The Hanahaki Club: Episode 0

Episode 0: Petals

Summary:

Hassie, Remi, Emery, Merryn and Taran have one thing in common—they’re all reluctant members of an unpopular club: The Hanahaki Club—a weekly support group for losers in love. Each member has the same rare genetic flaw that means their unrequited love is killing them—literally, slowly and beautifully—as hanahaki flowers fill up their lungs.

With all five of them under the age of twenty-one, they’re much too young to die over something so common and embarrassing; so, somehow, together, they must figure out how to go from losers in love to survivors.

The options are simple, really. Find love. Fight it. Forget it. Or fail… and fall to it.

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Episode 0: Petals

“Right, Hassie, in a moment I’m going to ask you to count backwards from ten, okay?”

Hassie nodded, curling her fingers into the starched, white sheets, her heart pounding behind her ribcage and anxiety fluttering in her throat.

Wait, she wanted to say. I’m not ready.

Anxiously, she watched the doctors flit around her, barely able to concentrate on the final checks they were making.

Do I really want this?

No. This wasn’t about what she wanted. This was necessary. The consultant had told her, if she didn’t have this operation now, it would only get worse. The tickle in her chest, the petals on her tongue, the roots twining deeper and tighter in her lungs. This was the only way to save her. But she was scared. When she woke up, things would be different. The feelings would be gone. Her memories would be gone. There would be blank spaces where the pain and the ache and the longing had once lived. The flowers would be gone, but so would the object of her affection. She wouldn’t just be losing feelings—a whole person would be erased from her life.

“Okay, Hassie. We’re going to go ahead now. Start counting for me. Backwards from ten.”

Hassie nodded again, fingers gripping hard into the white sheets, the beeping of the machines unnaturally loud in her ears and everything white, too white—white like fresh snow, like empty memories, like soft, velvet petals.

Like the first petal she’d coughed up, nearly three months ago.

It had been white—white velvet that drifted like a snowflake from between her lips and onto the palm of her hand. She had woken up suddenly with a gentle tickle in the top of her chest, persistent enough to make her sit up, with her legs over the edge of the bed, and lurch forward with a single, hard cough. When that hadn’t stopped the fluttering under her breastbone, she had reached groggily for the glass of water on her bedside table and taken a couple of sips. For a second, the tickling sensation seemed to ease; but then something shifted in the left side of her chest and she had hastily put down the glass of water before coughing harder for a second time. Immediately, something soft was in her mouth, fluttering briefly on her tongue before she huffed it out onto her waiting palm.

Had she swallowed something in her sleep? A piece of tissue? A bit of paper? Or—gross—a moth?

Blinking hard a few times, Hassie had finally focused her sleep-clouded eyes enough to realise that the soft, velvety thing she had coughed up was a petal: small, fresh and fragile on her warm skin. Not tissue. Not a moth—thank goodness. Just a single, small flower petal.

But still… where the heck had it come from?

Hassie had stupidly swept her gaze around her bedroom, as if she might find a vase of white blooms lurking slyly in a corner, but there was nothing. The window was still closed, so the petal hadn’t drifted in during the night.

Maybe it had happened before she’d gone to bed? Perhaps she’d somehow swallowed it during dinner? Had her father been experimenting with weird ingredients again?

Very gently, as if she had half expected it to melt at her touch, Hassie had pinched the petal between her finger and thumb and moved it from the palm of her right hand to the bedside table. There was probably a logical explanation, she’d reasoned. This was just one of those bizarre, one-off events that could be explained rationally but would forever remain a mystery. It didn’t really matter. No harm had been done and the fluttering in her chest had vanished; she could forget about the petal and focus on getting ready for school.

Switching off her alarm before it could begin its shrill warning, Hassie had eased herself out of bed, gathered her uniform from the wardrobe and stumbled to the bathroom. She didn’t think about the petal, sitting pale and damp on her bedside table, when she returned to her room to brush and braid her hair. She didn’t think about it as she consulted her timetable, packed her school bag and fussed over double-checking her homework. She didn’t even give it a second thought as she had sloped lazily downstairs to the kitchen and slumped into a seat at the breakfast table. Yawning into the back of her hand, she had reached for the cereal, pouring herself a bowl as she ran civil war dates through her head for the history test she had second period. Her mother had placed a steaming cup of tea on the table in front of her and Hassie had murmured a ‘good morning’ before splashing too much milk on her cereal and taking up a spoon.

And then she had coughed again.

This time, there had been no ticklish warning beforehand, just three petals, all white, puffing from her mouth and floating onto her cereal like wedding confetti.

Oh. That was definitely not right.

Looking up, she had found her mother standing on the other side of the table, one hand paused in reaching for the milk, her gaze fixed on the white petals resting on a golden hill of flakes in Hassie’s bowl. “Did you just..?” she’d begun, almost breathlessly. Then she’d raised her eyes to Hassie, slowly withdrawing her out-stretched hand. “Did you just cough those up?” she had asked more firmly.

Hassie had blinked down at the petals in her bowl and nodded twice. “Yes,” she’d said, doubting the answer even as it left her mouth.

Her mother’s eyes had widened and her lips had pressed into a thin line. Her gaze had flitted from Hassie to the petals for a few, tense seconds and then she’d turned towards the kitchen phone.

“I’m calling you in sick today.”

Hassie’s expression had slowly morphed from one of surprise to confusion as she watched her mother lift the receiver and run a finger down the list of numbers that was tacked onto the wall by the phone. “But I have a test today,” she’d said.

“We’re getting you an emergency appointment.”

“Appointment? For what?”

There had been a slight shake in her mother’s hand as she dialled the number for the school and a slight shake in her voice as she’d replied: “For the doctor.”

Her tone had stopped Hassie from protesting further.

From there on it had been x-rays and scans, the diagnosis from a consultant— hanahaki, rare, genetic, more likely to manifest in youth, unlucky—and then hospital check-ups, more petals, special inhalers, even more petals and worsening symptoms. And amongst it all, Hassie had juggled revision and final exams, leaver parties and ceremonies, hacking up plant matter in public toilets when she went out celebrating results with her friends, and fighting her feelings every day in the hope she could cure herself. But the confetti of petals had quickly bloomed into whole flowers, forced up her bruised throat in sticky clumps, thick and damp in her mouth, and ejected into a handkerchief, onto her pillow in the middle of the night or flushed down the nearest toilet. And the colour had gradually changed too: snow-white, to candyfloss pink, to the incarnadine flush of an angry sunrise.

So now, three months later, here she was, about to have the operation that would remove the flowers growing in her left lung, and, along with them, all the feelings that had triggered this disease in the first place.

And yet, still…

I don’t want this. I don’t want to forget. 

“Okay, Hassie. We’re going to go ahead now. Start counting for me. Backwards from ten.”

But this is necessary. There’s no other way. No other cure.

“Ten…”

If I don’t go ahead with this, there will be only one end for me. And what a stupid, pointless end that would be.

“Nine…”

Love. What a silly thing to die for.

Right?

“Eight…”

And yet…

“Wai—”

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Author’s Notes:

So, there we are. The first episode. It’s begun. No going back…

I’ll probably start off publishing each episode on a fortnightly basis. I’m back at work, so I don’t want to promise a weekly update and then discover I can’t stick to it because the fatigue has slowed me down again.

If all goes well, I’ll switch it to weekly, especially once the last post of The Dying Fall is published.

If you didn’t get to read my Welcome to the Hanahaki Club post, there’s a very brief explanation of my inspiration for the story below:

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Why The Hanahaki Club?

I’ve been a bit obsessed with hanahaki disease since I first came across the term (in some fandom corner of the internet, most likely). Two things that have caused me the most suffering in my life are unrequited crushes and hay-fever, so even though it’s a fictional disease I feel like hanahaki is something I can relate to.

Unrequited love, fortunately, is an infrequent misfortune in my life, but hay-fever is an annual disaster. I love flowers (I have a secret longing to become a florist) but they really do try to kill me each year and if I weren’t dosed up on prescription antihistamine all year round anyway, I would have to hermetically seal myself indoors from April to September.

I’m also half-convinced that if hanahaki were a real disease, I would develop it… or, to be more precise, I would already have had it at least once.

At least for hay-fever there is medication available to treat the symptoms. Not so much for unrequited love… if only there were a cure for such suffering.

How do you get over someone? How do you fall out of love? How do you manage your feelings so that they don’t rule or ruin your life?

I have no idea. So instead I wrote about five young people with hanahaki disease trying to figure this out together.

I hope you enjoy the journey of The Hanahaki Club.

If you do, don’t forget to let me know by hitting the like button or leaving a comment.

Next time: Episode 1—Losers in Love, Part 1

PJ

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