Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

by GennaRose Nethercott

The rest of us are florists. This makes us more qualified to conduct this research than just about anyone else. We spend all day touching beautiful things (both edible and poisonous), so we are experts when it comes to monsters. Monsters and flowers aren’t much different. Sometimes they are hard to tell apart—but a good florist knows what to look for.

But there is another sort of dying in between, a crueler death: when those you love begin to make choices they would never make if you were there. If you were alive. Things that would be thoughtless, brutal even, but in your absence, become benign. Like giving away your clothes. Or removing the flurries of magazine clippings you carefully curated across your bedroom walls.