Flowers for Anthi

FLOWERS FOR ANTHI

by Avra Margariti

(Content warning: abusive relationship)

“Flowers for Anthi”

Season 1, Episode 1 (Pilot)

The girls meet for the first time in high school. Anthi is a mid-year transfer with a hidden past and skittish-mouse demeanor. Katia has dirt-smudged cheeks and talks too loudly and smiles too much, until the apples of her cheeks might split open. She has purple flowers growing from the stigmata of her palms. When she grabs Anthi’s hand for a vigorous shake, both girls yelp. Anthi, because she doesn’t like to be touched; Katia, because the thorns growing from her new classmate’s palms have perforated her skin, crushed her blossoms. 

Season 1, Episode 2

Anthi sneaks out during lunch break and uses the curved thorns growing from her palms to slice Katia’s bike tires. The clear message in the hiss of displaced air is that Anthi isn’t to be befriended. Later, Katia finds the ruined tires and has no choice but to push her bike home while flower petals, wilted with hurt, shed from her body and turn to dirty confetti under the wheels.

Season 1, Episode 8

[Spoilers] 

Before the tragic season finale, the girls meet in the park under night-blooming moonlight. The music swells and you’d think they would kiss, but they don’t. One is too ace and the other too traumatized. Their bikes are piled on the dew-dropped grass, slotted against each other like sleepy littermates. Katia—tensely, tenderly—cups Anthi’s cold cheek in her efflorescent palm and asks, “Why did you do that, the first time we met? It took me ages to get my bike fixed.” And Anthi, thorn-bodied but yielding, replies, “I thought I didn’t deserve a friend like you after everything I’ve done.”

[End of Spoilers]

Season 1, Episode 3

The girls’ homeroom teacher signs them up as a team for a biking competition to fundraise for one of their classmates’ top surgery. Initially, Katia—not used to rejection or wounded pride—tries to sabotage Anthi by sending roots surging up from the dirt to tangle into her wheels. Anthi grits her teeth and keeps pedaling forward, muscles burning, brow sweating with the determination of someone used to sabotage—to always having to look over her shoulder. Once the other team’s riders gain ground and take the lead by several laps, Anthi and Katia exchange a look. Flowers and thorns grasp their respective handlebars. The girls work together, and they work fast—fast enough to fly, as one, to the finish line.

Season 1, Episode 4

As slowly as a seed germinates, the girls first become school friends, then friends who tell each other secrets—or at least, Katia does. One night, watching teen rom-coms on the carpeted floor of Katia’s bedroom with a plate of snacks Katia’s mothers lovingly prepared for them, the girls go for a kiss, then think better of it. Katia’s whole body is full of flowers as she blushes. Anthi tries to ignore the thorns spreading over her own—the same thorns that have been slowly choking the entire town ever since she moved here, enfolding bent buildings and cracking open potholes in the roads. Though she wants to, Katia never asks Anthi why they never meet in Anthi’s house. She never asks if the thorn infestation is her doing, either. Some secrets, even now, are too sharp to speak.

Season 1, Episode 5

Prom. Katia wears a flowing purple dress, the same semi-translucent hue as her flower petals. Anthi dresses head to toe in an oversized men’s suit, with black leather gloves to conceal the thorned gaps in her palms. Some of their classmates giggle, but Katia vehemently insists Anthi looks dapper. The girls dance together, Katia’s dress billowing when Anthi twirls her around, and a smile splits Anthi’s face for the first time since they met. 

Halfway through the song before the prom queen is crowned, a commotion breaks out. Students yell from outside the amphitheater, and the girls follow the noise. A thorned vine, like the ones found in abundance near the swamp at the edge of town, has curled around the side of the building. Under it, the prom-queen-to-be lies in a haphazard slump of limbs and tulle. Her pointer finger is pricked red, a dried drop of blood still clinging to the wound.

The prom queen is sleeping—unable to wake up, no matter how much her friends slap her cheeks or pour ice water on her face. The school nurse raises her hands, helpless to end the sleep sickness.

Everyone turns to stare at Anthi, who hugs herself. She shakes like a sapling on the verge of being uprooted.

Season 1, Episode 6

The town blames Anthi for the thorns, the sleep curse. Katia cannot stand the cloud of suspicion and speculation hovering above town, or the shoves and sneers Anthi endures at school and beyond. When Anthi stays late in the library to catch a break from the constant scrutiny, Katia bikes to the swamp, eager to bring back proof that it wasn’t Anthi who twisted the thorning vines around town, who claimed the school’s sweetheart.

The swamp is a cradleland of buzzing mosquitoes and vines thick as arms. The mud smells dank and moldy, a green-tinged rot. Katia’s boots sink into it when she tries to cut a vine loose with her pocketknife to bring back to town, to prove Anthi’s innocence.

“Little girl,” a voice says. It slinks toward Katia, mushy and melodious. It belongs to a young woman, tall and pale, who emerges from amid the vines. The swamp witch smiles at a frowning Katia and says, “Go back and tell my Anthi to stop playing her games of rebellion. I’ve waited long enough—it’s time for her to come home.”

Season 1, Episode 7

When Katia confesses to Anthi about her encounter in the swamp, Anthi turns pale and shaky. “Promise me you’ll never go back there again,” she asks Katia, grabbing her hands with urgency—forgetting to let go. “You don’t know what she’s capable of.”

Did your flowers turn to thorns because of her? Katia wants to ask. But she never did learn how to ask for secrets, only how to give away her own.

Yet still, Anthi tells her.

How she ran away from an abusive mother, straight into the swamp where its witch had promised her protection. Had promised her love. How the witch and Anthi lived together in the liminal embrace of vines and mud. How the witch grew possessive, not allowing Anthi to leave her swamp even for a day—for Anthi’s own protection, the swamp witch claimed. 

As Anthi grew pricklier, thornier, more reserved, the witch appeared to grow bored of her as well. She ignored and taunted Anthi, until Anthi was crawling up the vine-wall.

“I should have known,” Anthi says. Her hands are still in Katia’s, thorn to flower. “When she made her vines withdraw and told me to leave if I was so miserable with her… I should have known she wouldn’t let go of me so easily.”

Katia finds out Anthi has been trying to reclaim a semblance of normalcy ever since: to restart school and her old life. She’s been squatting all alone in one of the town’s abandoned buildings. Thorns sprout from her shelter and sprawl across town with every swamp-water-drenched nightmare she has, thrashing in her sleeping bag night after night.

“You’re staying with us from now on,” Katia promises. “We’ll keep you safe.”

Anthi bites her lips but doesn’t say no. Doesn’t say, it’s me the witch wants. That’s the only way to stop the vines.

Katia sleeps and dreams of nature’s Fibonacci sequence: flowers and ferns in perfect symmetry. She dream-wades through a floral infinity. When she wakes up in the middle of the purple night, she is sharing a bed with Anthi, who curls trustingly against her, cupping the thorns of her palms close to her chest so they don’t break Katia’s skin.

Season 1, Episode 8

[Revisited]

The girls go on a bike ride together. They ignore the thorns, the looming shadow of the swamp witch, and the way the towners give them a wide berth as they pedal past them as a team. Katia’s wheels are all patched up. When Anthi tries to apologize—for the wheels, the thorns, for everything—Katia only shows her the snacks she brought along for a secret picnic in the park after-hours. 

Anthi eats caramel popcorn until she’s full, and allows Katia’s jokes to make her laugh. This will later be labeled a filler episode and blamed for the show’s pacing issues and bad reviews, but this is the memory Katia will cling to during the finale: the way lavender sprigs cling to the spokes of her bike.

Season 1, Episode 9 (Season Finale)

Anthi spends the night at Katia’s house. Outside, barbed vines crawl and towners fall into long, unbroken slumbers. All because of her; because Anthi ran from the swamp witch, when once upon a time Anthi had been so eager to fall into the witch’s waiting arms.

Katia looks younger in sleep. Her flower petals shiver gently when Anthi holds her hand one final time. Then Anthi extricates herself from the bed they share. She doesn’t bother wearing a jacket to protect herself against the night chill. People like her, she thinks, do not deserve protection.

Anthi climbs out the window and walks, alone, toward the edge of town where the swamp sprawls. The swamp is part of every wetland network of every town; she was foolish to think she’d escaped it. Her bike lies abandoned on Katia’s mothers’ lawn. Maybe Katia can use it for parts to remember Anthi by.

Her witch awaits. The only way to stop the thorned sleep sickness, save the town—save Katia—is for Anthi to step through the vines that part for her. To enter the swamp once more.

In the episode’s final scene, the point of view shifts. Katia wakes up in an empty bed already knowing, in the wilting of her petals, what Anthi has done. The script says this is the part where Katia vows to bring Anthi back—to venture into the swamp witch’s domain, wade through the moss-soft mud and all its ageless, monstrous creatures, and play the role of Orpheus in the show’s next season. 

Katia’s flowers shake, her body coming undone with anger. Katia doesn’t like this finale: the emotional cliffhanger, Anthi’s sacrifice, the start of Katia’s own hero’s journey, her coming of age.

Katia wants to rewind. Rewrite her own script. She pictures herself biking on a loop, lap after lap, an infinity symbol, a Fibonacci’s sequence of spiraling symmetry. She wants to pedal so fast she flies back to the beginning. Back when Anthi first came into her life, thorns and all. 

She wants the world to bloom until it withers, then to rebuild it from the mulch, the decomposition-fertile ground.

And so she does.

Where thorns once coiled and twisted into knot-like configurations, now flowers bloom from the vine. They erupt so violently that soon they cover every surface: petals in an ever-expanding kaleidoscope. Pollen cloaks everything—the town, the streets, the buildings, the swamp—like a swarm of susurrating wasps. The sleeping town, quick to point fingers at Anthi, becomes engulfed by Katia’s rage—her ritual of rebirth.

Season 1, Episode 1 (Remake)

Katia’s classmates avoid her and the thorns protruding from her palms, her floral buds indehiscent from overuse. She’s too sharp, they say, she might cut them open, and then what? Katia doesn’t mind their contempt, but sometimes she gently strokes the thorns of her palms and thinks about loneliness, caught like clumps of soil in their curved edges. 

The homeroom teacher enters the scene, followed by a thin, skittish-looking girl. “This is Anthi, our new transfer student,” the teacher announces. “Everyone please give her a warm welcome.”

Anthi sits on the desk next to Katia—the only available seat in the whole class. When Katia goes to shake hands with her, their thorns snag together. Both girls look at each other, eyes wide as Fibonacci sunflowers.

Later, after the final bell, Anthi and Katia pick up their bikes. They ride home together.

This time, there are no tires punctured by thorns.

AVRA MARGARITI is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Strange Horizons, F&SF, Podcastle, Asimov’s, Vastarien, and Reckoning. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).

Flowers for Anthi was edited by Frankie Hagg. It can be found in Tales & Feathers Volume 3.