The Purple Flower

By Jeff Eckenrode

It was unpleasantly sunny outside. And warm, too, for a late autumn afternoon, the kind of heat that made Old Pete's forehead shine like a middle-aged disco ball. While stocking a shelf with a new delivery, he paused for a moment and held up a jar like he'd just found a diamond in a parking lot.

"Look at this one," he said, his pride cutting through his usual folksy drawl, sweat beading at his hairline. "Purple! All the way through. This has gotta be the strong stuff!"

Berny glanced over from the register, one eyebrow already climbing. "The color doesn't really tell you that."

"It's purple, Berny. Green stuff is regular. Purple stuff is upgraded!"

"It's not upgraded," she said, patient as a kindergarten teacher after a fresh cup of hot coffee. She tilted her head the way she often did when she was about to explain something for what she suspected wouldn't be the last time.

"It's just a different pigment. Anthocyanins, they're called, same thing that makes blueberries blue and red cabbage purple. Cannabis makes them too, depending on the genetics, and they show up more when it's grown in cooler temperatures toward the end. The green fades, and the purple that was underneath the whole time gets to show through."

Pete turned the jar over slowly, unconvinced, the way a man is unconvinced by a magic trick he's already decided to believe in anyway. He held it up toward the window, squinting, then tilted it a different direction, as if the sunlight might reveal a hidden truth the first angle had missed.

"So it's not stronger?"

"Potency's a totally separate thing, Pete”.

"But it's purple!"

"Yes, Pete. I heard you the first time."

"But it's really purple."

“Oh Pete…” Berny said sweetly, the boundaries of her patience still deftly hidden from sight. "THC, terpenes, how it was grown, how it was cured," Berny continued, undeterred, wiping a strand of hair off her damp forehead. "None of that has much to do with what color it turned out to be. You could have a purple jar sitting right next to a green one with way more punch to it."

"That doesn't seem fair," Pete said, with the wounded sincerity of a man who'd built a small but proud worldview around this. He pressed the jar briefly to his cheek like it might be cooler than the air, discovered it wasn't, and set it back down. "Purple's supposed to mean something."

"It means it's purple," I said, from the end of the counter, not looking up.

Pete looked at me like I'd kicked something he loved. "That's it? That's the whole explanation?"

"That's the whole explanation." I held my clipboard against my hip with one arm, crossing off another item on the inventory audit with the other, unbothered by the heat in a way that seemed to personally offend him. "Anthocyanins don't care what you think purple's supposed to mean. They're just doing plant things."

He turned the jar over in his hands, thumb tracing the label like it might be hiding fine print he'd missed the first ten times.

"I've been picking the purple ones for two years," he said, quieter now, the tone of a man reevaluating a small load-bearing belief.

"You can keep doing that," Berny said gently. "There's nothing wrong with liking purple. Just don't expect it to hit any harder because of it."

"But it might, right?" Pete said, brightening slightly, already halfway back to his original position.

"It also might not," I said.

"I'm gonna keep buying the purple ones."

"Never said you couldn’t,” I replied.

He set the jar down with the exaggerated care of a man handling a small, disproven religion, and went back to restocking, occasionally holding up other jars to the light just to check, muttering "regular" and "upgraded" to himself like he was sorting laundry.

Berny watched him for a moment, then turned to me. "He's going to do that for the rest of the shift, isn't he."

"At minimum," I said. "Possibly the rest of the week."