Shades of Purple

The safe room was tiled in steel printing plates heavy enough to deflect small arms fire, comprising an assemblage of foliate etchings bursting with vibrant Rococo details cut in a monochrome gray that made the blooms appear somehow lifeless and wilting. A contemporary biologist would find little recognizable in those haphazardly arranged petals and sepals, much less the asymmetrically bewinged beetles bustling before them. It was as if those ill-begotten botanicals and their pollinators had been conceived for a medieval bestiary based on secondhand descriptions of some dark continent.

I knew all this, and more, because I had traced each and every incised line uncounted times over the course of some interminable confinement. I had no conscious recollection of this ordeal but I could feel the phantom touch of those familiar grooves lingering on my fingertips, and I knew by heart the full spectrum of shapes they formed. I gradually came to recognize that cold garden for the means to some forsaken end, a pale shadow of its maker's ultimate intention, and realized that I had to leave the comforts of my cavern somehow, someway...