Author’s Note – Today’s flash fiction challenge was to write about an extinct flower that somehow blooms for the first time in a hundred years. Of course I couldn’t help putting an apocalyptic spin on a little floral fiasco. ~ J
It seemed like such a good idea, you know?
Just grow this seed into something people could connect with …
The rest of our work is so distant and impersonal to most of the world. Go dig around where the permafrost is thawed, tell everyone about what climate change is revealing, what it’s doing to us and our world.
Noble, important work, right?
Yeah, well, most people don’t give a shit. And I want them to. I want people to care.
As a botanist, my enthusiasm for finding the plant was no surprise, but the whole team was intrigued by my discovery. Here was the seed to a species that no one alive has ever seen bloom. Aerides glacies orchidaceae, a flower so long extinct that we don’t even have any photographs. Not just the seed either. But spores from the fungus it would need to penetrate its route systems to nourish its growth.
I just thought, if I could grow it, take my work out of the lab … Maybe people would care about it, care about the other things we’re finding, too.
I guess it worked.
Everyone knows about my ice orchid; a flower no one had seen or smelled in a hundred years.
Unfortunately, it’s killing them.
And I don’t know how to stop it.
Demons Run Press 
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