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By Any Other Name

Randy Vicknair Jr.

The rose smelled the way Jeff imagined heaven looked. It was so overwhelming. He just couldn’t put his finger on why. All Jeff knew was that the smell of the rose brought him euphoria. It came in waves that started in his nostrils and spread to the outermost extremities of his body. The smell was ecstasy.
He put the rose on the pillow next to him on the bed and rolled over to turn off his alarm clock. Every morning was the same for Jeff. Every night when Hope was away, he would always put a rose on her pillow so he could wake up to the smell of one of them. Then, at least, he didn’t focus on the cold side of the bed where she slept. He could wake up to something as beautiful as she was. Roses were her favorite flower. Ever since Jeff could remember, Hope spent at least an hour a day out in the garden doing nothing but tending to her roses. When she first started growing them a year and a half ago, they looked nothing like they did now.
People often asked what their secret was, Jeff always told anyone that asked to ask his wife. Everyone that came to their home in the past six months marveled at the roses’ vibrant coloring, size and smell. Jeff used to think that maybe all roses really smelled the same and that he was just imagining that Hope’s roses smelled differently because they were, in a way, a part of her. But it was more than that. Everyone that smelled them remarked on the exceptional quality of their smell. Even the objective judges at the local rose competition couldn’t help but smile as they sampled one of Hope’s roses expressly for the purpose of rating them according to smell, among other criteria. He watched judges sample smells from all of the other contestants’ entries. At the last contest, not a single one of them lost their blank face for any other rose but hers. The roses weren’t just big, they were surreal when compared to the roses Jeff saw in the stores or in others peoples’ gardens.
The roses were all Jeff really loved in the world aside Hope. They had a dog for a few months. It was a Labrador retriever. Jeff named it, “Nosy” because it would always dig through the garbage. He was quite fond of the dog, but he gave it away when it tried to dig up the garden. It was a horrible choice to make, but he made it and without the help of Hope, who always teased him about how indecisive he was.
Day after day was the same without her. Jeff went to work at the hardware store’s rental section answering the same stupid questions to different moronic customers every day. If a person rented a power tool without asking Jeff a dumb question, he’d give them a twenty percent discount. But he rarely gave that discount. Instead, he’d answer peoples inquiries over the telephone when they got the tools home because they were either too lazy to read the instructions on the side of the tool in question or they were just plain illiterate. As a result of this, Jeff often popped aspirin like candy at work. He’d take two aspirin when he got to work in the morning and around lunchtime, but the headache would come right back so he’d take two more aspirin.
After work, he’d watch his favorite television show in his living room. It was all about forensic evidence that led to the capture of a murderer who had almost committed the perfect crime. In college, before he flunked out, forensic pathology had been Jeff’s passion. He had always found detective work infinitely interesting. He loved coming up with hypothetical situations to explain events. Hope always thought his passion was morbid.
On Sundays, Jeff and Hope would go to church. He loved the ritual of a good catholic mass. He loved to sing the hymns. He never put any money in the collection plate, though. He figured that Gods’ work would be better accomplished if Jeff just used the money he could put in that plate to help people out in random good Samaritan acts. He was always willing to go out of his way for anyone that seemed to be in need of help or money. That’s what made him feel warm and tingly inside, doing good deeds and the smell of Hope’s roses. He never went to the confessional either. He figured that if something was really weighing on his conscience, he did not need a translator to give God his big, heart-felt apology.
Every Saturday, he’d undertake some new project in his back yard. He had put up the perfect white picket fence Hope had always wanted which he secretly thought was the corniest and most over used cliché in the modern American dream. But, for Hope, he spent an entire months worth of Saturdays making the perfect white picket fence all around their yard.
Around the trees in both the front and the back yard were little gardens extending out exactly four feet from each trunk. All the gardens ended in perfectly aligned red bricks laying on their side that didn’t have the little holes for the mortar. Those little holes inevitably filled up with little weeds. Each garden contained the same four varieties of plants in the following order: Hyacinth, Oleander, Petunia and Eucalyptus. There were four trees in the back yard and two in the front. All of them were weeping willows. Every tiny garden had approximately one hundred tiny green toy soldiers in them in a war Jeff created which would never end. Most people did not notice them. This is probably due to the fact that Jeff had hidden each of them meticulously.
Each tree had a tiny bird feeder hanging from its’ sturdiest branch. When the starlings came around in the spring Jeff would put a sheer tent over the roses or else the little black birds would defile them with shit. He even started shooting them one by one with a pellet gun one spring until his neighbor started giving him stern looks in perfect time with the death cackles of the dying starlings.
The garden in the front of the house was immaculate. Jeff and Hope were proud of it. This garden extended six feet out from the house and was ended with landscaping timbers. It did not contain the varieties of plants that the smaller gardens around the trees did. This garden contained nothing but roses and trellises. There were no tiny soldiers in this garden. There was no war in this garden. This garden was a sanctuary. It was Eden. There were two angel statues on either side of the garden with outspread wings holding harps made of cement. One of the angels had gone missing recently. It was probably the neighbor’s kids. Those kids were always doing terrible little things to Jeff and Hope. Just last Saturday, for instance, there were only ninety-three tiny green toy soldiers in the small garden next to the tree closest to the fence in the back yard which marked where the neighbors yard ended and his began.
Every night, Jeff drank a case of beer in front of his television before he went to sleep. And Jeff hated to sleep. Every night he had the same dream. In the dream, Jeff and Hope are arguing. The dog is there. He doesn’t remember what it is they are arguing about. But he does remember that the dog is acting very strange. He yells something at Hope as she runs out of the living room. As he goes to follow her, the dog attacks him. It bites him on the leg. So he kicks it so hard that it flies across the room and thuds against the wall, yelping. Hope is sobbing in the bedroom sobbing loudly. He goes to ask her why she is crying. When he goes to open the door it is locked and he stands there screaming for her to open it. After what seems like an eternity, she does open it. But not to let him in, she has suitcases that were bulging with her belongings. As she walks past him with the heavy baggage, she intentionally shoves him into the wall so roughly that he almost falls over. She is running for the door. Jeff regains his balance and chases after her. Her car is running outside in the driveway. And the gate of the little white picket fence he had built just for her is opened for her to pull out. As she goes to slam the door on his face, he catches it and shoves back as hard as he could. That’s when he hears it. The noise is a wet crunching sound. Hope stops screaming. He thinks to himself that maybe she has come to her senses and is ready to talk, so he opens the door the rest of the way. Jeff sees that Hope has been flung off the porch when he pushed back on the door. He runs to her, asking if she was hurt. She had fallen headfirst onto one of the pointed angel wings. She had fallen so that the wing was about six inches into her left eye socket and blood was soaking into the concrete down the contour of the left side of the angel. He pulls her head off of the wing and sees the remnants of Hopes’ left eye dripping with the blood down her face. Her right eye is staring straight at him. Her whole body is twitching in spasms. She is dead. He has killed her. If he calls the paramedics, he’ll go to jail for life. So he does the only thing that he could think to do. Calmly picking her up, he carried her inside the house and into the bathroom. He places her still warm body in the bathtub after stripping her naked. He shaves off all of her hair and throws her clothes and hair into the fireplace as the dog licks the blood from his hands and forearms. Jeff uses a pair of pliers to yank out each of her teeth and the nails of her hands and feet. He puts all of these things into the sink. He smashes the teeth with a hammer and ground up the nails in a food processor. He dumps all this down the drain, then goes back into the bathroom and cleans himself up before hopping into Hope’s running car and driving to the hardware store he works at to take the wood-chipper. The store is dark and deserted as he expects. He uses the key the owner had given him and the proper codes for the security system he had to know for all of the times that he was the first one to get to the store in the mornings. Then, Jeff drives back to his house. He digs up all the rose bushes in the front garden. He sets up the chipper so that it grinds almost silently. Then, he feeds Hopes body into it slowly, feet first, making sure that every little particle lands in the holes for the roses. Her head is still warm as he shoves it through the chipper using a little stick to force the very top of her skull through so he doesn’t lose his hand. Then he puts all the roses back exactly as they were before and cleans out the wood-chipper with bleach and then muriatic acid and returned it well before the store opened.
He stands in the front yard after bringing back the wood-chipper and stares at the rose bushes. He’s not sure how, but they start looking more vibrant. Jeff smashes the blood stained angel with the same hammer he used for the teeth. He puts all the little chunks of broken cement into a paper bag and throws it into the trashcan next to the gate of the perfect white picket fence.
That’s only a part of the dream that makes Jeff not want to sleep. In the dream, he goes to sleep and wakes up with Hope alive and well in bed next to him. Jeff wakes up. The dog is nudging him with its’ cold wet snout, wanting to play. Nosy is holding something in his mouth. Upon closer inspection, Jeff noticed what that something was. It was a piece of a rotten finger with a jagged bone and dirt clinging to the twisted metal of hopes’ wedding ring. All the diamonds are covered in dirt. The smell coming from the segment of finger is musty and makes Jeff nauseous. He screams at the dog so fiercely that it drops the ring out of its’ mouth before retreating out of the bedroom. He turns and looks back at Hope. But, she’s not there anymore. On her pillow is a perfect rose.
Every morning, Jeff sits straight up in bed, gasping frantically for breath, covered in cold sweat, with hot tears streaming down his face, looks over to where Hope used to sleep and sees it. Once in a while, Jeff forgets to put the rose on her pillow right before he goes to sleep and at some point in the night, Jeff thinks, one must just snip its’ own stem and float through the locked front door, down the hallway and onto Hopes’ pillow all by itself. But it has crossed his mind that it could be Hope not letting him forget what he did to her no matter how many tiny toy soldiers he makes fight imaginary wars in perfect little gardens next to Weeping Willow trees. Not letting him forget, no matter how much beer he drinks every night to try to wreck his brain or how many times he tells God how sorry he is. And, every morning, right before he smells the rose on Hopes’ pillow, he whispers to himself, “A rose by any other nameÉ”



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