My Name Is Love

The Man Who Loved Flowers, innate evil, and flash fiction

Good morning!

If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Currently we are finishing up King’s first short story collection, Nightshift. In today’s post we cover “The Man Who Loved Flowers.” If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “One For the Road.”

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This piece is only 2,264 words

It isn’t King’s shortest piece. There are nine others that are shorter, listed here in descending order.

• 2114 - Cain Rose Up

• 2108 - The Bone Church

• 1652 - Morning Deliveries

• 1506 - Here there be Tygers

• 1309 - The Beggar and the Diamond

• 855 - Tommy

• 603 - Paranoid: A Chant

• 308 - Brooklyn August

• 250 - For Owen

Still, it is surprisingly short from the same man who penned The Stand and It, both clocking in epic fantasy (nearly biblical) word counts (467,812 and 441,156 respectively).

There’s a lot of push for flash fiction. After all, we live in an age where attention is a commodity, and it’s hard to demand that our readers devote any at all to our writing. Flash fiction and short stories have always been around. Hemingway famously (though it was perhaps erroneously attributed to him) wrote his own short story.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

The idea is how much we can give a reader in so few words. Here, there’s a gut punch with a single sentence. It’s an example of what is possible in such a short structure.

King is, in my opinion, a master on this front. Many say his short stories are much stronger than his novels, where the lack of constraint on length lends itself to a wandering feeling at times. The stories we’ve been reading in Nightshift are decidedly punchier, the endings much more satisfying and tightly woven into the plot. And this story, “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” the shortest in this collection, delivered on its promise.

In such a short time, an evening walk through New York City in 1963, we are escorted, first into the lovely trappings of infatuated love as a young man shops for a gift for his love, Norma. The people at the shops and on doorsteps can’t help but notice the look in his eye and the easy way he walks as if on clouds. He is a young man in love.

But infatuation, like most human emotions, wears many faces. A man in love with a woman who loves him, or knows him, can be a beautiful thing. A man in love with a woman who scorns him, or worse, fears him, is a different thing altogether. Passion can drive people mad, just as the young man in the story knows. His name is love after all, and Norma is the object of his desire.

New York City, 1963

A warm breeze at dusk, the streets filled with smiling people, a rarity in that city, in that time. A radio breathes news of the endless calamities, locally and around the world.

The radio poured out bad news that no one listened to: a hammer murderer was still on the loose; JFK had declared that the situation in a little Asian country called Vietnam (“Vitenum” the guy reading the news call it) would bear watching; an unidentified woman had been pulled from the East River; a grand jury had failed to indict a crime overlord in the current city administration’s war on heroin; the Russians had exploded a nuclear device. None of it seemed real, none of it to matter.

A young man walks briskly, hand in his pocket, as dusk descends. An older woman notices him, remarking on how beautiful he looks because he is a man in love. She would know that face anywhere. An old man working selling flowers can’t help but smile when he sees him, knowing that he’s got a girl on his mind.

“My young friend,” the flower vendor said, as the man in the gray suit came back, running his eyes over the stock in the handcart. The vendor was maybe sixty-eight, wearing a torn gray knitted sweater and a soft cap in spite of the warmth of the evening. His face was a map of wrinkles, his eyes were deep in pouches, and a cigarette jittered between his fingers. But he also remembered how it was to be young in the spring…The vendor’s face was normally sour, but now he smiled a little…

The young man asks how much his flowers are, and they go back and forth, exploring bouquets and combinations, until the vendor has convinced the man to spend more for his love. After all, these aren’t for his mother, right? A young woman loves to be doted on. The man imagines Norma’s face, how happy she’ll be when he gives her the surprise flowers, and he splurges on the tea roses.

The street is a beautiful sight on that romantic evening

“Tonight’s weather looks just the way you’d want it,” the radio said. “Fair and mild, temps in the mid to upper sixties, perfect for a little rooftop stargazing, if you’re the romantic type. Enjoy, Greater New York, enjoy!”

Women sit on porches and push prams. Men stand and talk. Teen girls giggle and a traffic cop notices the dreamy look in his eyes as he passes and turns onto Seventy-third Street.

This street is darker and lined with Italian restaurants. He turns down a narrow lane, and now the night has come. Each trashcan on the street is a shadowy figure, obscured by the darkness. The young man looks at his watch, it’s nearly eight, right when Norma should be coming.

And just there he sees her walking from a courtyard. His heart aches seeing her.

It was always a surprise seeing her for the first time, it was always a sweet shock—she looked so young.

Now his smile shone out—radiated out, and he walked faster.

“Norma!” he said.

She looked up and smiled…but as they drew together, the smile faded.

His own smile trembled a little, and he felt a moment’s disquiet. Her face over the sailor blouse suddenly seemed blurred. It was getting dark now…could he have been mistaken? Surely not. It was Norma.

This is where the story starts to get strange

All along we’ve been led to believe that we are observing a young man in love, on his way to deliver a surprise gift for his sweetheart. Here, we find that he doesn’t quite recognize her, and she doesn’t smile when she sees him.

He hands the flowers to her, and she smiles and hands them back.

“Thank you, but you’re mistaken,” she said. “My name is—”

“Norma,” he whispered, and pulled the short-handled hammer out of his coat pocket where it had been all along.

WHOA!

That seemingly inane detail from the beginning of the story, the radio broadcast that no one seems to be listening to in that warm, spring-ish air on a beautiful evening made for young lovers, comes rushing back. This isn’t Norma, nor were the five other girls who fell to the young man’s hammer.

His Norma has been dead ten years. From what, we don’t know. The flowers spill on the ground, and the woman’s screams are put out before she ever has a chance. When he’s done, he slips the hammer back into his coat pocket, knowing the darkness around him will hide it along with any bloodstains on his suit.

He passes a stickball game and makes his way back up the street.

A middle-aged married couple sitting on the steps of their building watched him go by, head cocked, eyes far away, a half-smile on his lips. When he had passed by the woman said, “How come you never look that way anymore?”

In dark places

King has a way of writing around a character, showing us outside perspectives from extras in the movie that help build suspense and surprise. Without the omniscience of the third person narrator, we’re caught off guard by this protagonist turned antagonist. We see him as the people around him see him, a man in love.

It’s not that different from the reports you hear on the news from neighbors and co-workers who reflect on a grisly crime with the observation, “He was the nicest guy.” The truth is that most people who commit violent crimes have serious red flags if you dig into the accounts of their inner circle, but they may also have a charming exterior that shields them from suspicion from outsiders.

What I find interesting in this story is the time when it was written. Ted Bundy, perhaps America’s first famous sweetheart serial killer, killers who displayed more of the charming and manipulative traits of personality disorders, was first caught in 1975. This story was written in 1977 for Gallery, an adult sex magazine, and a year before Bundy was placed on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list.

He was popularized into something of a celebrity after he escaped from a Colorado jail in 1977, the same year when “The Man Who Loved Flowers” was first published. Bundy was often seen as an intelligent and charming individual by acquaintances, successfully manipulating young women to get in his van or follow him there through faked injuries and a winning smile.

While reports of survivors of some serial killers say things like, the hair on the back of their neck stood up, Bundy seemed to have evoked the opposite. Women were attracted to him, flocking to his court dates and saying things like, “He just doesn’t seem like the type.”

Stephen King believes that evil comes from within, rather than something influenced by external factors.

The author uses the example of serial killer and rapist Ted Bundy, who, he says, is “hard-wired”.

“I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, ‘Oh, that’s because Mommy put a clothespin on his dick when he was four,’” King told Rolling Stone. “Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there’s some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we’re able to address that issue, sooner or later, we’ll f**king kill ourselves.”

—From The Independent, Oct. 2014, by Ella Alexander

Regardless of whether or not Stephen King was writing directly about Bundy here, the story reveals something about his fascination and fear of evil, the reason he has given for why he writes horror to begin with.

It’s why we see the compelling combination of the natural and supernatural horrors in his work, which often play together and make us ask the question, which one was it? Is it The Overlook Hotel that drives Jack Torrance mad? He broke Danny Torrance’s arm before he ever came there. Was it Pennywise who caused Bev’s dad to abuse her? We know he had a heavy hand long before the cycle ever started again.

The countless bullies and villains are emboldened by the supernatural evils in King’s stories, but if we examine them, King’s philosophy on evil builds his worlds and universe. Evil permeates the towns and people because they were already bad. The supernatural entities and powers embolden them to be what they always were all along.

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What a wild ride.

This story truly felt like a punch. I was totally thrown off by the sudden direction it took, and only on reading it again could I see all the red flags there all along. The young man was not in love. He is insane, those dreamy eyes carrying him on a murder spree as he searches for his dead lover, Norma.

It reminded me of the scene in Joker, when Arthur’s neighbor, Sophie, whom we believe has been in a relationship with him for months, finds him in her apartment.

What did you all think?