Mighty Mercury

The man walked down seventeen flights of stairs, through a hotel lobby, out swinging glass doors, another 46 blocks every day to work past a little yellow rose growing discreetly in the shade at the corner of a vacant lot near the small, brittle office-building where he worked as a teletypist. He had a secret and beautiful relationship to the rose.  Each day he saluted and gave thanks to it, his reason to live.

 

All his life he'd worked in an office building and never seen anything nice but this rose on his way back and forth.  A life of hard corners and flat surfaces, the rose his only connection to beauty.  He fell in love with the rose, quit his job, built a shelter and set up camp beside it. He buillt a fence around it with a padlock so he knew it would be safe when, as would happen every so often, he would leave it unattended while he went around the corner for a burger.

 

He put up huge signs: "LOOK AT THE ROSE", "WONDER AT THE ROSE"," BEHOLD THE ROSE",  or simply: "THE ROSE!" Soon everyone knew it was there. The man became a licensed minister, grew a long white beard and started wearing long white robes around everywhere. He would stand on the sidewalk all day shouting about how beautiful the rose was, calling himself a prophet of the rose, and reading aloud all the poetry he'd written about the rose (which he claimed had actually been written THROUGH him by the "Holy spirit of the Rose"). His book was called THE WORD OF THE ROSE.

 

He'd lurch suddenly out of the shadows at night, clutching at passersby, forcibly cuffing them to a standstill if they resisted, then dragging them over to the rose and making them look at it briefly before he released them. Needless to say, this man became a nuisance to the neighborhood. People started purposely avoiding that particular stretch of sidewalk until finally there was no one left to shout at except the small group of followers he'd acquired, who'd get him drunk and tell him he was king, and the few bewildered lost tourists who'd ever-more-rarely stray by.

 

Unbeknownst to our anti-hero, many others among the droves of hapless workers formerly frequented to trafficking that stretch had also fancied themselves as having secret personally-trancendent self-revelatory relationships to the same yellow rose. I was one of them.  In the end, we put the man out of his misery and liberated our rose.

 

But it didn't smell the same anymore. Shakespeare was wrong.