What's the purpose? one of the guards said, arms crossed.

But the man didn't answer. All he wanted was his cabbage back, currently going through the metal detector, several times, back and forth, before they had to hand it over.

Some days later, when a woman went to bed, it turned out that she had broccoli in her panties. Suddenly she felt so unsure. What was she expected to do with it? A vegetable in the dark is not an easy thing to manage.

And not so far away, in a research lab, a researcher pulled off the electrodes on the florets of a cauliflower.

Any type of contact is difficult to prove, he wrote, even if some nervousness and peculiar behavior can be noted.

Then he removed his headphones and went back home.

In the evening, the darkness was strangely swollen, deformed and thickened.

Not again, he thought, looking at his arms and legs.

At home, yet another family member in the family photo had disappeared into the clouds.

We must put it to sleep, one of the doctors stated. A quiet man of the very type who always had his stethoscope comfortably coiled like a slippery tropical snake around his neck.

There is not much life left, not even a little white chirping bird sound, not a single thin butterfly wing, she said.

So very true, so very true. The thin dry branches creaked, and creaked faintly. And the garden furniture had already lost its color.

Is there nothing you can do? the woman said.

But the doctors were already over it with oxygen tubes, trying to help folding some of the chairs and flower petals and talking about shape cutting, planting surfaces, emergent lung incisions.

At the same time, a man was saying goodbye to a dry old linden tree. He wiped the tears from his cheeks quickly before being wheeled into Ward Three. There wasn't much to it, a little nail here and there, and then all these half-darkened boards. But the heart, strapped somewhere between the third and fourth floor, was still beating inside the rickety hut, at least he hoped.