Oscar Alarie

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.”

• 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

1937

Evansville had changed. Electricity hummed through its streets, the first cars lined Main Street, and the new department store towered where the elm trees once stood. Swanson’s Flower Shop still kept its modest window display, but the name on the sign had changed.

Now it read: “Swanson & Daughters.”

Vera had grown older, though time seemed to move more gently on her face than others. Her hair had silvered, her hands trembled faintly, but her eyes, those deep, cool blue eyes, still carried a brightness untouched by the years. Her eldest daughter, Marianne, ran most of the business now, while Vera tended the greenhouse behind the shop.

That summer, Marianne began a new series of bouquets inspired by her mother’s travels to France long ago. They called it La Couleur Bleue, an exploration of rare blue petals and forget-me-nots, woven through ivory lilies and lavender sprays. The blooms shimmered like frost under lamplight, delicate yet strangely resilient.

People adored them.

They said the color brought serenity, that holding the bouquet stilled the mind, as though one could hear the ocean in the quiet between breaths. The bouquets became a sensation in Louisville, Chicago, and even as far as New York. The Swansons opened a second shop, though no one could say exactly how they managed to cultivate so many flowers so quickly.

Marianne would only smile and say, “Mother taught us well.”

Still, whispers lingered. Workers who handled the soil said it was unlike any they’d touched before, cold to the touch, yet full of life. A few complained of restless sleep, of hearing faint music from the basement when no one was there. One night, a delivery boy swore he saw the faint outline of roots moving beneath the floorboards, like veins pulsing in slow rhythm.

When Vera passed quietly in her sleep later that year, the town mourned her as a saint of beauty, a woman who had brought color through war and depression alike.

At her funeral, the air was thick with the scent of lilies and violets, and though no one could explain it, a single blue petal drifted down from the rafters of the chapel, landing on her folded hands.

That night, the greenhouse lights burned brighter than they ever had before, a deep electric blue radiating into the fog. And in the morning, the La Couleur Bleue blooms had all turned toward the east, toward the long road that led back to Crimson’s Orchard.

• 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

1959

America was blooming again, in chrome and neon, not roses. Downtown Evansville was a grid of glass storefronts and clean sidewalks, and the Swanson name had outgrown the family shop.

Now, it was a company.

Swanson Floral Supply Co.

Marianne’s sons had turned their grandmother’s legacy into a quickly expanding business. They sold fertilizers, greenhouse equipment, soil enhancers, all under the promise of “growth guaranteed.” Across the Midwest, florists swore by the Swanson method: a secret mixture of organic matter, pH balance, and “rare mineral infusions.” The advertisements showed smiling housewives holding peach-colored carnations under the words:

“It’s Good to Grow with Swanson.”

No one asked about the source of the formula. The ingredients were labeled “proprietary.”

In truth, the family kept a single vial in a locked cabinet, thick, brown, and faintly luminescent. The label had long since faded, but family legend said the mixture came from Vera’s final harvest at Crimson’s Orchard. Once a year, under a sliver moon, a Swanson heir would take the vial from its shelf and pour a few drops into a new batch. Always the same words, whispered like prayer:

“Good to grow.”

That year, one of the family’s younger heirs, a chemist, named Ellis Swanson, began asking questions. He was a quiet, bookish sort, obsessed with genealogy. He traced the family records back through ledgers, diaries, and faded photographs until he reached the year 1910. That’s when he found the missing pages, entries torn neatly from Vera’s earliest ledger, replaced with pressed petals of a strange, brown flower no one could identify.

He took all of his findings with him to the orchard site, now little more than dirt and trees swallowed by vines. But the ground there still pulsed faintly when disturbed. He collected a sample of the soil and sealed it in a jar. He intended on sending it to the university in Bloomington for analysis.

Three days later, his car was found abandoned thirty miles out of town, near the old orchard road. The soil was not listed in any official reports.

When the family gathered to discuss his disappearance, Marianne, now an old woman in widow’s black, sat silently, hands folded. Finally, she said only:

“He shouldn’t have gone digging.”

That autumn, the company rebranded its premium line of products.

They called it Shades of Brun.

And its slogan, printed in gold on every label, read:

“Rooted in tradition.”

• 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

2023

The name Swanson was now just a logo, a clean serif font, silver on black. The company owned florists, perfume brands, seed lines, and luxury greenhouses from London to Tokyo. Its heritage campaign, “Over a Century of Growth,” ran during spring fashion week, pairing pale pink petals with runway models in translucent gowns.

No one remembered Evansville.

No one remembered Vera.

But every so often, in a rare catalog or late-night collector’s forum, an older bouquet would surface, pressed, preserved, still impossibly vibrant. They were called the “Century Arrangements.” Each bore a small embossed tag with a name: Blauw, Brzoskwinia, Natura, Violaceous, La Couleur Bleue, Brun. And one more. Noire.

The Noire arrangements were different.

Deep black blossoms with undertones of garnet and plum, their petals soft as silk, their scent subtle and addictive, like damp earth after rain. They were said to have been cultivated only once, from the last living cutting of Vera’s original greenhouse stock.

The public loved them.

Collectors paid thousands for a single preserved stem. Celebrities posted them on social media with captions like “Beauty reborn.”

Very few people know but deep inside Swanson’s corporate archives, tucked beneath decades of acquisitions and patents, there existed one final, unlisted file, Project Noire: Soil Replication Trials. The research logs described a recurring anomaly: test subjects exposed to the enriched soil reported auditory hallucinations, heightened empathy, and vivid dreams of an orchard “filled with red light.”

The lead researcher resigned. Her replacement scrubbed the record clean.

The flowers, however, continued to grow, thriving in conditions no one could reproduce.

In one leaked image, quickly removed from the internet, a cluster of Noire blossoms appeared to have faint, vein-like threads beneath their surface, arranged in delicate spirals resembling fingerprints.

When a journalist from an environmental magazine tried to trace the company’s oldest property records, she found one deed still active, a what seemed to be forgotten plot of land, listed as Crimson’s Orchard, Evansville County, IN. The file had been updated three months earlier.

No one knew by whom.

That winter, a small shipment left the Evansville facility, six crates, unmarked, bound for distribution centers across the country.

By spring, Shades of Noire appeared in flower shops everywhere. The blooms glowed faintly under moonlight. Customers said they lasted forever.

And on the back of each black tag, etched so faintly it was almost invisible, were three words:

Good to grow.

• 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

Filed: April 14, 2025, Superior Township, MI
Investigator: Dr. Elara H. Winslow, Horticultural Research Division, University of Michigan

Voice Memo Entry One:

Passing reference in an archived trade journal, “Swanson’s Floral Methods,” 1912. Citation incomplete. No public patent record found. The product line, Shades of Noire, is still active under Swanson Bioculture Holdings (London).

The company declined my interview request.

I’ve located one of their original soil suppliers.

Evansville, Indiana.

A decommissioned orchard listed on an 1899 map as Crimson’s.

Voice Memo Entry Two:

The orchard is gone.

But the soil… the soil is wrong.

It’s richer than anything I’ve seen, dark as ink even in dry light. When disturbed, it emits a faint sweetness, not decay, not chemical, something living. The readings show low oxygen levels, yet the samples pulse microscopically, as if breathing.

The land is quiet. Too quiet.

No birds. No insects.

Found fragments of porcelain, maybe from planting jars, and the outline of an old foundation. There’s a small engraving on one shard: “S.F.S.”, Swanson Flower Shop.

Voice Memo Entry Three:

I’ve recreated the blend using a portion of the sample.

Control seeds sprouted in thirty-six hours. Leaves exhibit faint phosphorescence. The scent in the lab has changed, heavier, like overripe apples and wet wood.

I dreamt last night of a woman standing among rows of trees. Her shawl was blue. She whispered something I couldn’t understand, except for three words:

“Good to grow.”

Voice Memo Entry Four:

I’m driving home now. The samples are sealed. I’ve left a backup at the lab.

It’s raining hard, and the wipers can barely keep up. The GPS just rerouted me, something about roadwork. The new route takes me down Geddes Road.

There’s an orchard sign ahead. Faded, but the name

*Recording cuts out here. The rest of the report was never filed.

Dr. Winslow’s vehicle was found abandoned along Geddes Road, in Superior Township. The car was undamaged. Inside were soil containers, each empty but damp to the touch.

Her phone was recovered from the passenger seat.

Its voice memo app was still recording.

In the final seconds, a woman’s voice can be faintly heard through the static, humming softly.

And over it, a whisper.

“Everything that grows must be cared for.”

• 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