A man wakes up and he is Immanuel Kant. Wow! He makes bad puns to himself in the mirror in the morning. Immanuel Kant sells his suits and buys a flower shop that he names Kant-Forget-Me. Not every Immanuel Kant works in flower shops - this one does. Kant arrives at 5 a.m. when there are only the stars to distract him.

Most of the time, Kant’s customers are still chained to the wall of the cave. Most of the time, they come in and tell him the shape of the germaniums is like a child’s smiling face, their heads moving like sunflowers around the tiny suns of the room.

But once Freud comes into the flower shop and tells him about these dreams that he had. Freud says that the flower had the voice of his father, Freud says that his father was Hamlet, Freud says that he shouldn’t even remember this from his dream. Freud talks for four hours about what the dream meant, other than that he was asleep.

Sometimes Nietzsche comes in to buy flowers for his wife. The flowers, he says, are a lie. So is God. His wife and he have agreed that he will buy her flowers once a month and she will titter and understand that those flowers mean that he loves her. In February, both men are exhausted by the red hearts in every shop.

A boy comes in to work at the flower shop from the local high school. He spends all his time in the greenhouse, writing poetry. Sometimes his poems are about the flowers, but mostly they are about the girls who come in, and their skirts. The money that he gets from the flower shop is enough for him to marry a girl. She changes her last name to Shelley, because they are old-fashioned.

Late in the year, Barthes comes into the shop and talks long about the general nature of flowers and of gardening and of culture in the context of this one flower shop. He congratulates Kant on having such a world-renowned flower shop, having it in a pretty famous magazine along with The Lone Arranger and Thistle Do Nicely. Kant smiles at Barthes but doesn’t really pay attention to that sort of thing.

A woman named Bordo walks into Kant’s flower shop. She likes that he owns a flower shop as a man, that he is sensitive, that he sees cooks her large meals and eats with her until she's full. She likes that sometimes, he is scared of her flashing eyes. She even likes it when he tells her there is a touch of sublimity in her – even for the terror. He is not afraid of her untamed and he is not afraid of her bounded. She stays for a while.

A man comes in. He is searching, he says, for one true flower. He seems like he might be a fanatic, like he might come from God, he says over and over again he is seeking the one true flower. The man says his name is Plato. He is very old and has a very long beard, so Kant doesn’t break it to him that there is no perfect flower.

Horkheimer walks in with his lover Adorno to buy flowers from the flower shop. They wear clothes that they made themselves. They do not look like men who have walked out of J. Crew or have ever seen J. Crew. Kant commiserates with them about how every flower in movies and television has been painted over, glossified. They prefer the tragedy of the flowers he keeps in buckets around the windows, who have begun wilting and putrefying. They give him twice as much money for the flowers that are sad, so sad that they could never be held in a magazine for brides.

T.S. Eliot is very young and he comes in and throws stones at Shelley in the greenhouse. Shelley yells right back at him. Eliot says that goddamnit Shelley is such a good writer, shouldn’t he realize that sad thoughts don’t lead to beautiful poetry? Can’t he just get out of this glass room? Kant comes into greenhouse and manages to get Eliot to stop throwing rocks. He gets Eliot some tea. Eliot says that he was never angry at all.

Cixous points out that Kant’s flowers have a tendency to be neatly arranged. Cixous assures Kant that she has entire fields of flowers at home, talks about her house for a while, talks about the sunrise, talks about horses, talks about talking. Cixous says that some days she thinks the only reason she exists is her flowers in a field. As she leaves the flower shop, her reflection in the shop window is momentarily monstrous; a trick of the light.

Derrida comes into the shop. He tells Kant that really he should be more concerned with the name of his shop than with flowers. While Derrida is confined in the shop, he does not believe that anything outside of it is real. Derrida is skeptical about the roses, the orchids, the tulips. He talks to the baby’s breath in the corner for a long time. Kant steps into the back room for a moment and when he comes back Derrida is gone.

Aristotle comes into the flower shop. Aristotle should be dead, right? But he very much wanted to see the most beautiful flowers in the world, all their arrangements, and the structure that went into them. Shelley is in the shop with Kant watching his old boss sit behind the counter and smile at the flowers that he has owned for so many long years. Shelley does not even notice Aristotle sitting there, telling Kant that the structure of flowers is also the structure of a good life: the solid stem, the realization, the petals of interactions with others. The best stories happen in one day in one place, with a realization before the end. Kant is not the best story, but he has lost himself in this one place. The stars on Kant’s walk home that night are breathtaking.

Immanuel Kant goes like this: he has a dream that his flower shop has been ripped apart by a tornado. Kant is not scared of this sublime at all, he actually finds the tornado beautiful, but he knows that this is a death sentence. While he is still asleep, his breathing slows and the universe unpins itself for him. Behind the universe, there are flowers.