The Petals Fall at Night

The petals fall at night.

The hardened ground was bare. Bare all the way into the depths of evening. I arose before the crack of dawn, and there, lifeless on the ground, is a single petal.

It appears to be floating. Hovering. Above the soil. Is it even possible for something so perfect to come into contact with something so impure as dirt? Not a speck blemishes the flawless surface. The white casts away the darkness of early morning like casting away a sheet. The white in unmistaken. Pure, like a pearl, but soft, like rolls of untouched snow. And like the snow, the petal’s surface rises and falls—little hills and valleys of ivory.

But in its center, a shock of red throws off the balance of white. For the petal has two colors: the purest of ivory and the purest of scarlet. The scarlet is a splatter of wine on a tablecloth; an uneven pool of blood in the snow.

But no, not in any way does the red destroy the petal’s perfection. It only adds. It adds depth to the meaning of the orchid.

For it is an orchid from which the petal fell. Inches away is the orchid’s base—a few long, broad leaves with a solitary spoke of green rising from the group’s center.

Follow the spoke up, and up—past its bumps, the stem’s elbows. A single flower head, an inflorescence, rests, easily balanced at the top of the stem.

But the flowers are closed.

They’re sealed shut, closed to the dark world around them. They sit there, silently, as one lone being. The silence is eerie; nothing stirs in its surroundings; not a breath of wind unsettles the air and the feeling of night. The moment right before dawn. The most mysterious, indefinable hour of all.

But is the orchid awake? Or simply sleeping? Peering closely…The petals are packed so tightly, their appearance making me wonder if they are speaking with one another. Are they’re sharing unheard, deep, dark secrets, in this ominous hour?

Abruptly, I stand up. I brush the soil off my knees, and watch soundlessly as the specks fall like snow back to the ground whence they came. Some fall and rest on the solitary petal, lying there on the ground—forlorn and forgotten. A care, an emotion, lying on its future grave—a grave that no one will dig for it, no one but the wind—that cryptic being, the unseen undertaker; the one who buries all that cannot run; buries all slowly, bit by bit—buries them alive while their bodies rot.

I turn, and leave the scene of the lone orchid behind me. I walk about a dozen steps—a whole realm to a flower. Suddenly the ground has come alive with sleeping little beings. Grasses, ferns, bushes—a variety of plants. They grow together in a community—so tightly knit it is difficult to distinguish one from another. Engulfing rocks, stumps, and other of nature’s debris, this floor is a stagnant sea of different shades of green. A robust rosebush here, its dark serrated leaves contrasting with its smooth, light flower buds. A straggled old vine, bereft of any support—it lies limp, stretching and winding over and under the foliage. A simple tuft of grass here, the blades long and slender, rising solemnly upright like a little army of knights, guarding the others through the night. A patch of stonecrop, hardly visible beneath the tangle. Patches of nettles here, tumbles of coyote brush there. The corner of dominating sages, their desire seeming to be to take over the whole green community by choking them out. The towering lupines, the peeping lilacs.

All are sleeping, resting, in this strange hour before dawn.

But all of them together are not half as intriguing as the lone orchid, a flower’s realm away.

I turn back now. I turn back just in time to spot the first sliver of yellow—an illuminating streak creep stealthily across nature’s floor. In its path is the orchid. The orchid whose flowers bloom so radiantly, so exotically. I can picture them now—in an hour or so, well into morning—there they will be. Bloodshot, yet unnoticed. Then, at the coming of dusk, those delicate little petals will curl inward once again—hidden, against the dark.

Yet the petals fall at night.