1921
The war had ended three years earlier but Evansville still wore black. The air carried a heaviness, the kind that lingers in empty rooms and half-read letters.
Only one place felt unchanged: Swanson’s Flower Shop.
Vera no longer came to town as often. Her apprentices handled the day-to-day, cheerful young women who never seemed to stay long. Each one arrived wide-eyed and eager, and each one left suddenly, their departures quiet, without goodbye.
The shop window displayed a new series that year: Shades of Violaceous. Deep violets, soft indigos, and midnight hues so rich they seemed to drink the light around them. People called them mourning bouquets, but Vera disagreed.
“They’re not for grief,” she said softly. “They’re for remembering.”
Those who brought the Violaceous arrangements home swore they dreamed differently, of lost faces glowing faintly violet, of voices calling from beneath orchard trees. Some said the flowers wept at night, their petals damp with dew though the windows were closed.
A traveling photographer came through town that spring and offered to capture Vera’s famous blooms on film. He stayed at the boarding house across the street and spent hours in the shop’s greenhouse. On the third day, he vanished. His camera was found near the orchard path, film undeveloped.
When questioned, Vera only said, “He was chasing color. Sometimes it doesn’t want to be caught.”
By then, the stories had begun to spread, from Evansville to Vincennes, to Terre Haute, to the border towns and beyond. People claimed the Swanson flowers could not die, that they drew life from something older than soil. Some whispered that Vera had made a pact with the orchard itself, that her blooms were the voices of those who’d gone missing.
But the shop remained open. The bouquets remained perfect. And when people asked how she kept them that way, Vera would tilt her head and smile, eyes shining faintly violet beneath her lace veil.
“It’s the care,” she would say.
“Everything that grows must be cared for.”
Swanson’s Flower Shop
- Chapter I: Shades of Blauw
- Chapter I (continued): Shades of Blauw
- Chapter I (final): Shades of Blauw
- Chapter II: Shades of Brzoskwinia
- Chapter III: Shades of Natura
- Chapter IV: Shades of Violaceous
- Chapter V: Shades of La Couleur Bleue
- Chapter VI: Shades of Brun
- Chapter VII: Shades of Noire
- Epilogue: The Geddes Report