Roses have always been on my bedside table. He started giving them to me when I was bedridden for a week, after I fell down the stairs. Every evening without fail, he would visit me to clean the house, and to cook me dinner. “Silly Zoë,” he would say as he fed me, “you really should learn to take care of yourself better.” Yet for all his little scoldings, he would always be there for me.

On the third day, he brought with him a single red rose. It was about ten inches tall and stood in one of those small porcelain vases with a wide lip and a narrow neck that curved out like a woman’s body. The colour of the rose was not like the bright red ones you see at weddings; it was a darker, more sensual and raw shade of red.

“You like it, Zoë?”

I wasn’t even sure why he asked. I could hardly take my eyes off the rose, and my fingers tugged lightly at the sheets under the blanket, desperately wishing to touch its petals; to find out if they were as comforting as they looked.

“Of course I do,” I said, blushing in delight. He must’ve noticed the warmth of my cheeks, because he set the rose down on my bedside table such that its head was tilted slightly towards me. I could taste the cinnamon-sugar fragrance of the rose on my lips, causing me to blush even harder.

“Good, just be careful not to break the vase,” he cautioned as he leaned over to kiss me.

“I will,” I replied as my eyes closed to receive the kiss.

The next evening, I woke up from a short nap to the sound of cooking in the kitchen. As I mused for a while on how cooking sounded very much like the static you get from a television when nothing’s on, I turned to see a second rose in an identical vase, standing next to the first one.

The roses soon became an unspoken little ritual that we both shared. It was like how you’d have a secret handshake that you’d greet your best friend with, except much more intimate. With each visit, he’d bring me a new rose to place on my bedside table, alongside the others. Upon his insistence, we would give each rose a name: Nicole, Kara, Julia, Esther, Lynne; it was a silly thing to do, since they all looked identical, but we enjoyed it.

It wasn’t long before my bedside table couldn’t take any more roses. By then I was no longer bedridden, so we would hunt around the house together for a place to put each new rose. We would have roses clustered together on the windowsill, on top of shelves, on desks, even on the bathroom sink. I never did ask him where he got all the roses and vases from, but it wasn’t really important to me; as far as I was concerned, he was giving me roses, and that made me happy.

One day, we were looking for a place to put a new rose. I found a little space on a high shelf next to a row of books. It was about two feet above me, so I pulled up a chair and tiptoed on it, barely getting the porcelain vase onto the shelf. A soft sprinkling of dust fell on me as I nudged the vase into place, causing my nose to screw up tightly before a hard sneeze inevitably forced its way out. For a moment, I thought I was going to fall from the chair, until I felt his reassuring hands on my waist. I regained my composure and thanked him, only to feel his grip tightening painfully as he shoved me off the chair.

“I told you to be careful!” he hissed, each word forced through clenched jaws.

I looked up at him in confusion, my elbows crushed with pain. He was holding the vase carefully, lifting it up to the light as he rotated it slowly, checking it for the slightest of damage. The clock in the kitchen chimed seven times before he lowered the vase, satisfied. Without a word, he picked up the chair and placed the vase back onto the shelf.

Later that day, I asked him to stop bringing me roses. He didn’t reply. On his next visit, we were back to looking for a place for another new rose.

By the end of the year, we had filled all the empty surfaces we could find with roses, but that still didn’t stop him from bringing a new rose every time he visited. The little porcelain vases began to line the edges of the floor, forming a dotted border of white bodies around each room. It was then when I realised that the roses on my bedside table hadn’t even started to wilt. If anything, their colour had become a darker, more intense shade of red, reminiscent to the skins of fresh cherries. When I asked him why the roses didn’t wilt, he just smiled and told me that the vases were full of life.

One morning, I sat up in bed with my back propped up against the wall and my legs crossed.  As sunlight flowed in, the walls of my room were slowly saturated in a thick, red dye.  Rows upon rows of roses lined the floor, leaving but a small path from one room to another. I dreaded getting out of bed, because it meant walking past all the roses. I knew I couldn’t stay in bed, he was going to take me out for breakfast, but the thought of having to leave the sanctuary of my bed only made me pull myself closer.

The roses were mocking me, I knew. They knew I couldn’t harm them, that they were safe in their life-giving vases. I stared at the nearest rose, the first rose he had given me. Her name was Nicole, I knew that, but she knew more about me than just my name. I reached out a finger to gently caress her petals, wondering what she had seen me do throughout her time on my bedside table.

I lifted her vase gently, slipping my fingers around its delicate neck as I slowly shuffled myself out of bed.

“Zoë?” I heard him call vaguely in the background.

I brought the rose close to my nose, inhaling deeply, letting its intoxicating scent worm its way deep into my lungs. Her gentle feelings and thoughts making its way into my blood, mingling with my own soul.

“Zoë?” He called again, his voice raised with urgency.

Ignoring his calls, I planted a final kiss on the vase and let it drop. It shattered crisply on the hard floor, the shards nicking at the skin of my ankle. I looked down with a comforting smile as I felt the syrupy blood, Nicole’s blood, pool around my feet.

By now, he had stopped calling. The sickening sound of my door splintering didn’t mean anything to me as I swept all the vases off my bedside table, breaking them on the floor, smashing the vases below them. My hands were cold with exhilaration as I systematically broke the vases in the room, filling the air with the delicate crashing of breaking porcelain, letting the blood that had been kept inside the vases flow free.

“Zoë!”  He burst into my room, his fists clenching and unclenching uncontrollably as he saw the vases shattered in pieces, a large pool of blood and shards forming in the middle of the room. “What... what are you doing?!”

“Don’t you see?” I looked up at him from my seat in the middle of the pool of blood, puzzled with his anger. “I’m setting them free.” He clearly still didn’t understand, because the next thing he did was to place his hands around my neck, and squeezed.

That night, he poured me into a white, porcelain vase and placed a single, red rose in with me.

As the sun rose the next morning, he knocked on her door gently before letting himself in. Broom in hand, she gave a delighted smile when she saw him place the porcelain vase on her bedside table.

“So, what should we name this rose?” she asked as her fingers touched my vase admiringly.

“Zoë,” he said, “let’s call this one Zoë.”