31_days | [SEPT 25] [ORIGINAL] RED FLOWER GIRL

Title: Red Flower Girl
Day/Theme: September 24: ‘even my beloved people will fall like petals’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: PG. Some swearing.

It was seven days after midsummer when Sondra slammed into the morning room and hurled a pot of violet pounce powder into the air above the breakfast table. Soft purple powder silted down across the bacon and kippers, sank gently into pools of egg yolk. There was general consternation.

The general especially looked pained, dabbing a soldier of toast sadly into her purpled egg.

“Sondra,” she said, lifting up her toast and looking at it dubiously, “was this really necessary?”

“Yeah.” Sondra flung herself down in an empty chair and began tearing her way through a croissant. “The Flower Girls have got the go-ahead.”

Around the table, people were silent. Lady Ayesa stopped dabbing at her front with a napkin; the two burly lieutenant-colonels looked at each other, both holding a forkful of kipper in the air. The general put down her toast.

When it became clear that nobody was going to say anything, doctor Tsen cleared her throat.

“It may not be as bad as all that, Sondra,” she said. She drew her little finger through the powder on her plate. She looked across at Sondra, six feet and an eyepatch of fey old soldier, bright red nails click clacking their way through the dusty croissant in little jabs, her jaws working as she popped shred after shred of pastry into her mouth without swallowing.

“Breathe, Sondra,” said the doctor. “Everyone here would rather it was you, if it had to be anyone.”

The general nodded and pushed away her plate.

“You were the best of us, Sondra,” she said. “We know it, and the new brass know it too. Those Flower Girls don’t know how lucky they’ve got it.”

Lady Ayesa said nothing. Everyone knew that her daughter had volunteered to be reconstituted as a Flower Girl, a petal of the Western Forces, if she fell. She had died in the assault on Jericho, five months back; even now she would be being taken out of storage. They did not have so many people that they could afford to clear out the body banks very often, though five months was pushing it, of course. Half a year. Her daughter had been very like Ayesa herself, thin and a little horsey, with jet black hair and a gap between her front teeth. Nothing like Sondra, tall and pale and scarred and blowsy, with big red knuckles and wide flat red nails she’d had implanted in a little shop full of varnished bamboo and plastic plants when she was fifteen and not yet of special interest to the military.

She tapped those nails on the table now. They were still good, even if the skin had puffed up around the implants sometime in the last half century or so.

She swallowed.

“Fuck this for a dance in the moonlight, girls,” she said. “I’m not gonna sit around and watch them pour people into my tits n’ arse, let alone the rest of me. The doctor here knows how they got hold of my material and the rest of you can ask her if you want my bona fides. But I’m going after them and I don’t care how far I’ll get. They should let our dead rest or bring them back right.”

She took a stick of gummy lipstick out of her belt pocket, drew it across her mouth and screwed her lips together.

“Hell, I couldn’t handle me when I was twenty-five,” she said. “Ain’t no little ghost-girls gonna take the heat.”

She clicked the lipstick closed one-handed and slid it back.

“Come if you want to go down singing,” she said.

She got up and left, closing the door gently behind her.

The Lady Ayesa rose and brushed off her skirts, nodded to the others. She followed Sondra out of the door.

The rest of them looked at the table, everything matte and a little purple like a dusty stage-prop under improbable theatre lights. They were old women by the standards of the war, and they had all seen heroics before. None of them got up.

The general picked up her cold, eggy toast, sniffed at it. She made a face.

“Ugh,” she said. “Parma violets.”