Chapter 1: Silk Flowers

I didn’t deserve this, no one did, except maybe I did, just a little, or if you want honest, a lot. I didn’t exactly live a clean life, more mud-with-sour-water kind of life. But to get reanimated as fake flowers in a Valentine’s-themed restaurant? Well, even hell sounds better.

Worse, nothing ever changed. The decor, the waitress, the music. In the six years, nothing, although I have grown to like the waitress and some of the music, but not the gaudy pink and purple ambiance with way too many paper hearts. Over time, the carpet had more holes, more worn patches, and more red duct and electrical tape, which I guess means change, but not really.

I wish I knew what I needed to do, or rather think, to get out of this. I still hated my fellow females, most so docile and full of need, and I still detested men, so one-minded, single-celled, old fucks who dated young women.

The waitress, a Becky by name but a Karen by look, hummed and somehow still enjoyed the song, ‘At Last,’ that always played before ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’ Ironically, I loved the King in my past life, but now his voice annoyed me, but not Etta Jones, I loved her more each time I heard her.

Becky spun in her red dress uniform, her in-need-of-moisturizer hair flipped and followed her body, while she placed forks and knives on white paper napkins on the red-clothed tables. They only had eight tables set up tonight, a Tuesday night, with another eight curtained off.

In the back, Carlos and Arlo prepped for dinner. Tonight, they placed me on the third table on the north wall, the one that they typically sat first. Somehow, while the other plastic flowers fell apart, I never did, as my yellow and red rose petals stayed unbent, still pristine, my green wire stem unbroken, and I still had my three green leaves. No idea how that worked, hell, I had no idea how I could exist in a plastic flower, because while I didn’t do great in school, I knew consciousnesses can’t exist in inanimate objects, or maybe it could, because I did, and just maybe scientists had no way to tell, not like they tested silk flowers with their brain wave jiggers.

“Welcome to The Heart, where every day is Valentine’s Day,” Becky said in a voice too high for such a memorable face, to a typical pair, a young woman in an elegant black dress with too much makeup, as if to hide her age. She moved tentative then quick, in the shadow of the overweight man with a wedding ring tan line, who wore too much cologne and didn’t smile enough. In a business suit with a stain on the elbow and the top button undone under his red power tie. He needed a haircut and a shave, but the girl’s gaze didn’t notice those things as it darted to his gold watch and his massive diamond-encrusted pinky ring, as if to remind herself why she agreed to the date.

I had no nose, no brain, no skin, no eyes, nothing that I could use to sense, and yet, I had all my human senses plus extra. I could partially read people’s minds, especially when they had strong feelings, and I could almost, if I focused, and the moon hung in the sky just right, in other words, no idea why, when, or how, I could put thoughts into people’s minds. Mostly, when it worked, I warned the young girls about the especially vile men, but sometimes, I could nudge a young couple towards more happiness.