A short story by Jim Skinner
Underground.
“Action stations! Action stations! All authorized bulbs and corms to go to the assembly areas immediately to prepare for spring display.”
“Is he having a laugh?” snorted a voice from the middle of a large group of corms. “It’s bloody freezing out there. We will never get our flowers to show their faces and anyway who died and made him the boss?”
The crowd eased a little to let a large corm carrying a purple crocus through. “Alright, calm down, let’s get this show in the garden, eh?” The loud corm containing a yellow crocus muscled his way forwards to bring him in front of the purple corm.
“I’ve just spoken to a couple of daffodils, mate and the thaw is arriving any minute” said the large, bossy purple corm.
“Daffs? Are you mad? Daffs are famous for being trigger happy. First sign of the sun and they are up and blooming,” commented the loud corm.
“The only thing blooming out there is the blooming snow, it’s everywhere,” moaned a larger group of yellow corms who were watching the daffodils shivering in the cold, continually opening and closing their yellow petals.
Another corm, this time carrying a white crocus, said “After all, we are not lemmings, crocuses are Spring’s harbinger, are we not?”.
“Croci, not ‘crocuses’,” said the purple corm. “ You what?” said the yellow corm.
“Croci is the word for more than one crocus,” the purple corm explained.
This was the final straw for the corms, even the ones housing purple flowers, the one thing all crocus corm can’t abide is being patronized about the unsolvable question of what word you should use for more than one crocus.
They all gathered together and declared that they will wait until the carrot falls from the snowperson’s nose – the official start of Spring according to corm lore.
Crocus – textiles by Julie Digby