"This is disgusting," said Arturo to himself. And then to the flower, he yelled "You know you don't belong here, right?" He covered his nose and mouth with a checkered handkerchief. Flies swarmed all over its little flowers. It had been giving off the scent of dead flesh, and the dry heat only emphasized its rotting, decaying effluvium. It was known that these flowers attracted flies instead of bees to pollinate, and this flower was giving off it's raw pheromones in thick, gaseous waves. "Phew."
An ugly flower, it was. Arturo almost felt a sort of kinship with it. It had been swallowed from one part of the earth and belched up here where it didn't belong. So, too, was Arturo. He had been taken here from the Philippines by his grandmother as a child, and had never known his true parents. The flower was considered ugly by conventional standards, and it's beastly size was considered by many as revolting. Arturo himself was never considered an attractive man, he smoked and drank too much, and ate poorly.
From overhead came a loud buzzing. A shadow the size of a pick up truck gracefully slid across the garden. The buzzing got louder and a whorl of dust kicked up around the carrion flower. It was a giant fly. Arturo removed his navy, sweat-soaked cap and pressed it to his chest. The fly was the size of a trimmed turkey. Its eyes glimmered in the sun, with swirls of light that looked like multicolored rainbows in an oil puddle. Arturo had no camera, and no cell phone with a camera. All he had were his own two eyes and his word. Being a known recluse as well as pathological fabricator, this mattered little, as there was no one in his life to tell, and casual acquaintance who would listen would not believe him anyway. He wanted to run, screaming, to gather as many witnesses as he could, but he was afraid the spectacle would end, so he stayed, his boots frozen in the red dirt.
"Praise God," said Arturo.
He watched in horror as the bulbous fly made love to the flower, rubbing its abdomen all over it's spadix, letting its legs wrap around it like a strippers pole. Arturo was repulsed, yet fascinated. When the fly took off, the flower began to close. The single petal that wrapped around it began closing until it looked like a small head of romaine lettuce. By noon, the flower had withered into nothing more than a gnarled, grey root.
Who would believe him? These flowers were rarities to begin with, and to insist to the public that one had bloomed at the garden outside of it's own natural climate would be to reaffirm his own reputation as a bullshitter. Add to that the giant fly, and well, everything he said would be dismissed as another fanciful and pointless lie. He may have even been slapped.
Arturo staggered to the front gate of the garden where he greeted the visitors. Throughout the day, he passed out folded maps and bit his lower lip as they all entered the park. He wanted to tell them about that fly but he held back. What would have been the point?
For the rest of his days Arturo developed and fostered an obsession for carrion flowers such as the phallic amorphophallus. He also developed a fondness for the red-petaled rafflesia, and the feathery, star-shaped, stapelia, with its gaping mouth and bad breath. When asked why he would start such an expensive hobby using up his lifetime savings growing such repulsive plants, that day would always float back into his consciousness. "I guess, we got something in common. Those putrid plants and me," he would answer. "All flowers, good or bad, pretty or ugly, they got a set of wings flying around just for them. And me, I throw my hat in with these different ones. The dark horses. I always root for the dark horses."
Although no one believed the tale, many supposed this to be the most openly reflective statement he ever made. Although he had an indiscriminate generosity when it came to fabrications, one thing was certain – dark horses were the always the ones to root for.
And he did have bad body odor.
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