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FLOWERY PROSE
The Posthumous Memoirs of Ernest Hemingway’s Gardener
Very Short Fiction
Ernest Hemingway hated flowers. He also hated gardens. He’d come out in the mornings and tell me why he particularly hated certain flowers, like mums or azaleas. He said that he liked fish a lot better, and often asked me if we couldn’t somehow develop a kind of trout flower, so that he could fish in his garden.
He didn’t mind tomatoes, though. “Tomatoes are like women,” he’d say. “They’re useful until they’ve been around too long. Then they get squishy and demanding and you have to get rid of them and pay them alimony.”
Hemingway would have his friends over to drink and talk about literature and bullfights and other manly things and they would get drunk and stumble out in the garden and vomit into the roses or lie down and pass out in the petunias. I found Dos Passos in a bed of daffodils once. The morning after one particularly boisterous party I arrived at work in find America’s greatest writers and poets in all of the flower beds, curled up and snoring gently.
That’s when I quit and went to work for Gertrude Stein. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” she used to say to me, and I agreed with her completely.
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