Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Sirkka Mäkinen-Korhonen had been a rising star at the University of Helsinki, completing a rigorous program of study and qualifying to enter the faculty as a full member before her 22nd birthday. In addition to groundbreaking work on the classification and molecular genetics of vascular plants in the Asteraceae (the daisy family), she was a well-regarded writer and poet. Mäkinen-Korhonen had the rare distinction of having work published in the university’s botany journal at the same time a series of poems appeared in its literary journal.

It wouldn’t be unfair to say that great things were expected of her.

Then, after she had worked at the university for six years, Mäkinen-Korhonen spent a summer at the university field station at Inari, in the north. There, Sirkka undertook a massive project to collect and classify Asteraceae native to Finland, as well as subspecies adapted to several nearby microclimates. It was expected to be three months’ work, resulting in the collection of some interesting specimens, an academic monograph, and another step on the inevitable road to a senior professorship and the departmental chair.

Instead, Sirkka Mäkinen-Korhonen never returned.

She insisted on prolonging her stay, first by taking a sabbatical. When her leave time ran out, she accepted a position overseeing the field station at substantially reduced pay and the loss of academic tenure and all promotions. Eventually, hit hard by a recession, the University of Helsinki closed the field station and reassigned its members to other areas. Mäkinen-Korhonen refused to leave, and was duly terminated from the university altogether. Using her savings, she purchased a small home on the shores of Lake Inari and arranged to have supplies delivered–and mail collected–for the nearest village once every few weeks.

In her hermitage, Sirkka apparently continued her study of daisies as well as her literary pursuits. Letters to family and former colleagues became more infrequent and more disjointed, jumbled masses of paeans to daisies in a variety of meters and styles mixed in with diatribes against the pace of modern life and invitations to join her in a life “outside the graph paper.”

Eventually, Sirkka began claiming that, through intense study, one could experience “asterism.” As far as anyone could discern, “asterism” was a sort of cosmic oneness achieved through daisies–one apparently recognized that the pattern of petals reflected stars in the night sky and the reflections in a polished gemstone, and thereby was able to tap into universal consciousness. Sirkka’s last, disjointed letters urged her friends and family to begin their study of daisies at once, lest they be left behind then all humanity eventually ascended to another plane through unity with flowers.

When the last supplies arrived at her cabin, the villagers found it deserted. A triangle made of three asterisks was painted on one of the walls, and every potted daisy in the house had been uprooted.