5- Dangerous flowers
They pass slowly, with moments of waiting and no answers, so Sherek aims his shotgun and quickly jumps to where the old man is. As he lands, he makes the floorboards sound so loud that the old man jumps out of his chair, and with him, two shots from his shotgun escape into the air. He screams in fear as if trying to scare something away. Sherek's face shows some amusement, but he avoids it as he explains, "I heard your snoring and came to see."
"Oh… it wasn't snoring, I was smelling, hmm… that flower!" the evasive old man responds, pointing to a white flower that neither of them had noticed. When they realize it could be one of the magical flowers, the old man quickly shoots it, destroying it and shouting, "This garbage wasn't here before I fell asleep. Are you sure you looked on the other side the whole time?" the confrontational old man comments.
Sherek responds firmly, "Yes, that's why I came to check while you were sleeping."
"Let go of my shotgun now," the threatening old man says as he aims it at Sherek.
"Now walk, let's go to where you were supposed to be watching, and make sure, kid if I see another white flower, I'll shoot you," he warns.
"Go ahead, let's go, I have no problem. I don't fall asleep while on watch, that's why I know there is no flower on that side," Sherek says confidently.
As they turn around, they confirm it. The old man relaxes a bit and stops aiming at Sherek. Amidst screams, gunshots, and threats, the old woman wakes up sleepily and asks with her eyes half open, "Did you kill it? Did you catch it? What happened?"
After a couple of minutes of explanation, the old woman begins to walk back, scolding them for their inefficiency. But on the way back, she trips over a chair that had fallen on the floor after the old man's scare. With her eyes half open, she didn't notice it and hit her ankle on one of the chair's legs. She falls from the platform of her house just a few centimeters away from touching a landmine. Sherek and the old man breathe a sigh of relief with delayed warning cries when she falls, but Sherek notices that the old woman is staring at something, very worried. He realizes that where the old woman is looking, the house keys are falling into one of the mines where she almost fell. It inevitably explodes, causing a strong circular explosion that expands around the entire house and garden, detonating all the mines that had been placed. The old man and Sherek receive burns from the small shockwave. The patio is in flames, and in front of them, there is a puddle of blood with pieces of burnt earth. It all becomes a terrifying scene. Sherek remembers his dream, which was similar, except that before there was green grass, now there was dry and infertile soil. An arm falls into view thirty meters away, and the old man screams in despair, very loudly, "Damn it! Fucking flower!"
The immense rage of the old man after the tragedy makes him unload ammunition from his shotgun, firing four shots at the white flower they had found. The pauses for reloading are shouts of uncontrollable anger and pain. His elderly wife with whom he had promised to die together had died. He reloads the last round slowly and sadly says to Sherek, "Take care, kid, and please stay away from these damn things."
Having said that, Sherek watches as the shotgun moves, and he can't help but hear a gunshot. The images flutter in front of him like in a dream, and the shotgun bounces on the ground, the lifeless body of the man falls onto the destroyed plant, and a white petal that had been lingering in the air slowly lands on his torso.