Flowers

On high stalks, scaly and stained black like snakeskins, were enormous spars, kind of funnel-shaped cornets with the dark violet of putrefaction inside, and the greenish yellow of decomposition outside, like the open thoraxes of dead animals. Long, blood-red spadices, imitating monstrous falluses, came forth from these cornets. Attracted by the corpse-like odor that these horrible plants exhaled, flies hovered in concentrated swarms, swallowed up at the bottom of the spar, which was adorned from top to bottom with silky contractile that enlaced the flies and held them prisoner more effectively than any spider's web. Along the stem, the digitalized leaves were clenched and twisted like the hands of men under torture.


The Torture Garden, Octave Mirabeau
Green Caviar, Marilyn Minter