Chapter Text
You were the owner of one of three flower shops left in Detroit since the extinction of honey bees.
You had been pretty well off before. Lucky enough to have been able to afford a place in a relatively nice part of town, you made a nice and comfortable living for yourself.
When the bees were gone, flowers themselves became a bit more complicated. The process of pollinating flowers had to become mechanical. When you couldn’t afford a contract with the company you had been using, you started using paint brushes to transfer pollen from male flowers to female plants in the garden on top of your apartment complex. It took you hours and hours, and didn’t leave you time for anything else. Needless to say, it wasn’t very sustainable.
Nearing the end of your rope, you were on the verge of closing down the shop just to keep yourself afloat. Then, one night you found a large envelope outside your door. On the outside were your initials. You quickly brought it inside and turned on the overhead light of the shop. The envelope itself didn’t look suspicious or dangerous, but you still wanted to be cautious. You grabbed a pair of long shears, then set the envelope on the checkout counter near the back. Stepping as far away as you could but still be able to reach it with the shears, you carefully snipped on the corner.
Satisfied it didn’t immediately explode, you step closer, setting down the shears to the side and picking up the envelope. It surprised you how light it was, almost as if it didn’t have anything in it at all. The flash of white you saw when the corner shifted told you that was incorrect. Ripping it the rest of the way open, you shook two pieces of paper out. The first was an index card with perfect print on it.
Owner of the Magnolia,
Your shop means a lot to me. I hope this helps.
C.M.
The second piece of paper was a check. A big check.
“What,” you whisper to yourself, alone in the night. That check had a lot of zeros. Enough to pay your rent for months, enough to buy your entire inventory who knows how many times over, enough to… Save the shop.
With the amount of money this check allowed you, you would be able to afford a 5 year long contract with the flower delivery service you had used before bees went extinct. You could save your business!
But you had no idea who this C.M. was, where their money came from or why they were giving it to you. Half of you begged to just rip the thing to shreds and not worry about that money ever again. The other half of you knew better. While you figured there was no way that this money could come with no strings attached, you simply had to take the chance. This was your livelihood and the universe was giving you a second chance to keep it alive.
You deposited the check the next morning.
You had a real bad habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It started in elementary school. You noticed around 5th grade that every single year, whoever your best friend happened to be, they would suddenly move away before the year was over. It often left you spending your summers alone and starting your school years afraid.
In high school, other people started to notice your bad luck. It seemed every huge party you got invited to got crashed by either parents or the police. Every friend group you found yourself in seemed to dissolve into chaos before the year was over. And you always were at the center of it all.
The bad experiences made you a loner in college. You kept to yourself and your studies, not wanting to get hurt or hurt anyone else again. You managed to get through your Associate’s Degree without a fault until you got a call about your aunt. She was sick, dying even, and had no children to take care of her. She had called upon you to help her in this dire time. After some arguing of why she wouldn’t just buy an android, you dropped out of school to care for her full time. That lasted about a year.
When she died, everything she had became yours, including the Magnolia Flower Shop your aunt had spent her life creating. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, you threw your life into the shop. You made it your own and it turned into the best thing you ever did for yourself, and you would always be thankful to her for giving you that.
Your bad luck didn’t cease completely, often manifesting itself into clumsiness. Stubbing your toe here and there, dropping a vase full of flowers every once in awhile. But you had your good days and you could manage the bad ones.
Today was not one of the good days.
The morning had been relatively slow for a Friday, leaving you plenty of time to sip on your coffee and work on the arrangements you needed done by Monday for a wedding. The bride had requested arrangements to feature the color purple, so you had an order coming in with lavender, catmint, and lilac candytuft around noon.
A customer had just left when a man popped his head in the door. “Delivery for the Magnolia?”
“Yes,” you replied in a soft voice, locking down the checkout counter and coming around to meet him out front. He opened up the back of the truck, starting to hand you containers of the specialty flowers you had ordered, along with several containers of the basics you needed to restock. You stacked them all next to you, checking over your receipt to make sure you had everything you had ordered before beginning to take them inside. You thanked him and he nodded at you, sliding the back closed and turning back to the drivers side. You noticed the blue circle on his temple as you grabbed the first packet of flowers and moved to take them inside. You absently wondered why he hadn’t removed it like most androids after the revolution.
When you bent down to pick up the last packet, the one containing the catmint you had ordered, you stopped there on the sidewalk to admire it. It felt as though they were fresh picked this morning and you took a moment to take a sniff, closing your eyes and enjoying the light smell it offered you.
You were so lost to it, you didn’t hear a far off yell of warning.
Suddenly, you were hit by what felt like a brick wall. It knocked the wind out of you immediately, the force of it tossing the flowers out of your hands. And just like that the brick wall was a person and completely on top of you on the concrete. Your head spun and ached, your vision blurring for a moment. The person scrambled to get off of you and continue running. You laid there for a moment, just trying to collect what had happened when another face appeared above you.
“Sorry about that.” Your eyes focused on the brown eyes in front of you before moving to the yellow ring on his temple. You felt a hand behind your back and another on your arm, pulling you upright. “You really should be more observant,” the android looked worried for a moment then seemed to remember himself. “Sorry again,” and then he took off running after the brick wall.
Your catmint was stomped into the sidewalk, your head was still spinning, and you just wanted to know why bad things always seemed to happen to you.