Mr. Blanchard had not anticipated such bewilderment.

He found himself standing before a meadow of blue lupines; an endless meadow of blue lupines; an endless, boundless meadow of blue lupines shrieking before him like an army of angels. A myriad of azure wildflowers, five feet tall and shaped like long truncheons, covered the entirety of the field. Their stalks were silver and furry, their fat petals the shape of canines. Since some two hundred of those petals were on each stalk, a single gust of wind across the meadows meant billions of flowers agitating, billions of blue teeth raging towards Mr. Blanchard. It was only him and the flowers. And there was nothing else, not a tree, not a bird, nothing but the vast horizon and two planes stretching out of it, blue and blue, their boundaries inestimable. One in the heavens and one on the earth; one emptying out overhead and one stampeding towards him. The formidability of the combination—a militia of outrageous flowers and the endless blue above— was enough to make a puny little human nauseate, and make the strings of muscle in each of his eye sockets ache with numbness, the numbness that Noah would have felt after witnessing the Flood.

He had thought the scenery would be beautiful.

Mr. Roy Blanchard was on a solitary two-day trip to the Bighorn Mountains. He had postponed a business appointment, rescheduled two meetings with an architecture firm, assigned his paperwork to one of his coworkers, and hit the road on a Friday afternoon. His embarkation was full of excitement and pride. Mr. Blanchard thought of himself as a relatively successful businessman with a relatively good salary, a man of pretty good fortune compared to his contemporaries, and also, one of the few men in his workplace that “knew to appreciate art and beauty.” He had thought of his journey to Bighorn as an expression of such “artistic taste and spirituality” that he possessed, of something that his coworkers could not enjoy. Something that they would be “too thickheaded to comprehend.”

It was Saturday, officially the first day of his vacation. And surely he began his schedule with an unanticipated, unpleasant encounter. He was planning on hiking up the mountains, leisurely, taking photos, admiring the scenery and admiring his own refined taste for beauty. Yet even before he could begin his hike, he ran into a scene that started a huge confusion within him— a confusion too large for him to cope with.

Creases of puzzlement appeared on his trimmed eyebrows. For the first time, Mr. Blanchard encountered something that was beyond his control. The lupines were like warriors. They were rooted to the ground, but within them was a force stronger than that of some twenty tractors. They were different from the withering ferns in Mr. Blanchard’s office or the brown dandelions he saw on the sidewalk.

They were different from Mr. Blanchard’s coworkers. The men in his office, Mr. Blanchard believed, were “easy to deceive.” They were “his pawns,” “his inferiors.” No matter what the circumstances were, Mr. Blanchard would have them obey his commands. He’d order them to raise a three-story building somewhere in the suburbs and they would do so; he’d command them to build a highway connecting two mountains and they would do so; he’d make them repaint an entire skyscraper, and they would do so. If Mr. Blanchard had a project in mind, he would make it happen regardless of the costs, whether it be an hour-long sermon in front of his “dull-witted coworkers” or an hour-long quarrel with the “morons at the architecture firm.” To him, life was a matter of control. Of manipulation. Of persuasion, and if that did not work, force.

And indeed the lupines were different from his family. His daughter Leia was formerly a delinquent teenager who was on the verge of dropping out of high school, but Mr. Blanchard eventually forced her into studying. To him her attitude was correctible, her scores perfectible, and her skills improvable. Even if that was against her will. When her math grades would drop, he would hire a math tutor; when her Latin grades seemed shaky, he would hire a Latin tutor. When Leia became a sophomore at Princeton, Mr. Blanchard declared that she should major in law. His wife insisted that he let their daughter choose for herself; to him, however, Leia was “meant to be a lawyer.” The girl had no choice but to accede to her father’s decision. Her father’s words, like herbicides, entered her roots and dried up the petals of her dreams.

Before the pack of monstrous flowers, Mr. Blanchard was a weed. He stood still like an old scarecrow, dropped his backpack to the ground, and let the hem of his windbreaker flap in the breeze. He was in the presence of Father Nature. He saw not the Mother, not the pleasant and photoshopped nature he had seen from his travel guide, but raw, living plants that seemed to reprimand him. And when he closed his eyes and avoid the pain, he saw images of his coworkers, his daughter and his wife. Mr. Blanchard felt uncomfortable.

Mr. Blanchard was furious. He did not deserve such belittlement and such humiliation from a patch of wildflowers. He could not let anyone, not to mention anything, leave a single scratch on his dignity. So he decided to walk straight into the field of lupines. He decided, not to go around the lupines, but instead to cut his path straight through them. He picked up his backpack and entered the meadow; he pushed the flowers away from his path, grabbed their bobbing heads and thrust them away; he bended their necks, snapped them, and shoved them; he stamped on the shorter lupines under his knees; he moved forward, with great might, killing each obstacle that interrupted him. He frowned at how fuzzy and beardlike the stalks felt in his palm; he grimaced at how the fragments of leaves and soil dirtied his boots; he grunted at the way grains of dust and grass stuck onto his spectacles, and the way clumps of lupine petals found their way into the sleeves of his windbreaker.

He quit. The journey was tiring and he struggled enough; yet he looked into his watch to see that only three minutes had passed. He collapsed to the ground. The lupines were now taller than him. He was exhausted, his heartbeat uneven and rapid, and his breath coarse.

His coworkers didn’t like him. They despised the way he gave unrealistic orders in a matter-of-fact way. They loathed how he would disregard the suggestions of others to pass his own. They did not want to work in the same office as him; they abhorred eating lunch with him even more.

His daughter was suicidal. She’d been taking antidepressants for two years, and though it was kept a secret from her father, she had attempted to jump out of her dormitory window. Her roommate found a suicide note in her biology textbook.

His wife had turned away from him. She did not want his money. She did not want his diamonds. She did not want any of the expensive dresses and earrings, nor the expensive wine he gave him on their wedding anniversaries. She did not want a new pool in their backyard; she did not want a new chandelier in their dining room.

She wanted flowers. Mr. Blanchard buried his face in his palms. His cannibalistic egotism had been ravaging the hearts of others, feeding on the souls of many; now it made a detour and began to knife up his own heart and his own soul. He’d been committing felonies every single minute with his closest people as his victims. Mr. Blanchard held his face with his fingers, wanting to crumple it so badly. His eyes watered, for the first time in two decades.

A fragrant breeze swept the meadows— the lupines, with the disarming softness of a bluebird’s wing, stroked Mr. Blanchard’s head, combed his wispy hair, and caressed his dented soul with angelic whispers that only a brokenhearted man could hear.