Murray Hathaway was a florist. He kept a respectable little shop on 21st Street, just a couple of doors down from the McDonald’s. He always managed to be at least a dollar cheaper for a dozen roses than most of his competitors; it helped that his father had managed to pay off the shop before he died and Murray inherited it. At 52, Murray considered himself a sort of ineligible bachelor; his father had always called him a “late bloomer” and chuckled to himself while Murray grimaced. Murray had been interested in girls for about 40 years at this point, but hadn’t had the nerve to ask one out until he was 41, when he asked Mrs. Martha Spritely, a widow of about his age, to dinner. She died the next day of food poisoning, and that just about summed it up for Murray’s sex life.

So Murray poured his energy into other projects – he’d been an assistant at the city floral show for the last five years, and when the Parks Commission had bid for a contractor to seed new flowers throughout the parks, Murray had come this close to winning the bid. You see, Murray was interested in a lot more than floral arrangements – though he had an excellent contract with Finnister Family Funeral Services a few blocks away (run by Ed “Better Dead Than Red” Finnister, who made sure that all the corpses were blue blooded Americans), Murray was really a botanist. In his spare time, he’d managed to develop several new strains of parsley, which had the added effect that aside from being ugly when used as a garnish on a dinner plate, they were totally inedible. He’d wondered for a long time if it was a sprig of Hathaway Parsley Number 23 that had killed poor Mrs. Spritely.

He still worked his botanical magic in the small laboratory he’d made for himself in his family’s house when he was a child. At age 8, he’d created such bizarre vegetable Frankensteins as a head lettuce sewn on top of a carrot which had several radishes grafted to the sides of its root. Murray’s childish mind had hoped to get a complete salad out of one plant. Three weeks later he found a better use for his decaying experiment, when he deposited its unrecognizable corpse in the kitchen bread box for his mother to find (God rest her soul, Mrs. Hathaway had died in 1968 in a freak accident when a cantaloupe truck backed up over her car – the truck only squashed the hood of the car, but Mrs. Hathaway drove a convertible and was crushed beyond recognition by the avalanche of cantaloupes from the back of the truck – it took two days to recover her body).