SWEET TEA by DFL
Perry was in quest of a flower, a flower as rare and as difficult to germinate as the Black Tulip. He lived monotonously in a land of mountains disguised as valleys. His fellow inhabitants loved flowers as they all enjoyed staring into buds, dreaming forth the potential petals in a spray of colour … in keeping with their idea of waking from sleep.
Sleep was thought to be black but possessing many colours that remained hidden till waking arrived. Only in hindsight, Perry knew, was sleep truly and unutterably black.
In the land where mountains were disguised as valleys, he sought the single flower that would be precisely symbolic of the very moment of waking from sleep, when its imputed blackness became its own backward fountain of colours, unfurling like fingerstall blooms.
Indeed, one day, the flower was there. Perry invented it. He awoke and spotted the flower as real as any real tulip in the vase beside his bed would have been … except this invented flower possessed colours he had never seen before. Being the inventor, so to speak, of this inscrutable flower – this flower with brand new colours, having unfurled itself like a fount of feathers in the land where mounts were vales – Perry realised that it lacked something. It lacked independent eye-witnesses. It also lacked a name. A name gave provenance. Every invention needed a name; needed a patent or label to grant it reference in the same way as mountains hereabouts were referred valleys, and veils piques.
He was now fully awake in the scheme of things – and he was a Perry as distant from sleep as to be impossible any longer to imagine its blackness … and he sipped the hot drink that his nameless companion had brought him in bed.
Ah, he thought, I’ll Christen the flower Sweet Tea.
“But that’s your drink’s name,” quibbled the nameless companion with sunken nose.
“But it’s also a good calling for my invention, isn’t it, my sweet?”
And he planted the stalk of the extraordinarily shaded flower-head into his drink and the follicles of bloom grew like rat-tails, much like unto his nameless companion’s hairstyle.
He stared at it and smirked – as ensued the gentle suckling noise of stalk’s raw end upon its own created teat of sweet tea.
Perry gazed from his bedroom window and saw a mountain rise like a moon with sunken seas, except this particular moon wasn’t yellow or white, but of unutterable black. In truth (if truth can be spoken in the same breath as fantasy), Perry had failed to invent a flower called Sweet Tea but had evidently invented an eclipse of man by a black tulip. He fretted and frowned at the thought of missed fulfilments.
“Now, now,” said his nameless big-chested companion with some fellow feeling, while stirring his tea with a finger-thin finger.
Man or moon, Perry felt becalmed upon a land-locked sea of sleep again.
