She Eats Flowers/Flash

A sentence that needed a story/

She eats Flowers. Not like, sometimes, but full-time. She eats peonies and roses and cornflowers and honeysuckle.  She eats tiger lilies and sunflowers fried in a pan with flaxseed oil. She carries them around in little plastic bags in her purse. Her tongue is always green and her breath smells like the botanical garden. I’m sitting across from her nursing a coffee and she pops a neon pink and purple petal into her mouth. I couldn’t identify it, but I’d say something tropical. From a warmer climate. It’s November here. Florists know her by name. She’s drinking a peach smoothie with orange juice, a dandelion sticking out of the top of it like one of those little umbrella drinks. She says that she doesn’t want to eat anything that isn’t beautiful. Meat, she says, is ugly. Nuts, she says, look like rodent shit. Salad, she says, looks like weeds, cut from the street and thrown in a bowl, doused with spiced gasoline or hand lotion with pepper in it. She says this while eating ornamental poppy petals, white, yellow, pink, purple, scarlet. She says this to me every time I eat something. I worry about pesticide. She says she buys organic. She says this while eating a rose dyed black in October, for Halloween. Her mouth was black as an oil spill for two weeks. She claims special dietary needs. She says if she ever has a daughter, she’ll name her Rose, Poppy, Lily, Sunflower. I say, if I ever have a daughter, I’ll name her Dance.