Covent Garden Flowers; Tuesday [07/28].

[white_oleander]

Clearly, the postcards weren't big sellers here at the flower shop, but Astrid hadn't really expected them to be, but she'd handwavily talked to Summer about getitng her old job back at Turtle & Canary, so she had higher hopes for Friday. Either way, the box was still out on the counter if anyone was interested, but she was moving on to a slightly different project, cutting old magazine covers into shadow puppets with her mother's old X-acto knife and sewing them onto bamboo skewers she’d saved from Taste of Thai and Sushi Station.

They were mythical figures, for the moment, mostly half-animal, half-human—the Monkey King, the antlered man who was sacrificed each year to fertilize the crops, wise centaur Chiron and cowheaded Isis, Medusa and the Minotaur, the Goat Man and the student-pilphering Krampus and the White Crow Woman and the Fox Mistress with her latest moneymaking scheme. Mermaids from like class earlier, although equal distribution of ones with the fish on the bottom and on the top, cavorting with various reimaginings of Zora of every shark stype she coudl think of. Even sad Daedalus and his feathered boy.

And when she'd finally tied those paper cut-out bodies to their long skewers and chopsticks, she went around the shop and stuck them into the soil of various pots and plants, populating this microcosm jungle with figures that may be real, might not be real, were probably real in several dimensions, if not necessarily hers or this one or some other one, half wondering how long they'd be there before anyone noticed there was a Pegasus taking flight in their begonias or Kali and her extra arms and many skulls lurking underneath the fronds of a featherleaf fern, if anyone even noticed at all.

Covent Garden is open!