Why the Cop with a Rose for a Head Wears a Rose-Head
Mask
by Robert T. Jeschonek
The woman with a daisy for a head — her name is Gravelina Scalding — runs out the front door of her townhouse with a pair of pruning shears pointed in my direction. The silver-shining blades are scissored open wide, ready to snip my green throat with a squeeze of the handles.
Myself, I have a red rose for a head, but not for long if I don't make a move right this instant. Then, who'll find the killer of things roselike, the man, woman, or thing the papers call the Pruner? Who'll avenge the murders of my dear darling wife and seedlings?
The very thought of their deaths is enough to fill my red heart and my green heart too with rage.
My faithful partner, Chub, is nearby, but I know better than to look to him for help. While I have the head of a rose and the body of a man, Chub has the head of a man (though it's a fat, pasty man's head like a pile of mashed potatoes) and the thick-stalked body of a sunflower. He gets around on flippery roots, but he's useless in a pinch because he just can't run.
So it's up to me, as usual.
Since I'm more interested in questioning Gravelina than killing her, I don't reach for the pistols in the pockets of my lemon yellow suit jacket. Instead, as Gravelina charges, I grab a nearby lawn chair and charge right back, jamming the aluminum frame into the blades of the shears. Gravelina keeps pushing — she's stronger than I expected — but I hold her off. One last shove and I knock her back off her feet, sprawling on the cobblestone walk.
The shears fall from her grip, and I kick them away. Dropping on top of her, I pin her wrists to the walk.
"We know you're connected to the Pruner," I say in the language of the flower-headed people, the play of scents and the rustling of petals. "Now tell me the killer's name."
Gravelina thrashes violently beneath me. "The weeds must be pruned if we are to touch the sun."
The blood and chlorophyll syrup in my veins freezes. She is quoting the message that was left hanging in wisps of fragrance in the air at each of the Pruner's twenty-one known murders.
I press the thorns in the palms of my hands more deeply into the meat of Gravelina's wrists. "Tell me! Who is the Pruner?"
"The question you should ask, Inspector Glisten," she says, "is who isn't?"
"Daisy-heads suck," says Chub, wrapping a dark green frond around a mug of beer. He hoists the beer from the bar and downs the contents in one swallow. Drinking is one thing he does fast.
"Gravelina won't crack," I say in flower-speak. Though Chub has the head of a man, he understands my rustling/scent language, which makes my life easier.
A girl with a marigold head drifts by, carrying a water mister on a tray. I wave her over. "What do we do next?" I say. "Gravelina was our best lead. We found the pollen prints of five victims on her pistils."
"Hmm." Chub thoughtfully sways from side to side. "She said the question we should be asking is who isn't the killer. Does that mean the process of elimination?"
The marigold girl lifts the blue-tinted mister bottle from the tray and directs the nozzle at my rose-head. I lean forward as she squeezes the trigger, spraying my crimson petals with fine droplets of water.
I feel instantly refreshed and tip her generously. As she glides away, I admire the bobbing of the sepals at the base of her blossom, the sway of her buttocks under her filmy white skirt. She reminds me of my wife, Zwilla, though my wife has a rose instead of a marigold for a head.
Had. I mean she had a rose for a head before the Pruner killed her.
For the umpteenth time today, I feel a stab in my gut at the thought of dead Zwilla. Though she has been gone for a month, the pain is as fresh as if she had been taken only this morning.
"One other possibility, Chub," I say. "Could she have meant that the least likely suspect is actually the murderer?"
Chub thinks, then sighs and shakes his fleshy jowls. "Maybe she just wanted to throw us off track."
"You might be right," I say, reaching for a plant food spike from the jar on the bar. "We know Gravelina has a connection to the killer. Perhaps we should take a closer look at her personal life."
"She works for a rhododendron-head who arranges humans," says Chub. "Miss Carionette. Maybe we should drop by her shop."
I kick off my right shoe, peel off the sock, and nibble the food spike with the tiny toothy maws on my toes. "Now you're thinking, man-head."
"Gravelina is my finest arranger," says Miss Carionette as she puts the finishing touches on the latest masterpiece at her shop, Fleshlovers. The masterpiece is a spring bouquet of six humans draped with veils of pastel chiffon. "I refuse to believe she had anything to do with any murders."
"What do you know about her personal life?" I say.
The mauve petals of Carionette's rhododendron-head ruffle with an affected highbrow accent. "Very little," she says. "She had an interest in composting and animal grafting...not necessarily in that order."
Strolling away from Carionette, I look at the framed photos on the walls of the shop, examples of her past work. "Did Gravelina ever talk about roses?"
Carionette's tone changes. A barely perceptible nervousness excites the flutter of her petals. "Only when a rose placed an order, and then only in a businesslike manner."
I come to a photo of a young human male, covered head to toe in a red silk bodysuit. He holds his arms straight out, red-gloved hands folded in the foreground.
Suddenly, I realize that all is not as it seems at Fleshlovers.
"I'd like to see your back room," I say, giving Chub a meaningful glance.
"I'm afraid I don't have time to show you gentlemen around," says Carionette.
"We won't take up your time," I say. "My partner and I will have a look-see ourselves."
"But there's nothing of interest back there."
"Not according to this." I snatch the photo of the red-bodysuited human male from the wall and wave it at her. "The Red Boy is a well-known sign of criminal activities."
Agitated, Carionette stops working on the human bouquet. "That's not an advertisement of illegal merchandise. It's a photo of a specialty item that's very popular with our hipper clientele — the Red Boy bouquet."
I hurl the photo to the floor. The glass pane in the frame shatters on impact. Storming past Carionette, I sweep around the counter at the rear of the shop and heave open the door to the back room.
What I see there makes my stomach churn.
On one side of the workbench, a translucent plastic bin brims with deep crimson petals. More of the petals are scattered over the bench.
On the center of the bench, half-finished, is a replica of a face...the face of a rose, assembled from the same crimson petals. I can tell from the texture and scent that the petals are real. This mask is being glue-gunned together with petals from someone with a rose for a head.
"Let me explain!" says Carionette as she charges into the room.
I pounce on her, pinning her arms to the wall with my palm-thorns.
Chub has finally managed to flipper into the doorway. "Partner Man-Head?" I say. "What is the penalty for making, distributing, or wearing rose-masks?"
"Death by lethal injection of herbicide," says Chub.
"Mandatory death penalty," I say. "But you never know, Miss Carionette. Maybe, if you tell me everything I want to know, I'll cut you some slack."
"W-what do you w-want to know?" says Carionette.
"A name and address," I say. "Who ordered this mask?"
I am surrounded by roses who are not roses.
Men and women dance under the flashing colored lights in the warehouse, and at first glance, everyone appears to have a rose-head. A closer look, however, reveals that every rose is a mask, and behind every mask are petals of white or gold or pink or purple or orange.
There must be at least a hundred people who look like roses in the warehouse, and the only one among them who is an actual rose-head is yours truly.
And I'd thought seeing the rose mask in progress at Fleshlovers had been sickening. This twisted masquerave violates the most sacrosanct of our laws and moral codes.
The rose is sacred. The rose is above all others.
Imitation of the rose is forbidden.
Forcing down my revulsion, I circle the dance floor in search of the man described by Miss Carionette.
It doesn't take me long to locate my target. He is seven feet tall and wears the only black rose mask in the place. His name is Carotid Aficionado, and according to Carionette, he is the man who ordered the rose-head mask she was making in the back room at Fleshlovers.
He is also the host of this nightmarish masquerave.
Carotid stands by the bar at the back of the room, a rose-masked woman on either arm. His scent puffs at me like clouds of smoke — powerful, capricious, and arrogant.
As I draw near, he turns his attention to me.
"Mr. Aficionado?" I say in flower-speak. "May I have a moment of your time?"
Even muted by a rose mask, the fragrance of his voice is as abrasive as his personal scent. "What'll you pay me for it?"
"It's about Gravelina Scalding," I say. "She's out of the picture."
"Is that so?" says Carotid.
"My name is Rooted Capsule," I say, "and I'd like to offer my services."
"Outstanding," says Carotid. "The question is, can you measure up to dear Gravelina?"
"Let's find out," I say.
Carotid sheds his chippies like the sleeves of silk pajamas. "You've talked me into it, Cappy." He gestures at a guy wearing a yellow rose-mask behind the bar. The guy runs up metal stairs to an elevated booth, and the pulsing music cuts out. The dancers stop moving all at once.
One of Carotid's men hands him a microphone. As he flower-speaks, his flutters and scent are amplified and cast out over the crowd.
"Hello, roses!" says Carotid, and the mob on the dance floor flutter-roars and applauds.
"Are the stamens of your rose-heads heavy with pollen, guys?" says Carotid. The rough, insistent flutters of male flowers charge the air. "Ladies, are your pistils crying out to be dusted with hot, surging pollen?" The room ripples with a wave of lighter fluttering. "Then it's your lucky night!"
I try to slide away from Carotid, but he keeps a tight grip on my shoulder. Undesirable outcomes are hurtling toward me, and I have no weapon to blow my way out of here.
But I do have a man-head up my sleeve. Smoothly, I drop a hand in my pocket and press the button on the secret weapon I call the Chub Signal, otherwise known as a pager.
As Carotid pushes me into the hands of two goons, I take heart that any minute now there'll be fire in the hole.
"Gravelina can't be with us tonight," says Carotid, "but your Uncle Carotid won't let you down! Put your hands together for Rooted Capsule!"
Everyone but me and the goons claps wildly.
"Nobody leaves a Carotid party unfertilized!" Carotid spins around like a rock star and punches an index finger toward the elevated DJ booth. "Hit it, Goomie!"
The guy in the booth scratches a record on the turntable, then lets it spin. A hip-hop version of "Flight of the Bumblebee" explodes from the amps.
One goon holds me while another raises a mask toward my face. The mask is a rounded cone striped gold and black, covered with fuzzy bristles...an instantly recognizable icon of sensuality.
It's a replica of the ass-end of a bee. Now I know why Gravelina Scalding had so many pollen samples on her.
Like Gravelina, I'm meant to go person to person and rub my masked snout in their flower-heads, picking up pollen from the males and smearing it on the pistils of the females. This is not just a masquerave, it's a pollenation orgy...and I'm "it."
At least, that's what's in store for me until an engine roars outside and the doors of the warehouse blow in like autumn leaves in a wind-gust.
Thankfully, in addition to drinking, there are two other things that slow-moving Chub Man-Head does fast, and one of them's driving.
The other is evident as the machine gun turrets on the roof and hood of his squad car burst to life. Chub might take a half-hour to flipper across a room, but he's a speed demon when it comes to shooting people to death.
Chub's guns chew up the crowd with deafening, random fury, filling the air with plumes of green and red syrup. As the crowd scatters in a panic, I haul up a leg and kick back hard into the shin of the guy who's holding me. He loosens his grip enough for me to tear my arms free and slash his throat with my thorns.
When the other goon, the one who was going to put the bee mask on me, charges, I dive at him with palm thorns extended. My thorns slide into his chest like meat thermometers into a roast, and then I drag them downward, gashing him open. Red and green fluid pours out like wine, and the goon drops away.
All the while, the gunfire rages, and dancers pelt the floor like hailstones. One of the few people left standing is Carotid, who runs out the back door without his arm candy chippies.
When I chase him down and pin him to the alley wall with my thorns, he doesn't look the slightest bit rattled. I tear the black rose-mask off his red carnation-head, and he just stares at me like I'm no more threatening than a pizza delivery guy.
"Alone at last," he says.
"What do you know about the Pruner?" I say, twisting my thorns deeper into his flesh with satisfaction.
Carotid laughs, the fine red petals in his bloom fluttering with delight. "What's a Pruner, pray tell?"
"Tell me what you know!" I spike Carotid's thigh with my longest knee thorn, then slowly drag it downward, opening a furrow in the meat of his leg.
He stiffens, and I know I've hurt him. "This drama is completely unnecessary," he says.
"Tell me what you know about the Pruner!" I say, driving the thorn deeper.
Carotid gasps, then leans close enough for me to hear and smell his whisper. "I'll do better than tell you," he says. "Uncle Carotid will show you."
As Carotid leads me among the wildflowers in their foul-smelling camp, I am overcome by disgust.
These people of the streets and shadows huddle around barrels of burning compost and squat in makeshift tents of trash bags and scavenged cardboard and plastic sheeting. They dress in stinking rags infested with parasites and water themselves from stagnant puddles.
"You said the Pruner would be here," I say to Carotid, stroking the grips of the automatic handguns in the pockets of my lemon-yellow suit jacket.
"I spy, with my little eye," says Carotid, "the certain someone you're dying to meet."
Looking where he points, I see two dandelion-headed people sitting on the ground by a campfire in front of a ragged bedsheet tent. One is a full-grown man, cooking something in a tin can, and the other is a little girl, maybe eight years old.
"That's the Pruner?" I say.
"Seek and ye shall find, dear Cappy," says Carotid.
The dandelion-heads look up as we approach. "Inspector," says Carotid, extending a hand toward them. "You wanted to meet the Pruner. Allow me to introduce Gristle Skinbone and his daughter, Medium."
I stare, and Gristle stares back, wisping out a stench that's rancid with contempt.
I barely manage to restrain myself. "All those murders," I say to Gristle. "Why did you do it?"
"‘Scuse me, Mr. Jumpy-to-Conclusions," says Carotid, "but what makes you think I was only talking about him?"
Confused, I look to the wilted little girl in the dancing firelight.
"Tell him, honey," Carotid says to little Medium. "Tell him how you won your medal."
Medium touches a tarnished silver disk pinned to her stained sweater. "Okay," she says timidly. "Daddy and I met the rose-man walking in the park. I told him a joke while Daddy knocked him down with a stick."
Medium hesitates, and Carotid coaxes her to tell the rest, sweetie.
"Then Daddy and I cut him up with clippers," says Medium. "I did the small stuff on account of I'm small."
I am speechless. Something inside me flips over like a vegetable that looks fine on top and is crawling with insects underneath.
"Happy now?" says Carotid.
"I don't understand," I say. "Why would they...how could they do it?"
"Look at how they live," says Carotid, gesturing at the squalid bedsheet tent. "Can there be a nobler motive than the end of oppression?"
"You mean to tell me...they killed twenty-one roses...out of resentment?"
"Shame on you," says Carotid. "Do these two look capable of murdering twenty-one roses?"
I say nothing.
Carotid laughs. "This is just our first stop! There's more to the Pruner than two unwashed wildflowers."
For the next two hours, Carotid leads me around town, introducing me to one self-confessed Pruner or group of Pruners after another.
The parade of psychopaths quickly wears me down. I quickly sicken of the toxic anti-rose-head sentiment spewed out by the whole rotten crew.
I hear the same crap from the band of housewives who murdered a rose-head city councilman that I hear from the men's church group who cut down a rose-head newspaper publisher. The teen street gang who killed a rose-head attorney and his family sing the same song as the janitor who hacked up a company vice president.
This, to say the least, is a real bud-opener. I've been a cop for two decades, dipping my roots over and over in the filthiest shit-pools...and I never knew how far and wide the poison had spread. Until this night, I never knew how much the non-roses hated us.
This is what is going through my mind as Carotid directs our driver, Chub, toward the last stop on our tour.
As Carotid and I enter the lobby of the stadium, the roar of the crowd is deafening. The mingled scents of many flower-heads in close proximity are overpowering.
"Stay close, Cappy," says Carotid, marching toward the open gate that yawns before us. "This is one place you don't want to wander off in."
My sweating hands are tight on the guns in my pockets. "Why? What's going on here?"
Carotid spins and throws his arms up in the air. "A spectacle years in the making! The grand finale or brave new beginning, depending on your inclination!"
"What the hell are you talking about?" I say, following him through the gate.
"The greatest show under the sun!" Carotid is silhouetted in flame. "Behold, Red Night!"
As I step out of the gate, all I see at first is fire, leaping up from the green turf of the playing field. An enormous bonfire blazes at dead center of the stadium, orange and red and yellow tongues lashing in the wind.
Staring deeper into the flaring surge, I see a solid form at its core, tall and straight like the trunk of a tree or a telephone pole. I follow it up along its height, rising far above the field into the night sky.
When I get to the top, I realize that it is meant to be more than a tree or a pole. The spar in the heart of the blaze is supposed to be a stem.
Atop it, an enormous effigy of an open rose blossom burns.
Suddenly, the crowd explodes with a roar of clapping and stomping, and I drop my gaze to the field to see what the excitement is about. It is then that I know conclusively that the giant burning rose was not erected and lit as a worshipful gesture.
Gangs of flower-headed men parade onto the turf to the thunderous music of a marching band. At first, I see geraniums, marigolds, begonias, violets, asters, chrysanthemums...no roses.
But as the men get closer, I see roses among them after all. Each gang carries a rose-head, raised overhead like a coffin or a luau pig.
And when they get to the bonfire, the men throw the rose-headed people in with a flourish.
Carotid leans close, his petals brushing against mine. "Here are some more Pruners for you. Aren't you going to arrest them?"
I flash back to the words of Gravelina Scalding when I asked her who the Pruner was. The question you should ask, Inspector Glisten, she said, is who isn't?
At last, I understand what she meant.
A rose-head drops to the field from above, and I look up into the packed stands. I see roses among the thousands of flowers there, struggling and screaming as they are beaten and tossed over the railings.
Petals of rose red and pink and yellow and white swirl in the air like autumn leaves on a windy day.
"Don't feel bad, Cappy." Carotid throws an arm around my shoulders. "You know as well as I that it takes a fire to clear the way for new growth."
Another rose is dumped on the bonfire. The men who threw him high-five and hug each other in celebration.
As I watch, I realize that I recognize them. A chill shoots up my spine as the last flakes of sanity peel away from my world.
They are cops out of uniform. Not just any cops, either, but cops from my precinct.
Hearts jackhammering in my chest, I turn and run. As I charge through the gate, I hit the Chub Signal in my pocket and draw my guns.
When I bolt out into the parking lot, I feel the start of true panic build inside me like a bud about to burst. My secret weapon who has never let me down and who I fully expected to see waiting at the curb in the revving Chubmobile is nowhere to be found.
As the stadium doors crash open behind me, I run straight ahead into the parking lot because there's nowhere else to go. Stealing a look over my shoulder, I see the traitor-cops hurtling toward me, leading a mob of flower-heads shaking knives and scythes and ball bats in the air.
I run for my life between lanes of parked cars, barely outpacing the onrushing army. Feet thunder across the pavement like the pounding hooves of stampeding cattle; a cloud of choking stench rolls over me, scents mingled in a single transmission of murderous rage.
Just as I have consigned myself to a terrible Red Night death, I hear the screeching of tires.
Looking over my shoulder, I see the glorious Chubmobile leap out of a parking space, directly in the path of the oncoming mob. As the car jolts to a stop, the machine gun turrets on its roof and hood chatter away, spraying the crowd with a shitstorm of fiery bullets.
As the nose of the mob explodes with blossoms of red and green fluid, I bolt toward my beloved savior-buggy. The door handle jitters in my grip with the supersweet vibrations of the stuttering guns.
"Couldn't you park any closer?" I say as I dive into the passenger seat.
"I was in a towaway zone," says Chub. "The asshole parking attendant would've made his own crippled grandma move."
It's not like me to give with the mush, but I pat Chub's shoulder as he keeps firing into the mob. "Thanks, man-head. What say we make like bananas?"
"Where to?" says Chub.
"Given recent developments," I say, "I think we ought to pay a visit to Miss Carionette."
Months later, Chub Man-Head sits at the bar in our favorite joint, one frond wrapped around a freshly-refilled beer, and waves me over. For a moment, it's like old times again, my partner and I bellied up to shoot the shit after a long day of shooting lawbreakers.
But I can't fool myself for long. The old times are ancient history.
"Hey, waiter!" Chub says to me. "How about a mist for my partner here?"
These days, I'm not the one on the receiving end of the mister spray.
A man with a lily for a head turns from beside Chub at the bar and extends his glossy white petals to receive the refreshing spritz. I lift the mister bottle from the silver tray I carry and let him have it. His petals ruffle smoothly with delight.
The full-head azalea mask Miss Carionette made me is so good, the lily-head doesn't know I'm a rose underneath. Chub has my number, but that's okay; he's been promoted to inspector, but I know he'll never rat me out.
Chub's new partner, on the other hand, is a complete asshole."Don't be so stingy with the mist next time," says the lily-head, dropping a lousy tip on my silver tray.
Inspector Chub adds another bill to my tray. "Take care," he says with a wink on his mashed potato puss.
I linger for an instant, more grateful than ever for the good and faithful man-head. Now that the other flowers have killed every rose they could get their hands on, and I can never show my true rose-head face in public, Chub is my only connection to the life I once knew.
I smile to myself as my former partner drains his beer in one gulp, and then I move along to serve other customers. I hate doing it, spending my days misting the petals of the inferiors who troop through the door like they own the place, like they own the whole world.
But it keeps me alive. I don't have to live in a wildflower camp or peddle my ass as a street pollenator. I blend in and watch for other flower-heads who might be roses under masks...though I haven't found any yet.
Also in the plus column, my job isn't my life anymore like it was back when I was an elite lawman. I have time for a life away from work these days.
Some nights, I go on hunting expeditions, ambushing wealth-flaunting nightlifers fattened on the kill-gotten gains of the Red Night massacre. I call myself the New Pruner and aim to beat the record for hacking up non-rose flower-heads...but only after I've interrogated them for information about the murders of my wife and kids.
That's the one secret I never discovered while investigating the original Pruner killings. I'm still no closer to figuring it out, but I'm nowhere near giving up.
Neither is my friend in high places, Inspector Chub. He says he's all over the case in his spare time. Recently, in fact, Chub said he had a feeling that the killer was so close that he could reach out and touch him.
It makes me feel good that Chub's taking this case as personally as I do. Some people might say it's unimportant now, given all that's happened...but to me, it has never been more important. Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps me going.
And sometimes, there is one other thing.
On certain nights, I go to Carotid's club. I put on a rose mask over the azalea mask over my rose-head, and I pretend I'm dancing among rose-heads again, not lesser flowers masked as roses. Sometimes, I pretend my wife and seedlings are among them, swaying and waving and smiling in sunlight, telling me everything's going to be all right.
And for a while, at least, I feel like I'm on top of the world again.
