“It sounded like a good idea at the time.”

The standard excuse given for all fuckups, from the smallest “Whoops” type moment all the way up to the big granddaddy “Oh shit” ones. I’m sure when somebody finally knocks over the wrong vial in the wrong lab at the wrong time and unleashes whatever superbug finally kills us all, that will be what the lab tech who put it in that precarious spot will say as some hemorrhagic fever turns his large intestine to jelly. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I worked in a lab, yes. With my best friend, Danny. It was a very small company that operated on the cheap, sinking everything we brought in, venture capital-wise, into R&D.

We had only told everyone, my girlfriend and Danny’s wife included, that we were working on engineering a new kind of rose.

What we didn’t tell them is that we were trying to grow a new kind…that could talk.

Imagine being able to walk into a florist and buy a rose that could be kind of like your little organic audio calling card. You leave it on someone’s doorstep and it says “I love you” as it’s picked up. Or a dozen roses that could sing, as a choir, your honey’s favorite tune.

We thought of the idea originally as a joke, but Danny had this knack for making the ridiculous feasible, so when he showed me how he thought we could pull it off, I went in with him.

So after five years of roughing it out in a small lab space and getting so sick to goddamn death of looking at roses of any color, we were ready to run another trial.

Our latest prototype had reached maturity. We started audio and video going to capture the moment…if it happened. To be honest, we had run through so many trials at that point, the newness had worn off. We did
this because it was all part of the routine.

Danny leaned down and said to the rose, “I love you. Can you say ‘I love you’?”

The simplest way to explain how the rose was supposed to work is that it could be trained to say certain stock phrases…almost like a parrot. You could get it to say anything you wanted, in theory, given enough time and patience.

“Can you say ‘I love you’?”

The rose made a tiny hissing sound. Nothing special. Once we had had one cough. So big deal. “I’M SORRY” it finally struggled to say.

Danny looked at me, thunderstruck. “Steve! Steve, holy shit, did you hear that?”

I peered through the viewfinder for the camera, making sure we were getting all of this. “Yeah,” I said. I was less awed by Danny. I remember that the voice had sounded so faint, so fragile, and so genuinely sorrowful. It felt remorse and that oozed out in its unnatural, tiny voice.

Danny was jotting down notes on a clipboard. “What could you have to be sorry about?” I think he was talking to himself, really.

“I’M SORRY,” the rose answered anyway, sounding as though saying this was the last thing it would have wished, “THAT STEVE SLEPT WITH YOUR WIFE WHILE YOU WERE IN HOUSTON THAT TIME.”

Danny looked at me, then to the rose, then back. “What the hell? Is this some kind of a joke? Did you do this?”

I think then he got a good look at my face. I think the color I had turned, despite my efforts to keep a straight face, was ashen gray. He seemed to grasp fairly quickly that this was not a joke. If I could have opened my mouth to laugh it off or something, anything, we might have been able to salvage it.

But the rose spoke first. “I’M SORRY,” was all it said.

“Oh God, it’s true, isn’t it?” And again when I didn’t answer immediately, louder, “Isn’t it?”

It was, of course. Wendy and I knew each other before I ever met Danny. We had had one of those things that never came to fruition. You know, the timing’s always bad or whatever. Then Danny had come in at just the right time and swept her off her feet. It was a one time deal while Danny had been out of town, and we’d never revisited that night. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but I think quite frankly we were both glad to get it out of our systems.

“Aw, God,” Danny said, clapping a hand to his forehead. “You did. You did. While I was off getting us VC for this. Oh Jesus, with Wendy.”

Yes, I did. And had never told anyone. And neither, to my knowledge, had Wendy.

“I’M SORRY, DANIEL,” the rose said miserably.

“Shut the fuck up!” He roared at it. Then he turned back to me and eyed the video camera. “Turn that shit off!” Then he sat down in a chair and covered his face in his hands, moaning on and on about me and Wendy. In doing so, though, he drowned out the rose, which had not, in fact, shut the fuck up. In fact, I had the suspicion that the reason it sounded so mournful was because it simply couldn’t shut up.

“Shut up for a second,” I told Danny.

“You go–”

I crouched down by the rose and barked at him, “I said shut up!” Then to the rose I said, “Did you say you were sorry for something? Something for me? What did you say?”

“I’M SORRY JEAN DIDN’T WANT YOU TO BECOME A FATHER,” the rose said simply.

“What are you–?” I started, then stopped. Jean and I, at that point, had been dating for almost four years. “She didn’t–”

With that, Danny kicked over the vase the rose was in and crushed it under his foot. Then he found his way back to his chair and sat down hard.

I sat down as well, on one of the nearby desks. Neither of us spoke for some time, and whenwe finally did, I honestly don’t remember what we said to each other.

It hardly matters. Last I heard from Danny, he and Wendy had weathered out their problems. I wasted no time in taking care of mine. I don’t know what happened to Jean. Don’t care to know.

Danny and I stopped our research together at that point. I haven’t tried to recreate what we had done, and I’m fairly certain he hasn’t either. There’s nothing stopping me but the fear we’ll hear more apologies. Or something even worse. Like the little noise it made as Danny killed it. It sounded almost like gratitude. Because it couldn’t stop on its own.

I try not to think about it when I go to sleep at night. But I think about it every time I start to feel lonely. And it helps the feeling to eventually pass.