A Dozen Gross
Posted on 26 Apr 2021 @ 7:55pm by Holly Palin -Living Arrangements Florist
Mission:
M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Promenade, "Living Arrangements"
Timeline: MD03 0530
1279 words - 2.6 OF Standard Post Measure
Holly approached her shop on the promenade very early in the morning. She was typically an early riser and today was no different, even though she was yawning profusely. She'd been up too late, upset over a misunderstanding with her fiance. It had taken much longer than usual to get to sleep and she'd woken up just as perturbed by the entire thing. With any luck she could put it out of her mind for a few hours, at least enough to handle her customers with her usual genuine verve.
She looked up at the sign when she came to her shop. Her very own shop. She had a little swell of pride at the empowering sense of steering her own ship now. "Living Arrangements" she'd called it, in a cute little stroke of genius. She'd painted the sign herself and was reasonably pleased at how the script had turned out. She'd had some practice with signage in her job working for another florist when she was a teen, only a few years ago. Mostly she'd worked in a kind of washable paint on black backgrounds for holiday announcements and to list out the available florals and bouquet pricing. This time she'd used a little computer assistance, having borrowed a projection device to take her smaller calligraphy and expand it against her signboard, so she could paint it in with a broad brush, aiming to match the paced energy of her original strokes. Holly deemed it as more or less successful and nodded at the sign again now with approval as she disengaged the security fielding with her keyed entry. Behind the field was an old fashioned lifting gate, which she intended to etch flourished designs on to. As of yet, it was just a translucent milky corrugation. She lifted the handle and the assisting motor within took over from there, amplifying her effort and tucking away the panel. The notes of happy daisies, sweet lilies, and romantic roses rushed out at her and Holly opened her chest and arms and tilted back her head to receive the whiff entirely, holding in that first breath as she did each day since first opening for business.
Early mornings were generally very slow, so she didn't rush. First there would be the business to tend, so after rolling out display carts in their charmingly old fashioned looking barrows and stands and checking everything was still moist and nothing fading, she passed through the customer front where the cool cases of rows and rows of flowers allowed people to point out their choices for special arrangements. A cutting and arrangement counter stood ready and freshly cleaned the night before. Beyond that, through and archway to the right, past a blank little space she wanted to install some water feature with some koi in when she had the money, there was the lovely jungle-like area, somewhat larger than the floral business. Here she housed samples of house plants for purchase or to be ordered for homes and offices under contracts for care, maintenance and replacement. She only had two such contracts, so far, but she still believed it would be the key to going from barely solvent to lucrative as a model for her future franchise plans. In the very back was a break room and an office, and a door to a storage and loading bay that ran along the delivery alley of all the fronts. It was a strange space which customers seemed completely oblivious to, those docking and maintenance rows. They were integral to most businesses with stock to manage or kitchens to keep. The station moved larger units via utility lifts from the docking bays to make the deliveries without unduly clogging the walking paths, and took away larger waste that couldn't be handled by the smaller de-replication units. Old store furnishings and construction materials, for instance. it was a much dimmer lit causeway, with zero frills and no design to it at all, practically abandoned and depressing, really, as though it were a sad mirror of the bright promenade walk on the opposite end of the shop. She took a moment to stand on her loading dock and look down the long row of her neighbors’ docks, waving at a stranger who was doing likewise. She didn't know him, but she felt the camaraderie of entrepreneurship between them any way.
The feeling brightened her outlook for the day and she returned to the break-room where she had a replicator and ordered up a breakfast sandwich. She looked at it a little before she bit into it, thinking. She paid for the energy use credits a utilities fee, likely, she could spend the same amount and have one freshly made by one of the other businesses. Maybe tomorrow she would see who was open early enough to make her egg sandwich. Well. This one was here now. She bit into it and switched on the light in the store room, looking at a stasis case full of sunflowers. She’d ordered them on a rush demand the first day she’d opened. A very impatient officer in gold had insisted on having them and the best she could do at the time was a three days wait. When she told him the rush delivery fee in the thousands since she’d have to ask for them to be shuttled specifically, she thought he’d balk and turn away, but he hadn’t flinched at the bill a bit and paid in advance. She had to order the entire bulk case. Luckily she’d already had snapdragons around and hadn’t needed to make any special arrangement for those. She’d messaged about the sunflowers’ arrival and he was there that evening to collect them. Holly had put together the arrangement and he specifically requested she go back to the delivery stasis case and find one with a broken spiral. Although customers often had unusual demands for their arrangements, that one did stand out to her. Probably it was some intimate detail, although she found it difficult to picture him intimate with anyone. He was somewhat short tempered and, she thought, belittling, but he also seemed to Holly a little bit pitiable, and maybe sad. Ultimately, she maintained her professional cheer by entertaining the thought that whoever these costly flowers were intended for must matter a great deal to this difficult man. He waited in the shop for quite some time, maybe a half an hour, while she’d managed to find an imperfect flower in the lot and he put it into the vase himself. It was a sizable vase, as it held so many sunflowers and snapdragons, and she advised against carrying it on his own. He paid for delivery to an infirmary on a ship and Holly arranged for it to be transported over immediately. His cloud never lifted, and he didn’t seem pleased exactly, just satisfied enough and had left after paying the arrangement and delivery fees.
Now she was left with the remainder of a dozen gross of sunflowers taking up her stasis chamber.
Holly shook her bald blue head. She bet that guy that bought the sunflowers at least didn’t stand his lover up when they hadn’t seen each other in months. He probably didn’t just forget things like that. Not like Eric had last night. Bitterly, she took another bite of egg sandwich and went to her office to balance yesterday’s books. Someday, she promised herself, she’d be employing help for all these different operations and tasks. She just had to get off the ground with it.