My —search for the adequate antonym of “dear” on Google later, DON’T forget, Walter— readers, there are no words that can make justice to the Lagos family garden. How to capture in a sentence the gorgeous, chubby tulips and all of their colors? How to describe the vines that crawled upon old, dilapidated columns of basalt? Which are the words that tie the rosebuds and the bees that upon them frolicked to the page? How to attain an image with mere symbols?
Like that, I guess.
I caressed the white potato flowers and the turgid pea pods. The atmosphere smelled sweet and sunny, in contrast to the humid and stagnated hallways inside the castle. Mariana discussed dog illnesses with a bell pepper.
Florencia, who had been dragged unwillingly into the garden tour, shuffled her feet past a mound of Forget-Me-Nots so vibrant it would not have surprised me to discover it was breathing.
“This is amazing, Mateo. Where do you get the water to keep this up, though?” I asked, like a child in a toy store.
“Pit powered pump.”
“Ah.”
“Now, if you excuse me, I have things to do. Florencia will keep an eye on you.” Mateo said, and then winked.
I blinked once, twice. Then tried to reach for the man, that stormed back into the labyrinthine halls.
“Your father is going to… spend time with Sabrina, right?” I didn’t like walking on eggshells, but she left me no other option.
“She is such a daddy’s girl,” Florencia stated, full of frail innocence.
“You have no idea…”
I turned to see what Mariana was doing and Boss music ensued. She was facing a terrible flying ant.
No, not a giant one, nor monstrous in any regard. A normal flying ant. The one you can find in your house. I took note of Mariana’s level: it had increased to eight hundred and something since the last time I checked. The ant was level twenty-one.
The ant was winning purely by using evasive maneuvers and staying close enough to the ground that Mar couldn’t bite it out of the floor.
“Go back to the kibble factory, bitch,” telepathed to everyone present the Ant.
“Never!” howled Mariana, and redoubled her effort to put an end to the ant’s life.
“So, Flor, how’s Mar dress going?”
Her eyes lit up and she started exaggeratedly gesturing with her hands. “Almost done. The base is ready; I just need to work on the last little touches.”
“Good, cool off now,” I said, always looking at the fierce conflict between a dog and an insect.
The ant engaged on a quick time event that made ethereal PlayStation buttons appear to the sides of Mariana’s head. He was pretty good at it, for someone that would soon get turned into a sex slave by females without opposable thumbs.
The titan fell on her fluffier side, and, pulling out a white hair from the root, the ant proclaimed his victory. Mariana’s tail, an entity of chaos not caring about cheering for the right party, wagged anyway.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The ant went back home victorious, ready to get his wings amputated by enslaved virgin maidens with stunted growth who were mentally controlled by smells. Ain’t nature beautiful?
“Is Mari alright?”
Her HP bar was full.
“No, Flor, she is herself. I would worry if she were alright.”
She gestured at the flowerbeds, aligned as cars in a jam, with freshly removed dirt piled up in them.
“These are mine, any suggestion of what to plant in them?”
“How much do you hate the garden?” I said, ready to recommend the most invasive and harmful species of domestic plants known to mankind.
“I don’t hate the garden.”
That raised a further, deeper question.
I inspired deeply and looked her in the eyes, “Why? why is the garden undeserving of your hatred?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“A ‘why’ question, they talk about them in English classes,” I said, and nodded slightly while pressing my lips together.
“The garden has done nothing for me to hate it,” she continued, ignoring my deep wisdom.
The mound of forget-me-nots sneezed.
“Salud,” I said, reflexively.
“Gracias loco,” said the mound of flowers, also in auto-pilot.
After a few seconds of conversing with Florencia, I turned towards the mound.
“Mariana.”
“Yes?”
“Pee the forget-me-nots.”
The flowers started trembling. The bees flew desperate back to their hives. Wind blew, without teeth, because it was a slut and had several billions years of experience in the matter.
Mariana started sniffing because ominous magic was no reason to skip a good bathroom escapade.
I buckled up, and Florencia grabbed a nearby garden spade, heaving it in her hand.
“This will do.”
A discussion about eyes ensued among my belts.
“Okay, so, we have a socket, even two, in Pachycephalosaurus, but how do we know it had an eye or even two? We cannot. We never found a fossilized eye.”
“Makes sense, makes sense. How do we know non-avian dinosaurs had flesh? They could have been just skeletons chilling around.”
If it were not for the pressing issue presented by the mad flowers, I’d have introduced them to the marvelous world of phylogenetic bracketing.
The flowers spat a dog treat over the castle’s parapets, and Mariana followed it, jumping into the void without a first thought. Seconds later, we heard a loud thud accompanied by splash sounds.
“Did she…” asked Florencia, incredulous.
“Fall upon the pit pits and cause a small scale extinction? Probably.”
And now the flowers were taking the shape of a dragon before our very eyes. So the pits funeral would have to wait.
Florencia gripped my shoulder.
“Do we let it completely form before attacking or should we, you know, be intelligent about it?”
One of the wings took the purple flowers, the other one was content with blue ones…
“You raise a good point, Flor, but it’s a dragon made of flowers. It’s the coolest and most weeb shit I have seen since in arrived here. Also, my belts are still discussing dinosaurs.”
I gestured for her to shut up and listen.
“So, I think, ornitischians must have been the GOAT of dinosaur asses. Something about the bird-like hips should have made hauling a big caboose easier,” theorized one of them.
“They don’t call it MuttaBURRAsaurus for nothing. Tremendous burra it must have had,” added another.
When this all ended, and before going back to earth, I was going to inhumanly euthanize every single one of them.
…from between the chest flowers emerged a mask depicting a melting human face with a happy expression. It was obviously not made of wax, but it gave the impression of having been molded from it.
Florencia hefted a mature tomato, plucked it out from the plant and got in position for the launch. Her body turned and her arm extended, propelling the fruit against our uninvited guest. The tomato like a bullet drilled a path to its target, and impacted squarely on the mask, erupting into a festival of pulp similar to a book store in the early 1900’s, taking the mask’s wearer out of balance, making him fall on his back, tearing the one of the flower dragon.
“Damn girl, how high is your fucking strength stat.”
“Enough to drive away most suitors,” she lamented.
A tide of maniacal laughter interrupted us.
“Awesome weaponization of the local flora, albeit pretty simple,” said the masked man as he recovered. Denuded from the flowers, we could see his clothes: a white and gold robe and a purple scarf. “But I’d recommend you, Florencia, daughter of the ruler, to stay out of this.” He pointed at the dragon, that was stretching her claws made of intertwined roots, “I am Fernando, and this pollinaceous gal next to me is Irene.” He ducked to dodge an orange. “I am a member of the Escapists, and I have come for Walter.”