The elderly woman regarded him for a long moment from her doorway before responding to Parker.  He waited, projecting his best “eager young student” vibe and willing his charm through the mesh of the flimsy screen door between them.

“The ‘X Orchid’ you boys are calling it now?” Parker thought he detected a shadow of a smile waft across her face. “Around here, we know it as the ‘Shiloh Orchid.’”

“Oh, that’s very interesting…” said Parker. He leaned forward, seeing an opening in the old lady’s armor.

But she was gone. The screen clattered shut and brisk footsteps receded into the little house.

“Hey! Please wait, Miz Walker, please!”

Silence answered him. Damn, he thought. I can’t believe I wasted a Saturday coming out to the sticks chasing this crazy old bat. Old Miz Walker, she was supposed to be his payday, his treasure map.  Now he was standing alone on her front porch like a fool.

“Well, come along then, if you’re so eager to see them.” Miz Walker’s voice came from behind him and Parker turned to find her standing next to his pickup truck.

She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and held a carved walking stick

that was almost as tall as she was. “We’ll have to leave now if you want to get back before dark.” Miz Walker’s tiny hand gestured imperiously at the truck.

Greenbrier and bindweed choked the woods so that he couldn’t even see the forest floor. Once Parker had to jump backward, glimpsing an oblong rust and ocher pattern just before he would have sunk his boot deep into the coil of a copperhead snake. Behind him Miz Walker clicked her tongue against her teeth to hurry him along, as if he were a recalcitrant mule.

The old girl was spry in the woods, he had to admit. The vines seemed to part before her feet, while he tromped along like a befuddled bear. It didn’t help that Parker had long since acknowledged to himself that he was lost. Now under the canopy of virgin hickory and white oak, he couldn’t even determine what cardinal direction they moved in.

“I’m afraid I’ve gotten turned around. I’m not sure I could find my way back.” he said to Miz Walker.

“Is that so?” she said, sounding disinterested.

“How big is this orchid bed we’re going to see?” Parker asked. “A few dozen plants, you’ll see them soon.”

As they walked Parker did the math, calculating a sale price of five thousand dollars per healthy plant. A conservative estimate, since the legendary status of ‘X Orchid’ and its rarity could drive the price much higher at auction. Say he could harvest a third of the known population, that could be sixty thousand dollars, maybe more if he could get to the right orchid collectors.

He thought about the others in his agriculture classes at State, studying so hard so they could go back home and kick shit around like their daddies.

Should have done their reading in native botany class like I did, Parker thought.

Of course, harvesting and selling wild orchids was illegal. And this stubborn old woman, Miz Walker, she probably wouldn’t be agreeable to any harvest of her ‘Shiloh Orchids.’ Small problems, really. He would deal with them when the time came.

The orchids occupied a crescent-shaped clearing. They were ground orchids rather than tree-dwelling epiphytes, just as his

research had suggested. The plants were smaller than he’d expected. The accounts he had read called them palmates, but while ordinary palmate petals projected outward, star-like, these petals coiled into the body of the plant, each an asymmetric green tangle.

As Parker approached the orchid patch his foot kicked something that made a hollow clattering sound.  Looking down, he saw there were animal bones and weather-bleached deer antlers scattered around the clearing.

He stopped at the first orchid plant he came to, staring down into the arthritic-looking clump. Even with the draw of extreme rarity, it would be hard to drive up a good price for twisted little mutations like these. For the first time he wondered about the origin of the ‘X Orchid’, if it was truly a natural strain or just some would-be orchid hybridist’s cast off.

“Not quite what you expected?” Somehow, Miz Walker managed to look both dour and as if she were barely suppressing a grin.

“The blooms seem deformed. I read some orchid hunters’ accounts of the ‘X Orchid’ that made it sound so impressive.”

“Yes, I can see why you might think that way.” Miz Walker spoke from behind him.

She still hadn’t approached the orchid bed and Parker wondered why. Most orchid collectors fawned over their flowers, grooming them as if the plants were expensive little show dogs. “They only show themselves to me, you know. Dozens of young people from the university have come out, but none have ever seen them. Only the caretaker can find the path,” said Miz Walker. Parker smirked, then smoothed his face into a respectful expression and turned back to her.

“Yes ma’am. Well I am so grateful to you for bringing me here…” A crackling sound interrupted him. A waist-high clump of cane rattled and an animal pushed through into the clearing. It was a white-tailed deer, a doe. She swayed unsteadily about three paces from Parker, her eyes round and wild.

Miz Walker said, “Oh, the poor thing.”

The deer had been shot, but the hunter missed the kill spot behind the shoulder. Instead the doe oozed gore from a messy wound low in her abdomen. Parker heard the deer’s breath coming in rapid barks. She careened into the center of the orchid bed, hovering on stilt legs for a long moment before collapsing beside one of the plants, folding herself up like a pocketknife.

Parker saw blood streaming from the deer’s wound and her open mouth. The earth around the orchid darkened as the blood soaked it. The doe’s breath slowed and then stopped. Without the deer’s rasping breaths, the woods seemed unnaturally silent. Parker strained for any sound, but not even a breeze moved in the treetops.

Then he thought of Miz Walker with a start, having forgotten about her while he’d watched the deer die. A flash of the old woman creeping up, gnarled walking stick raised and ready to brain him, flickered into his imagination and he spun around.

She hadn’t moved, of course. She leaned casually against the

walking stick, hat pushed back so she could watch him watch her. Parker shook his head, confused by the weird intuition and embarrassed. How ridiculous to be afraid of this tiny old lady. Miz Walker motioned to him, inclining her head in the direction of the deer. He looked back at the corpse. Then he realized she’d been indicating the orchid, the plant now cradled by the deer’s limbs. The orchid seemed bigger and healthier. As he watched, the knotted petals loosened, slowly inflating like little green balloons.

Miz Walker approached the orchid, and as they watched the flower unfold she said, “Shiloh Orchids. It’s after a bit of old Confederate propaganda, or maybe a truth, nobody knows.”

“Propaganda?” Parker couldn’t look away from the orchid. It had expanded into a bundle of tubes, its color lightening to a muddy yellow.

“The story the old folks told after the battle of Shiloh, south from here, back in the War Between The States. They said that the Union soldiers who fell were buried in a proper Christian manner, but they threw the rebel bodies into shallow trenches and buried them with their hands exposed. The story goes that there were lines and lines of dead fingers poking up from the earth all around Shiloh. You have heard of Shiloh?” Miz Walker looked at him sharply.

“Yes ma’am, of course, the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.”

Parker remembered a long, hot school trip to the battlefield when he was a kid. The park ranger had herded them about, droning a script about the pond that turned red with blood from the thousands of dead and wounded.

The deer’s orchid had finished transforming, the stunted green knot replaced by a fleshy brown shape. It resembled a man’s hand, a broad palm with four slightly curved fingers and a bent thumb. But Parker could see the individual petals that made up the fingers flutter when the breeze picked up. A faint purplish fog rose from the orchid, something like gunsmoke.

Pollination triggered by blood? he thought.

The fog reached him and Parker detected a coppery scent. The aroma exploded inside his nose and lungs and he closed his eyes as if against a bright light, his mind floating weightless over the forest, warm and joyful. The sensation dissolved after a few blissful seconds.

He inhaled again, deeply, but the scent faded, carried by the breeze out over the other orchids in the bed. Parker focused on the deer’s orchid. It wavered and then regained its shape, remarkably like a hand, complete with a lifeline creasing the palm. He stooped to study the plant at his feet. Anemic spiky leaves

surrounded a green core. Parker touched his index finger to the knotted center. Nearby Miz Walker stood, watching patiently. She reminded him of one of his better professors, presenting raw data and then waiting for him to puzzle out the solution on his own.

“You’re free to go. I can take you back at any time.” She said, as if reciting a legal disclaimer.

Parker ignored her, sliding his knife from a back pocket and prying open the smallest blade. He sliced into the flesh at the base of his left thumb and a glob of crimson blood welled up. He let the blood stream onto the soil near the base of his orchid, squeezing the wound when the flow lessened.

“That’s enough, dear.” Miz Walker said.

He watched as the orchid bloomed, unfolding and reaching up for him.  Waves broke over him, pleasure beyond orgasm. His secret self expanded beyond the papery confines of his body to float above the forest. Everything he had been striving for this past year as graduation loomed — money, pride, women — fell away from him as he rose, like ropes cut to release a hot air balloon.

Parker’s future flowed out from him like a crooked river, spawning little tributaries of alternate possibilities branching

this way and that.  As he watched from a great height, the river shrank into itself, drawing back the tangential fingers of might-have-beens until it resolved as a thin, short line. His flight lasted for minutes or hours; Parker wasn’t sure which was true.

After some time had passed, satiated at last, he collapsed back behind his own eyes to see his orchid shiver apart, Shiloh palm and fingers deconstructed as scaly flesh-colored petals, disintegrating until only the mossy heart remained.

Dizzy and weak, Parker was vaguely aware of Miz Walker. The orchids had shown him the truth. Chosen so many years ago, she alone linked them to that other world, his old colorless world outside the orchid bed. Parker knew that his time there would be dreamlike from now on. His new existence would revolve around getting back here to his orchid.

He examined the gash in his hand. It gaped at him, still oozing. He would have given anything for the orchid, any amount of blood. Parker knew that from now on he would give anything and do anything for her, the caretaker.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about, you and I,” Miz Walker said. “Yes, ma’am.”

Then she stepped forward and knelt to feed her own Shiloh Orchid.