Short-Story.Me!

“Six billion dollars, Mr. Day,” her words took eerie flight throughout the empty gallery.

It was a Sunday morning and just before dawn. From the first floor of The Old Harbor Gallery, I stood listening and watching beyond the elegant silhouette of the curator and through the forty foot windows. From the eponymously named Cliff’s Edge Lighthouse, the slow rotation of a light filled the gallery and the inlet shoreline of Lake Superior.

“Mr. Day.”

Smoky clouds of blue sorcery danced above the rectangular, wooden table. The Aélkyn child concentrated, casting the healing spells he’d learned over the course of his youth studies. Sweat trickled down his plump face and his hands trembled as if stricken with the Shaker’s Curse. But for all his effort, nothing worked. It seemed his best friend was beyond conventional healing.

I’d forgotten that wallflowers can be harmful. We think of them as passive, innocuous, we even pity them for being so pathetically uninteresting, but we should remember that they are quite toxic.

The wallflower genus, Erysimum, includes about a hundred-eighty species, both popular garden plants and many wild forms, characterized by narrow leaves, sometimes arranged in a sort of star around the stem, with yellow, orange, purplish or even brown flowers, and multi-seeded fruit capsules. But that is by the by.