Why can't I watch AHS all night?

Amarilla was not interested in the five pages of Shakespeare that Durnham had produced. She said sharply, “What good will that do me, seeing as I am out here unable to read or playact?”

 Oh that Durnham, she though savagely, he is unhinged, unsettling, undemanding, and very uninteresting!

Durnham said, “I agree! Wholeheartedly! If, and when, you do partake in the breathtaking art that is reading, you will no d-“

“Durnham!” shouted Amarilla (startled at the intrusive thought that had just popped into her head like a ravishing jelly bean (and although she’d never tasted a jelly bean, she had heard from many that they were deliciously ravishing)) and tried unsuccessfully to turn her little pot away from him.

“It is of importance!” he cried.

If Durnham were to have facial expressions, Amarilla supposed that his eyes would be wide, like someone staring around a bloody mass in horror, and his eyebrowse would be so high up his forehead that not even the most skilled Eyebrow Scholar would be able to wrench them down. They would be thick also, and maybe require a sort of cream to keep them slick. She sat there in a daze of distorted (yet plausible) dreams, wondering just what colour Durnham’s eyes would be, and drooping sadly at the intrusive thought and impossibilities.

Durnham was a plant. He could never raise eyebrows or stare at her outstanding foliage in admiration.

“I don’t suppose you have ever thought about wearing shoes?” she asked him.

“…for it was Macbeth- Eh?” Durnham looked up from his pages and Amarilla sighed raucously.

“Oh, dear, you seem- I mean, are you sick? Was that a cough?”

“I do not get sick!” Amarilla cried and once again tried to turn away.

Durnham cleared his throat and Amarilla imagined him lowering his glasses in a studious way. Glasses! She yelled at herself. Would he? Oh my, I just…

“It’s always a pleasure to have you sit with me, Amarilla, for I do know the ways of the world. There are crabs that clip, and babies that use up all their mother’s sound until they are red and wet in the face, there are bees that buzz and try to steal my pollen, but do I let them?! I do not! I have grown strong and sturdy and purple! Or…” he trailed off, suddenly sombre.

Amarilla looked up, interested. Durnham was staring at the crumbling wooden planks that made up their sitting bench, and he asked quietly, “What colour am I?”

Her heart fluttered, her soil sank a little (her pot did have useful holes in the bottom for drainage and midnight snacks), her little leaves quivered and she tried very hard not to let Durnham see the expression in her eyes.

“I believe you are purple,” she said steadily, and, she thought proudly, rather brisk. As if she was handing out horrible medicine to a line of noisy school children. She thought about medicine and the process of handing out, she thought about horrible things that people take and the will it must require to take them, and take them again, and she thought about raspberry jelly. How did they get that stuff to fly planes? Then Durnham said: “Have I always been? I have a bubbling of fear that is grabbing me with all its fingers and there is a whisper, Amarilla, like a soft breeze carrying doom, like the spiders that sit on my highest leaves and giggle terrible secrets at me in their absurdly ethereal voices, I feel-”

“Oh for the sake of my awe-inspiring pot and all that it holds! Durnham! You are purple! PURPLE I SAY! PURPLE!”

Dunham looked aghast. Amarilla curled and uncurled her little leaves and the dry ones crumbled onto her soil and she swore.

“You are a tad brittle,” Durnham observed. He nodded. Amarilla glared. Durnham said, not unkindly but also not as kindly as he could have, “you are in stress.”

“Stress! I’ll give you stress-”

“I do not require stress,” he said at once, and ruffled his five pages, “I require an audience! For the need to practice is sure up there, in the clouds and the moon and the some such, if I am to achieve my dreams and perspire!”

“Oh for the love of…” Amarilla started, turning away in disgust, but she caught the eye of a snail chewing something green far down in the grass. It was staring up at her, chewing slowly, maliciously, and with much dripping of saliva. “YOU!” she yelled. She turned to Durnham and bumped him. His pages fell. “It’s Sanrio! Durnham! He tried to eat my lower leaves the other day!”

“Sanrio? Tried to? Lower? What?” Durnham peered over the bench down onto the grass. “Oh it is. Hello there!”

“What are you doing?”

“Inviting him up!” Durnham waved excitedly and called out, “Come and help the dreams unfold! Watch the beauty- I am the beauty,” he clarified, “and let us dazzle you in a way you have possibly never been dazzled before!”

“Durnham!” Amarilla hissed, positively incensed.

“What? I said possibly-”

“He tried to eat me! You see this hole, just here, below my head and above my stem submergence?” she stretched so he could see, “This is a bite mark! A battle wound! I have been in the wars and I survived!”

There was a moment of blinking slowly (Durnham) and blushing furiously (Amarilla) and chewing repeatedly (Sanrio) until Durnham said, “Bit you?”

Amarilla said, “Yes. May seventh, when you had that Welcome Snails party.”

“Oh yes…” Durnham smiled fondly, then became serious, “We have to take him down!”

“We do!”

“Attending our parties, drinking all our rainwater (“It was tap,” interrupted Amarilla, “I never serve rain to guests.” And she gave him a withering glare as if he should have known this) and then taking part in a host invasion!” Durnham’s leaves seemed to have grown taller and greener and firmer.

Amarilla stared up in a fit of adoration.

“We must fight!” he commanded.

“Yes!” she squealed.

“We must conquer!”

“YES!”

“We must take back what is ours!”

“YES! YES! YES!” Amarilla quivered in potential ecstasy.

Durnham looked absolutely majestic. They both turned and glowered with all their might in a ferocious way down at Sanrio, ready for war. But he wasn’t there.

“He’s gone!” cried Amarilla, in a surge of uncomfortable anti-climax that made her shiny white petals dim to a faded off-white.

“The bloody coward!” shouted Durnham furiously, but also partially relieved as, being an artist, he didn’t have the nervous system for war and his petals were quite delicate. He often described them as being made from the finest, most exquisite and expensive crepe paper in all the land. (“You mean tissue paper,” Amarilla liked to remark with a snort, “crepe is a fancy term for tissue,” and as Durnham could only read Shakespeare, he never knew if she was right.)

“It was all the chewing!” Amarilla commented, “His chewing somehow aided his speedy escape!”

“Quite,” Durnham pleasantly agreed.

Amarilla frowned, “What do we do now?”

Durnham cleared his throat and rustled his papers, “Let us continue! We will conquer! We will open up the heavens, and let it all rain down, for that is what it does when the heavens opens! It rains! And we will rain along beside them!”

Amarilla sagged, “Oh good heavens, help me…”

    

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