“Next up: Manifred Williams with his orange begonia! Look at those colors folks!”
Manifred Williams is a large man and his size grants him a cavernous belly button. A begonia grows from it, bushy and dangling downward, swaying as he walks to center stage in leather boots and unbuckled jeans. The effect is slightly vulgar but the crowd eats it up. The man has swagger. Unearned, in my opinion, but I am far out of my depth at the ‘The Festival of Stomach Flowers.’
‘It is as the name suggests, dear reader. ‘The Festival of Stomach Flowers’ is like a beauty pageant and a flower show fused into something that doesn’t resemble either. It is an annual gathering of people who have nurtured or neglected their bodies in such a way that their crevices have realized an uncommon fertility.
It’s said, among believers, that the flowers growing from the bodies of festival participants display special qualities- that they bloom in new colors and attract strange insects, that, crushed into a powder or brewed into a tree, they will treat chronic ailments and soothe apocalyptic hangovers. The legality of selling body flowers for consumption is questionable, but no agency has yet cracked down on ‘The Flesh Flower Market,’ a long-standing evening event that takes place after the festival and allows runners-up to recoup some of the cost of coaxing life from their hidden places.’
Melanie Elroth has encased her abdomen in a looping terrarium, sweating and growing moss. Scott Abner carries a parasol and grows a mushroom from his ear, cradles it like an old fashioned hearing horn. Two philosophies are on full display at ‘The Festival of Stomach Flowers.’ Half of the participants appear to be at peak health and the other half look like corpses, folded over. Sallow and sick.
I have to remind myself that these growths are the culmination of hard, careful work or extended languishing- that the chance of me… catching something like the thing that hangs from Manifred Williams’ midriff is slim. I have to remind myself often because the gathered crowd is made up of enthusiasts, mildewy and sprouting weeds.
After half an hour I realize that Hector has escaped his harness and I find him eating grass that curls from a man’s cracked callus. The man doesn’t notice, or doesn’t seem to, but when I fetch the wayward rabbit he turns to us and nods.
“Thanks for the trim,” he says.
We only skirt the edges of ‘The Flesh Flower Market,’ where attendees clip and moan and cross-pollinate. Hector throws up a little green pile in the kennel and sprouts a single dandelion from his nose a week later. It withers and falls away and that, thankfully, is the end of that.
-traveler
