Everything is so much louder in the mornings: the bustle of early risers, the blare of leaf blowers, and most recently, I’ve learned – the screams of the forsaken.

“Where are we?” A woman cries out on my right.

Scoffing myself fully awake, I scan my unfamiliar surroundings with increasing dread, unable to answer the stranger as I stiffly sit up.

It’s almost sad that this field of endless rolling emerald growth is more comfortable than my bed.

Worse, is the sun still rising on the horizon, indicating that I wasn’t even allowed to sleep in.

I narrow my eyes and scan the infinite verdant for the source of my rude awakening, deflating in disappointment when more people begin popping up in the chest high grass like meerkats.

Ten people, I count.

All of them, strangers.

I frown.

I’ll never know which one deserves a slap for waking me up now.

A man about ten yards to my left begins audibly sobbing. I tilt my head.

_‘Maybe I could just slap him,’ _I think.

I am not a morning person_. _

It only takes another minute for the new arrivals to wake fully. All scanning the place with a wariness borne of the alien surroundings.

“Anyone know where we are?” The blonde woman says. She’s on my right, but her deeper voice and confident cadence save her from being slapped.

For now.

“Lady, does look like we do?” A large bald man snarls from about twenty yards away.

I instantly decide that we should eat him first, if it comes to it.

“Looks like we’re in a screensaver,” I hear myself commenting before I can think better of it.

There are a couple scattered snorts at that.

Someone behind me makes a sound like they swallowed a bug. I whirl in their direction, horrified by the thought.

The brunette woman’s hair is in a bun so severe that it doesn’t tremble despite every other part of her seeming to do so.

“It can’t be,” she breathes.

Chatter picks up at my back as I console her through a cringe I can’t contain, “It’s just a bug. Natural protein, you know?”

Large eyes, that match her hair color, pin me in place and widen as if just now noticing another person here. She scans the space containing the other occupants and begins to hyperventilate, confirming my suspicion.

“No, no, no,” she chants like a mantra.

Maintaining my grimace, I politely turn back toward the majority of our group so that she can have her breakdown in peace.

But there’s no peace to be had here.

Someone must’ve asked about the last thing everyone remembered, because they’re all answering that at once.

Through the overlapping chatter, I vaguely pick up on some people having been at work, some in bed.

The crying guy gasps out something about a camping trip and then, “My kids!”

I personally remember closing up at the bar and then… nothing. Huh.

But the bun lady? She’s murmuring something over and over again like some kind of incantation.

I warily turn back her direction, the increasing light of day revealing purple buds adorning the stems we’ve awoken in. Pretty.

But as I mindlessly reach out to touch one, the movement is suddenly stalled, my wrist violently shackled by another hand.

I gasp, startled by the crazy bun lady who is currently on her knees, bent over after having apparently launched herself at me.

My reaction and her attack have silenced the others enough for me to fully hear the phrase she can’t stop saying.

“Once the flowers bloom, we’ll be doomed.”

Over and over again she says it, her grip tightening on my wrist almost imploringly.

“Once the flowers bloom, we’ll be doomed!”

Her voice almost hoarse with the fervency of her delivery.

“What flowers?” I whisper.

Deafening silence follows the ceasing of her incessant chanting.

Her eyes lower to my hand in her grasp, my pointer finger still extended towards the bud.

_Oh_. Those flowers.

“Why will we be doomed?” I ask lightly.

You don’t work in customer service for years without learning to humor the crazy people.

They’re often the best tippers.

Crazy bun lady inhales a shaky breath, her eyes rise to track the progress of the sun.

Tears immediately pour down her cheeks at what she finds.

“I’m a botanist,” she begins in surprising coherence, “and every morning, these…. flowers…”

The helpful information ends as she breaks down in sobs. Great.

“‘Ey! What’s going on over there!” The rude man shouts.

I recline my head, refusing to remove my gaze from the crazy lady that still has my wrist in a death grip, and speak loudly enough to inform him,

“We’re all going to die.”

There are a couple gasping screams, an escalation in crying guy’s sobs, and lots of cursing.

I was mostly kidding!

Geez.

Tough crowd.

I shake my captured arm, reclaiming the botanist’s attention. “What do the flowers do?” I ask with a little more insistence.

As though they’ve been waiting for the question, the buds begin to bloom.

Silence befalls the field, all of us entranced with the preternatural dance, mesmerized by the plant’s unfurling lavender skirts.

There’s a puff of pollen that miraculously doesn’t make me sneeze.

The botanist’s shrill screams and release of my wrist are happening to some distant version of myself.

It’s almost like a hibiscus peony, the hundreds of petals consistently and endlessly unraveling, stuck in a time warp where it never stops blossoming.

Muffled voices, as if coming from up on dry land as I sink to the depths of the sea, demand silly things like, “Stop,” and, “Look away.”

I brush them off easily, slipping into the oblivion offered by the blooms.