And one of my short stories.
Enjoy it dear Traveller. And thank you for your time.


The Black Rose

We used to have a beautiful garden. There were a thousand kinds of flowers blooming in it. The rainbow could hide in our garden if it liked as everything was so colourful. The only reason it did not become famous was its size: it was too small. At that time we lived in a very small house in the heart of the city. We had nothing else but that little house and the even smaller garden.
Many people from the neighbourhood came to admire our garden and perhaps the fact that our house was not demolished and we were not moved to some junk old flat was thanks to it. However, it was not only the garden... Our house was so small that had it been pulled down, nothing else could have been built in its place. We were as lost among the huge tower blocks as a pansy in an oak wood.
Whatever was going on around us, our garden was alive and the ones who saw it could say it liked living.
We did not have any favourite flowers or trees, we love them all the same.. We talked to one plant just as much as to the other and we tried to take the same care of each. Sensitive flowers were paid nice compliments and the cheeky ones were told jokes.
Roses were the best to talk to. You did not have to compliment them, stroke their petals or tell them jokes. They preferred people's stories. They loved listening to people.. Whoever went up to them was listened to by them and they smiled or showed their sadness by swinging their petals.
They were no gossips, what had once been whispered to their ears was a closely-guarded secret, locked deep inside their petals. That is what I loved about them the best.
One day when I wanted to share my last night's dream with them, a great surprise was waiting for me. It was a black rose.
There are no black roses, are there? Nature cannot afford to create a black rose as the other roses would not accept it as their brother or sister and butterflies would not think it to be their home. Nature may have got very tired if she has forgotten about even a single flower, particularly when it is a rose.
I went up to it and admired it. I was looking at it for a long time in case it was dark blue... no, the rose was black. And no one got talking to it. The other flowers turned their silky faces away from it and pretended not to take notice of the black rose... and I guess they really did not see it.

We never made friends. It never talked to me and I never talked to it. I was afraid of It. I did not want it to tell me about its sorrow, to tell me about the world outside the garden. I could not really become fond of it, either... it was such an ugly little one... but besides, it was special as well. It hid in itself every night and it blossomed every morning although the Sun never rose for It.
One day a passer-by saw It. He started screeching at once and rang the bell. He wanted to see the flower more closely. First I was reluctant to let the stranger in but he was pleading for such a long time that eventually I said yes.
He turned out to be some great scientist and that said science badly needed that little flower. They had to find out if the rose was really black and if so what made it black.
He was speaking a strange language, a kind of gobbledygook, I could hardly understand every second word. All I could certainly understand was that he wanted to take the whole rosebush, root and branch, away to start his all-important research of it.
I looked at the roses and They looked back at me.. None of them understood what was there brewing, only the black rose. It was the first time I had seen emotions on its face: wrath was dancing on its wrinkled petals.
We let the scientists take our rosebush away. Nothing but black soil will remain in its place... We had to give it to them. We knew it very well: had the rose not been given to them, they would have resorted to violence. And in a fight like that it might be considered there is no space for our tiny little house in the centre of town any more... we could have become heroes defending roses but we preferred to remain ordinary people with a roof over our heads.

The rose was really black. It was pointed out by the very first experiments. That even more threw the scientist's folk into a fever and they were doing research intensively day and night. At the beginning they made sure that the rose should feel fine and stay alive but later even their minor questions were more important than the flower.
They started examining its petals, one by one. Eventually, all of them were torn off.
Will there anything be left of a rose if it loses its petals? It will be alive until it has a last petal: torn and trembling, it is still alive. When it loses its last petal, there is no rose anymore.

The petals ran out, my rose died. It was never found out what had made it black.
But science can state: black roses do exist.
There used to live one, once it existed for me.