Winter Blooming Daphne
By Hana Carolina
Daphne had never considered murdering anybody.
In fact, death itself barely crossed her mind.
‘Really?’ one of her friends asked. She didn’t remember which one. Several, possibly. ‘Not to upset you, but in your position I’d—um—that would be all I could think about.’
Daphne would nod. She felt bad for them. Sometimes they would talk about their successes at work, their travels, their plans, eyes lighting up, whole posture lifted right before they froze—they remembered at last.
‘It’s fine,’ she’d say. ‘It’s fine,’ she’d repeat. ‘It’s fine,’ she’d keep saying until the words turned meaningless, and she began to feel like a bad actress despite telling the truth.
They didn’t understand. No wonder. Imaginations were poor guides, more fit for exploring fantasy worlds, tragedies, and dramas, than envisioning the mundane details of her life. Hungry for pain, they overlooked the monotony.
And her normal remained undisturbed, forever present, squeaky clean to the point of being sterile. It smelled of sanitising alcohol and sounded like beeping, the swoosh of fans, slippers dragged on vinyl tile floors. It involved routines, predictable outcomes, forecasts signed off by multiple experts, charts, sheets, a rhythm to get lost in.
‘But how is he?’ they’d ask.
‘Oh, you know. His usual self, still,’ she’d lie.
When they asked the most important question, their voices would waver. ‘How long?’
‘We don’t know.’ That much was true.
She didn’t think about death. But she did think about prolonging. And she couldn’t help but notice how little it had to do with love, and how much with fear.
They lived on the top floor of an apartment building, the ground ten stories below, the view full of concrete—a simulated world. The night blinked at her with identical windows shimmering from afar—cold, untouched, a frozen image behind clean glass.
The faces of models in glossy magazines were poreless, all folds smooth and glowing. There were no dark circles under her own eyes, all signs of tiredness hidden under thick layers of skin-coloured fluid, all wrinkles dissolved by photo filters, eyes enlarged.
And he—even he—could look perfect too, as he did in their wedding photo, the only image of him she still liked. The soft light hit his face just right, immortalized, arms wrapped around a thin figure of a woman Daphne barely recognized as herself. He hated that suit, spent the evening before fussing over it, but no one would know.
No one would see him now either. She hasn’t taken a photo in years.
Sometimes she’d find herself lingering in a vegetable section of a grocery store, shelves drowning in a flood of cool, LED light, chilly air seeping in underneath the trays—six tomatoes in each package, stripped of leaves and stems and displayed behind a shimmering layer of polyethylene film. They were all about the same size, the same shade of red, skin so perfect it looked like plastic. Nature was only allowed to enter for ornamental purposes, just enough variation to make it easy to choose the best specimens.
The meat was shiny and red behind a thin layer of foil. It looked like it never had a head or legs. It looked like it had never been born.
They moved to the country for—well, not his health, exactly. Perhaps they did it for her. Therapeutic, her friends said, a word which must have meant something once, but became a space where their fantasies lived. They imagined her lounging in a cottage—a thing of sentimental paintings, an elusive vision of city-dwelling minds, stone walls painted white, waxy-dark green leaves shining in the sunshine, grass thicker than a Persian carpet, silk-soft under her bare feet.
‘He could sit out,’ they said, ‘see the blue sky, fill his lungs with fresh air.’
That’s where you hide when medicine fails. You die slowly while eating carrots from your own garden, drinking green tea, and wandering in linen clothing soaked in essential oils.
But that’s not how things played out.
The first tomatoes she grew came out misshapen and began to rot on their stems, the juice thick, gashes on their skin open and soaking, dark beetles moving in swarms under yellowing leaves. Others remained green and started to dry—little, mummified babies on a browning umbilical cord. They finally fell, then sank into the pungent compost, teeming with life she never invited there.
Her neighbour would smile at her, sun-worn skin stretched over sharp cheekbones, eyes fallen-in, wrinkles cavernous—valleys, and mountains dancing as she spoke. Daphne stood there hypnotised, her own clothes growing more rumpled by the day, heels shrinking, sleeves shortening, hair looser, until she set it free in the wind.
The first time she poisoned a rat, she stood over it, listened to it shriek, every convulsion a squeeze in her stomach, bile rising and setting down again. The second time, she wasn’t as bothered. She didn’t even remember the third time.
Things died all the time in the country. When her neighbours’ cow got ill, nobody called a vet. The next day its head was sitting on their front porch, eyes staring into the sky, a clean cut, the expression frozen in time, a treat for the dogs and the birds, flies buzzing.
‘No reason to get precious about it,’ her neighbours said.
She planted a daphne odora, and he laughed, dry and paper-thin, saying they have two daphnes now. But the daphne growing in their garden was a cruel creature, bearing clusters of poisonous berries—scarlet and shiny, a warning scream vibrating against the green background. A daphne was a special shrub—it bloomed in the winter when most plants were asleep or dead. Its smell was sweet and tropical, heavy with the stickiness of an expensive liquor.
With her hands dirt-brown, arms sprinkled with red bites, and shallow scratches all over her bare face, Daphne was no longer fond of pretending.
When things became unbearable, she fed him the berries and watched him ripen.
THE END
Author Bio: Hana Carolina is the pseudonym of an Edinburgh-based creative and academic writer. Born in Poland, she moved to Scotland and studied literature, film and television for many years. Since then, she’s been working as a tutor, interpreter, researcher, and publishing academically while dreaming of writing dark stories about horrible people.