I started writing this out a week ago doing my old pastime of shuffling music on Spotify and writing within the timespan of the song. I think there's maybe 3% of that original drabble here. I couldn't have gotten that far without attending a virtual session of my local Shut Up and Write chapter and just sharing what my favorite fandom to write about is, or going to a screening of the 1986 movie for the first time a month back. Sometimes I feel pretty lonely in my small fandom, but I've gotten way more support than others over the years, and what we lack in numbers we make up for in dedication (and weirdness). Maybe I'll finally have the guts to share my page with family, who still have no idea I've written NSFW... probably not.
- Laura
After Seymour left the city with his wife, their shared days grew into weeks, which in turn ripened into months at a dizzying pace. Maybe there was some magic combination to his new life, free from the endless cycle of poverty, that just made the time melt away. Owning a house (not a room or apartment but a whole house!) and opening his own little garden shop where he could run business the way he saw fit had certainly done wonders for his self esteem. Whether or not magic was real, he got to share his new life with an angel named Audrey, who seemed to bloom with something new to love about her more often than a flowerbed in springtime.
Whatever earthly or divine reason there was for it, Seymour's confidence had definitely bloomed from the weak sapling it had been such a short time before. Getting a perennial to fully grow from years of stunted growth was difficult for even the most accomplished horticulturalists, but he supposed that people were perhaps not quite so needy as plants. Try as he might, his tendency to compare his everyday human experience to plant life cycles didn't go away with distance from his old life.
When it came down to matters of procreation, being human was definitely more straightforward than anything plants could do. He'd never been the most concerned with the needs of his body in the city, and much as it had led to his tendency to excessively anthropomorphize plants, his isolation had made him believe that he could never find a partner who would want him back anyway. Some people, he'd reasoned, were just born unlucky, and they were left to rot in the compost bin that was Skid Row.
From what Audrey had told him, her bodily disconnect was the exact opposite of his. She had learned to convince herself so fully that her body was merely a vessel which men could use or take whenever they saw fit that she stopped looking for anything that could take away the pain they'd also cause. That didn't stop her cravings for intimacy, but those everyday desires had twisted into gnarled roots of shame over the years.
If there was one thing Seymour would ever try to take from his wife, it would be her shame.
Nearly every night and morning since their wedding day they would make up for lost time. Most of it was spent on their crudely fastened together twin beds, but occasionally the sofa or bathtub served as multipurpose furniture. There were still limits; he'd learned after one particularly bad chafing incident that the carpet was not the best of propagation grounds, and he knew that if they ever tried anything in their teeny blue Volkswagen he'd be blushing during every drive afterward just thinking about it. Wherever it happened, there was no better irrigation for his parched sense of confidence than listening to the changing tones of Audrey's sighs, or the ever so slight scratching of her nails on his skin as she gripped onto him. His "pollination yield" had greatly improved since the early nights when it all was still too much to handle, and it wasn't uncommon now for him and his wife to reach the sweet harvest of their efforts at the same time. For the first time in his life, Seymour saw a grown man looking back at him when he looked in the mirror rather than a scared, unwanted boy pretending to be a botanist.
Being able to hold an angel all night was just as good as making love to one. In the long run, it may have been even more satisfying, but that was tough to judge in the bliss of either option. Between short talks about their usually predictable days, she liked to play with his hair and hum little tunes in his arms until one of them would finally fall asleep. Those were all things he never even knew he was missing in his life before and being without them now would be unbearable.
Just as the winter snows had melted away to reveal new growth on their front lawn, signs of new life had started to bud and bloom from Audrey. Only half a year previously she would have dismissed it as impossible because the damage a back alley "doctor" had done to her insides years before permanently changed her motherhood prospects. Yet, like his confidence, her condition was becoming more obvious each day. Occasionally she would fret about soon being un-lovably large, but Seymour assured her that he would love her the same even if she grew to be as big as a prize pumpkin. The squash comparison was as strange as it was appropriate, because by the time the season's pumpkins would be fully grown they would have their own little family together.
There were some nights when he would stay awake, taking stock of just how quickly his life had turned right side up, with so much more to hold onto than he'd ever dreamed of as a child of the streets. He was of course nervous about his future too, but it was worth it just to be something for one (soon to be two) very special person. Seymour remembered that when visions of his recent past inevitably cropped up, trying their best to uproot his and his wife's happiness like an ivy feeding off its host. Though he doubted he'd ever fully get rid of all the vines that had entangled his soul, with Audrey at his side, he knew that he could stand tall and weather even the harshest storms.