FLOWERS
by Cameron Pierce
When Franz Kafka’s ghost awoke, he found himself transformed in his coffin into a flower. Clawing with his petals at the coffin lid, Kafka’s ghost began to sweat a glow-in-the-dark juice that stank of sulfur. “This must be my spirit leaking out,” he said, and ceased clawing to preserve what remained of his soul.
“This might be Hell,” he said, “but a man could truly sleep down here.”
Yawning, Franz Kafka curled his petals (seven, he counted) beneath his frail, leafy belly. With no alarm clock to disturb the sleep of the dead, Kafka’s now-comfortable ghost nodded off to nightmares of diamond-eyed golems eating the sky. He dreamed of insects reading the scriptures in muddy corners of the cosmos, and in those scriptures he caught muttered accusations against shapeless, yet-to-be-named insects. Among those judgments, he overheard his own name and beheld a vision of himself as one of those nameless vermin, and of the terminal white light with which every life bloomed before consuming its own petals.
