Sam is alone on the yellow bus. He’s going on a field trip, to the sunflower maze. It’s dark outside but the bus keeps him warm. He rests his feet on the wheel hub, hugging his knees, and it rumbles deep in its throat, soothingly. The little windows that you’re not supposed to open groan and chatter in the cold, but the bus keeps Sam warm. He rocks back and forth. The bus heaves and caves, deep in its mechanical lungs. A low breathy sound comes from inside it and exhaust fumes emerge from its depths. Up and down, Sam is lulled to sleep.  

Sam wakes up to the hissing of hydraulic doors. He gets up and the leathery seat croaks him goodbye.  On the way out, he thanks the empty driver’s seat and it tips its hat to him. Sam steps outside and slings his work bag over his shoulder. He pauses to take in the scenery. The sunflower maze is huge and wide and reaches to the smoky-green horizon in all directions. The sunflowers are twice as thin and tall as Sam is. They wriggle and writhe in the absence of sunlight. The bus door hisses closed and it drives itself away.  

Sam, filled with wonder, takes a step closer. The sunflowers’ discomforted dance stops in unison. Together, they turn to see him more clearly. They bend to peer at him, slithering across one another. They stretch and coil and crawl towards him, like long fingers grasping for a golden apple high in a sacred tree. Sam puts his finger in the air and the flowers stand at attention. He waves it from side to side and they follow it carefully. Sam laughs and takes another step. The sunflowers part, inviting him into the maze.  

Sam walks through the doorway they carved so kindly for him, looking up at the yellow flowers’ expectant brown faces. They close behind him and he notices he’s not holding his work bag. He turns back to grab it but the flowers nudge him so that he faces forwards. He lets it go and continues, dead leaves rustling under his feet.  

The flowers twist playfully above his head. They bend down to greet him, waving their petals dynamically. One brushes his face and stands up straight, shivering with emotion. Its petals seem to glow brighter against the dusky green sky. More and more arch to kiss his cheeks, his nose, his hands. Sam walks faster as the flowers that touched him stretch orgiastically skyward. They lurk behind him reverently. They grow bolder. Tens, dozens, packs of plants trample over one another to touch Sam. Sam puts his head down. Two flowers wrestle to claim him. The larger twists its stem around the smaller and pulls.  

Sam stops in his tracks. The runt flower writhes in agony. It spins and scrapes its leaves against its lanky body, rustling for mercy, and with a pop, its head comes off. A dark red liquid pours from the hole in its neck. Sam doesn’t recognize it, but it scares him. The larger triumphantly presses its mottled, seeded face against his lips. It stands up and spins with glee, shrieking like a cicada as it gyrates ecstatically, and then with a violent tearing its head twists off, and dark red blood sprays into the sky.  

With a flash of horror it comes to Sam. The red meant blood, the thing that came out of him when he fell or cut himself, the fluid that meant pain. The flowers here were just like him, and they were his friends, and they killed one another to be near him, and then bled out gently into the solid earth, so was that just like him too? Would his head have to come off in the end, and the flowers swarm around him to study him and feed on him, kiss his wounds and lather him with twisted affection?  

Sam runs, parting the sea of flailing stems with his hands, trampling, crushing their throats. They close in around him and he lashes out, feeling their stems split. Warm wet blood pours in on him like honey, bitter viscous nectar, while a rough stem wraps itself around his neck, chest, arms, and lifts him into the air. Sam fights to gain purchase as he rises, working a finger between his skin and the stem, and pulls, desperately, while the flower grinds its seed-pocked core back and forth across his cheek, and slowly, it tears away and comes undone, releasing Sam into a fast tumble towards cold earth. 

Sam collides with the side of a hill. He tumbles down the sheer slope until his leg slams into a rock and all his momentum stops at once, and his leg splits down the middle and opens up like an egg. Sam is left staring, immobile, at an incredible field of flowers down below that expands to the edge of his vision, maze after maze, realized in interlocking circles that stretch as far as the fog will allow. Sam twists back and forth, but as the life leaks from his leg, he musters less and less motion from his inert body.  

There is nothing, he realizes, in his memory from before he boarded the bus. Sam’s life fails to flash before his eyes. The adrenaline gives way to scathing static bluntness all down his ruptured leg, but he fails to wake up. Sam loses consciousness, but the light fails to appear at the end of the tunnel. 

 A blur of curious yellow-orange crests the hill.