In "The Flowers," ten-year-old girl Myop skips around the property where her family lives, including a pigpen and henhouse. She taps out a tune on the fence with a stick she holds in her dark brown hand (here Walker indicates that this child is African-American), and she eventually heads into the woods that surround her family's cabin. She looks at the ferns and the spring where her family gets water eventually going even deeper into the woods. She finds a bunch of blue flowers, a very unusual discovery.
By noon, she has gone deep into the woods about a mile away from home. She has gathered the blue flowers and holds them in her arms. The air starts to seem gloomy and dark.
Myop begins to circle back to her family's home. Suddenly, she steps through the skull of a dead man. He has clearly been dead for a long time because only his dry corpse remains and much of his clothing has rotted off. Myop notices that he was a tall man, and all of his teeth were broken.
Myop notices that a beautiful pink rose has grown up nearby, and she picks it up. However, she notices that there is a strange ring around it, and she realizes that this is the remnant of a noose. She looks up and notices another scrap of rope hanging from the tree. The story ends with her laying down her flowers and declaring that summer is over.
"The Flowers" is part of Alice Walker's book of short stories In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, published in 1973. It is considered a canonical instance of flash fiction: stories that are typically between 500 and 1000 words.
