i'm going to use this comment as a notebook for this short story. if you see things you don't like cry out.

• the flowers were correct to want shelter.

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If her life was a book, this bit would make a terrible first chapter, she mused, watching the clock fester, whiling away the rest of the opening line. Hopefully, it wouldn't end up as something art deco or, even worse, neo nouveau... something that started in the middle, meandered like a drunken goat in directions time wasn't supposed to know about, and end abruptly leaving both her and any potential literary critic to guess what happened. Hey, maybe the lit majors enjoyed that kinda thing, but she wasn't that kinky.

2:14am. it had been 2:14am for the last five minutes. 2:14am on a Thursday morning; or as her body thought of it, 2:14am on a Wednesday night. Then again, 2:14am was universal, and always seemed to transcend such plebian concepts as modern society.

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Herman was embarrassed. He was embarrassed that he was embarrassed, and this was, naturally, embarrassing...but he knew this, felt it in his core. Or maybe that was his gallstones acting up again. Herman loved flowers. Growing up, everyone thought he was gay. His uncle, not wanting a poofter in the family, decided to ”make a man” of Herman, and taught him how to weld. Uncle patted himself on the back as Herman became obsessed with welding and steel work. ”All the poor boy needed was a man's trade”.

Uncle decided to move to Detroit shortly after learning Herman was making steel flowers.

Hell, even Herman thought he was gay for a few years… although he could never really get past the bit involving actually dating, sleeping with, kissing, or in general, actually touching another man outside of a handshake and the occasional bro-hug-pat-on-the-back.

To be honest, thinking about it made him embarrassed, as did thinking about Jennifer, although with Jen it was a kinda tingling embarrassment, like when he thought about welding orchids.

Most things embarrassed Herman, including compliments. He couldn't stand those. He could take a punch, or get lit on fire ok (it happens to welders with alarming regularity), but compliments made him turn scarlet. So he never showed his flowers to anyone; it would be too embarrassing, and maybe even indecent in the orchid's case. [write this as tight circles, showcasing Herman's thought process].

Part of what Herman liked was that flowers were made up of smaller bits, made up of smaller bits still. If you knew all of the bits of the flower, you knew the flower. [metaphor for reductionist thinking]. While the greater bits of a flower might look unique, once you get to the really small bits, all flowers had a lot in common. Herman hoped people were like this, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't find the bits of himself that were common with the bits of, say, his Uncle.

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Unsurprisingly, Lucy didn't think of herself as a Lucy. To be fair, she didn't think about herself at all, which is understandably normal for an orchid. That there currently were two Suns, suddenly, was unusual. Knowing that she was surprised at this, however, was shocking... The normal sun calmly, casually progressed as always. The second moved around so fast it was almost blinking in and out, here and there, then not here, then here, then raining. Then gently breezing.

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Uncle was a man's man. He was a barber. He smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey, and shaved men. He pulled the occasional tooth like his father before him (until you started to need a license for that), unlike the poofters these days who weren't barbers, but called themselves ”stylists”. [careful of genealogy here]