(no subject)
Seymour gives the strange plant a place of honor next to his Old Man’s Beard and his Devil’s Head cactus.
Mushnik isn’t around, so Seymour can talk to his plants. “There you go little guy. Hope you make some new friends.”
Around the time he gets the plant, Audrey tells Seymour and Mushnik about her boyfriend. She’s been going with him for a month and it looks serious. He’s an older man - “I think in his thirties” - and very cultured. He took her to a play by some guy named Brecht. The tickets “cost forty dollars each!” He’s a very successful dentist who cooks. “One time he made me seafood bisque. It’s made of ground up shrimp and stuff, and he added these spices, like rosemary or something and, anyway, it was just amazing!”
Seymour agreed that the bisque sounded great, and the dentist sounded great, and for an entire night contemplated throwing himself in front of a bus.
Fortunately he has a task to distract himself from the pain: he sets about trying to find out what the plant is. He pours over his books, spends hours at Skid Row public searching through their collections, even takes a bus to the closest university to use the internet.
He comes up with a lot of what it’s not. Slowly the idea forms: it might be an entirely new type of plant. Maybe someone had been experimenting with cross-pollination, or even gene splicing, like those monkeys with jellyfish genes that can glow in the dark. None of this explains why Mr. Chang had the plant. Something so rare would be heavily guarded, not accidentally dropped in a flower shop - unless someone slipped it there.
Seymour indulges in a few fantasies before realizing each one was as improbable as the next. All he knew was that this plant was so rare that no one had any information on it - and nobody knew how to take care of it.
He shows it to Audrey a week after he’s found it, bringing her downstairs to his and Mushnik’s room during their lunchbreak (after shoving some beer cans and books under the bed to clean up). He’s trying it on a moisture-heavy diet. Its leaves are droopy, its petals turning brown.
“This is the strangest thing,” Audrey murmurs, rotating the Maxwell Coffee can in which it’s housed. Seymour keeps sneaking glances at her shiner, faint blue under all her concealer. She got it when her neighbour Mrs. Roasrio was bringing a new cabinet to her apartment. Audrey had stepped out suddenly and whacked her face against the cabinet.
“You know,” she continues, “maybe a rare plant is what this place needs. We could talk to the paper, advertise this as a one of a kind plant, put it on display. People love new things; they’d come to see it and bring money. We should tell Mr. Mushnik.”
“I dunno.” The thought fills him with dread. “He’d probably think it was stupid.”
Mushnik himself forces the issue a few days later. It’s another day with no customers. The radio is playing Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ (but something touched me deep inside / the day the music died / so bye-bye Miss American Pie). He lumbers out of the back room, deposit sheets and finance forms in hand.
“That’s it! Audrey, don’t bother coming in tomorrow. This is your notice of termination. Seymour,” his anger tapers off, his face goes grey instead of red, “I think it’s time we face facts: the Mushnik name won’t ever be what it was. We’re throwing money into a pit keeping this store open.”
“Sir…you can’t.” The words straggle breathlessly out of Seymour’s mouth.
Mushnik looks at him sourly. “I’ve been living this old dream long enough.”
“But-but-” Where will we go? What will we do? Seymour and Mushnik don’t know anything other than the flower shop.
“Mr. Mushnik,” Audrey says, “Seymour was just telling me an idea he had the other day.” She falters when Mushnik turns the glare on her, then rallies with, “It-it was about that strange, rare plant? Um, Seymour, why don’t you…” she motions to the basement.
Seymour stumbles to the door and down the stairs. He comes up in time to hear Audrey saying “-might attract business.”
“It isn’t doing too well today, poor little guy,” he mutters as he shows it to Mushnik. It had had a growth spurt where the petals dropped off and the pod grew; but it still drooped and its green was an unhealthy, withered grey.
Mushnik looks at the plant skeptically. “Sure is ugly.” He eyes the display window. “You give it a name?”
“I did.” Seymour swallows. The words take another moment to come out, but when they do, they burst out. “I call in an Audrey II.”
They’re silent - Mushnik looks incredulous, Audrey gapes. Seymour’s guts are so hot he feels like they’re cooking inside him.
“You named it after me?” Audrey manages.
“If you don’t mind,” he adds quickly. She does mind, of course she does, he didn’t even ask her permission, he wanted it to be this big dramatic surprise and he failed, naturally, stupid, stupid, STUPID….
“Oh,” she gasps. “Of course I don’t mind.” She begins to smile. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever- said to me in a while.” She steps closer to the plant, looking at it fondly. “An Audrey II.” Then she turns her face up to him, looking at him in the same way. “Thank you.”
He could fly, he feels so high right now.
“You can’t stick a rare and unusual plant in the window and bring in customers,” Mushnik growls.
“Please, sir, just give it a week or two?” Seymour surprises himself by not stammering. Mushnik’s glare doesn’t seem that bad. “We’ll call up the paper - like you said, Audrey. It really was all her idea, sir….”
Audrey writes up a sign: “See The Unique AUDREY II!” in sparkly pens. The local paper ran two inches of column space in the back of Sunday’s City section. They got more traffic from passersby who asked questions like, “Is it really unique?” and “Where’d you get it?” Some of these passersby become customers. Even they taper off when the plant keeps failing to thrive.
“I’m trying everything I can, sir!” Seymour moans late one night, tugging at his hair.
“Try harder, boychik! Peat moss, have you fed it that?”
Seymour has fed it everything under the sun, but under Mushnik’s stern gaze he puts in more peat moss.
One night, flipping frantically through a new gardening magazine for ads that could relate to caring for new plants, Seymour gets a paper-cut. He whimpers and squeezes his finger.
“Well, that was smart, huh?” he comments to Twoie, showing the wound off to the plant.
The plant’s pod moves forward on its stalk. The idea is so ludicrous that even as he watches he can’t accept it. The plant isn’t moving. The crease on its pod isn’t becoming more pronounced. The pod isn’t splitting open down the middle. Its pod most certainly does not have a stamen that looks like a tongue.
Slowly, Seymour pulls his hand back. The plant’s pod swings from side to side like it’s searching for something. Then it droops, pod shutting once more.
Seymour holds his bleeding finger out. The blood is already clotting. The plant’s pod rises upwards and opens. The stamen inside wags. Like a tongue.
He presents the plant with his undamaged hand. It keeps stretching upward for a moment, then closes its pod and droops again.
He looks around the room. Same old basement. He goes upstairs. Same old store. A bag lady wanders by, finishing up a slimy hotdog. The world is as it ever was.
Seymour goes back to the basement. He forces the edges of the paper-cut open. Blood begins to trickle out. He holds his bleeding finger out to Twoie. It’s up with pod gaping open in an instant. Drops of blood fall into its pod. Its mouth.
The cut starts to clot again. Seymour lets it. He watches Twoie. Nothing changes. He puts a Band-Aid on his finger and goes to bed. If he dreams, he doesn’t remember them.
When he wakes, the whole experience feels like a dream.
The plant rests proudly upright, its colour of a vibrant green. Three thick leaves have sprouted from the base of its stalk.
“Long as you don’t make a habit out of it,” he tells Twoie, while the morning sun filters in through the grimy basement window.