspired by viral fever.

I paused at my front door, my attention drawn to the adjacent flower bed. Hands in pockets, I wandered onto the grass directly in front of it. I crouched down, and picked up a clump of dirt, crumbling it between my fingers.

"I don't know what it is you all want," I whispered, then paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. What does one say to a cluster of plants? "Uhm, pardon me." I cleared my throat. "If you wouldn't mind, I'd really like to be left alone."

"All right, I'll just leave the mail here then."

I startled and spun. Merve, the postman, took a step back.

"Lordy Merve!" I said with a gasp.

"You ok mister Leets?"

"Yes, fine. Fine, good. You?"

"Good." He looked at me suspiciously.

"Fine. Well. See you later." I quickly shuffled in the door and closed it behind me.

I found my wife folding clothes in our bedroom.

"What are you doing home?" She asked.

"The session was a bust."

"You aren't going back to work?"

"Not yet." I laid down on the bed, disrupting a tower of shirts. "Sorry."

"So what happened this morning?"

"I'd rather not talk about it."

She was silent for a few minutes. "Maybe you need some time off. You haven't taken a real vacation in years."

My mind wandered to the warm beaches of Acapulco. The sun, the sand, the endless expanse of blue waters.

"You could go see your sister in Iowa," she ventured. My daydream melted away.

"Iowa, yes." Hot, humid, green with fields of corn as far as the eye can see. "That would be nice."

"I'll give her a call and tell her you're coming."

"Good, good." I stared at the ceiling awhile, then closed my eyes.

I was startled from my dozing by a crash of breaking glass from downstairs.

"Bea?" There was no response. I sighed, stood up dizzily, and stumbled downstairs.

"Bea? You all right?" Silence. "Bea?"

I walked into the kitchen. The telephone hung at the end of a row of cupboards. Its receiver dangled. There was a plant lying on the floor below it, it's glass container in shards. A panic swept over me. I kneeled.

"Bea?" I said to it. It didn't respond. I picked it up and put it in a coffee cup, along with as much soil as I could fit. I put some water on it and sat at the table.

"Bea, Bea, Bea. What are we going to do?" I sat and stared at her for a good long time. She seemed relatively unhurt, considering the fall she had taken. I wondered how long she would live. I wondered how I was going to explain this to her siblings. I rubbed my eyes in frustration. Reality was becoming very confusing. I needed to escape.