A Flood of Posies

by Tiffany Meuret

  This Book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN Print 978-1-64548-026-6

  ISBN Ebook 978-1-64548-027-3

  Cover Design and Interior Formatting

  by Qamber Designs and Media

  Published by Black Spot Books,

  An imprint of Vesuvian Media Group

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  Praise for A Flood of Posies

  “Bewitching debut....this is a promising first outing from Meuret.” —Publishers Weekly

  “With its unforgettable imagery, Posies is a phenomenal novel set at the edge of an unforeseen apocalypse.” —Foreword Reviews

  “Meuret’s examination is as much upon changing relationships and human endeavors as on the face of world-changing disaster....A Flood of Posies is highly recommended reading for readers of fantasy and women’s literature who look for more in their world-ending and world-building studies than an action-packed survival saga alone.” —Midwest Book Review

  To my Grandmother, who upon reading this book from her hospital bed told me, “The ending needs work.” May she rest in peace.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sestra worked her arms through the endless ocean, sinking them into the blue. Every inch of her body dripped from the salty spray and sweat. She’d been paddling atop an old door for hours now and the sun stood at high noon. It had still been dark when she left.

  She wasn’t sure where she was going. She knew what she was looking for, just not where it was, exactly. So she paddled and swam, just like she did every day, a combination of swimming and floating and swimming again. After the flood, that’s all there was to do.

  The water was calm and she moved with the tide, letting it lead her. She’d dipped in and out of consciousness due to fatigue more than once. The beast she sought was everywhere, always, except now, when she wanted to find it. She couldn’t help but feel watched; the idea that it was spying on her from somewhere deep below was insidious and uncomfortable. How long would it wait? Would it lurk beneath the water until her body withered to a shell, then pluck her like an appetizer from a tray? She was growing weaker by the moment, infection and dehydration and starvation all culminating into an effective and deadly flourish.

  Perhaps that was the point.

  It was difficult to gauge how long she’d been searching and floating, floating and searching. Her limbs dangled in the water, her body barely afloat on the flimsy sheet of old wood. She might have stayed that way forever, drifting into an unending sleep, her body a feast for whatever still lived, but then a throb of water swelled around her. It nearly sunk her—the pulse of something big coming to life. Sestra peered into the water, an adrenaline spike threatening to end her where she lay.

  Even though she hadn’t caught sight of it yet, the thump from below was enough to let her know she’d found it—or rather, it had found her. After all this time, she and the beast were finally face to face, nothing but blinding fury and a plank of wood to separate them. Just when she’d become content in paddling and being thirsty until she either died of dehydration or drowned, there it was.

  Fucking things had a nasty way of showing up just when she’d almost forgotten about them. Nasty posies. Rob had named them—Poseidons of the sea, angry creatures full of malice and vengeance. Sestra shortened it to posy, because who wanted to bother with three syllables when two would do? Not even the end of the world could stamp out the human love of shortcuts.

  Aside from the basic functions of trying to not die, Sestra had spent the past year running from posies and praying they wouldn’t take her too. That she wouldn’t be stolen into the water like so many others, never to be seen again. As if the earth-ending flood of biblical proportions wasn’t enough, of course there had to be monsters too.

  She was tired now yet couldn’t stop flexing her fists. The feral instincts of her old life were hard to shake. Hard to imagine the old life could be measured away in mere months. Bored and anxious, Sestra had decided last night she was going to hop overboard and find one of the fuckers haunting her. It had waited for her, behind her, underneath her. And now she’d found it.

  She’d slit her wrists for a needle right now. The entire ceremony of tying off, tapping her shriveled-up veins and finding that perfect one, coaxing it out of hiding just to stab it with the beautiful, beautiful poison. Heroin would make all of this better. But all the heroin of the world lay somewhere lost underneath millions of gallons of water, down below with the old world and all its ghosts—pressurized like an opioid diamond.

  Sestra faced the eerie calm of the water. Just one pulse for the posy to let her know it was there, and nothing more. The surface was slick as glass now; how long had she been sitting there thinking of heroin? Smooth water never stopped unsettling her, not with knowing the monsters that lurked just below. Things that horrible shouldn’t be allowed to be so damned stealthy.

  Willing it to show itself, willing it to leave, hoping and terrified and ready to vomit, Sestra carefully leaned over the edge of her raft so as not to upset her precarious balance and send herself over the edge. She stared into the water. The sun penetrated just a few inches, but it was enough. Her raft bobbed as she settled onto her stomach, and then again as something thick and silvery shot underneath her. The thing was thicker than her torso, and that was just one of the tentacles that she could see. There were more—nobody was sure how many—all attached to a massive body hiding deeper than the light could penetrate.

  She was out of options, not that there were ever many to choose from.

  Scooting to the edge, Sestra slid into the water headfirst and swam.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Doris sat in her kitchen drinking tea and dragging a thumb over the leather of her husband’s wallet. James had forgotten it and conspicuously not called to ask if she could look for it. He’d probably already cancelled the cards in hopes she’d never notice. The last place he ever wanted her to look was his wallet. It was less of an inconvenience to simply have it stolen.

  The morning pounded down on her from above—rain in all directions for the foreseeable future. The sky was heavy with the bleary gray of a storm. If she believed the weather app on her phone, it was bound to be one for the ages; it was only nine in the morning and small pockets of water already pooled in the recesses of her yard.

  Not that there was much she could do for it, even if she’d had the urge to bother (which she did not). Physical therapy was a slow process—slow and painful and limited in effectiveness. She was a tuning fork for pain, and every flinch, sneeze, or heavy sigh set her body ringing with it. Years, they said. Years, and there was no guarantee she would ever regain her former strength.

  A petrichor musk rose up from the oak planks of her floor; the smell of wet earth mixed well with her green tea. She propped the wallet against the tall glass vase centering her kitchen table. James screwed so many lilies into it that they burst out the top like fireworks. He bought them because they were her favorite, and they were her favorite because they looked so damn mean.

  Work gnawed at her. More than one deadline today for more than one client. Copywriting was brainless work. She’d d
one it for so long now that she often didn’t remember what she wrote immediately after sending it, like arriving at home and not being able to recall the drive. Her brain deleted the words from her memory, needing the space for more strenuous activities, like staring out windows.

  Turning away from the window, Doris glanced at the phone in her hand. Eight missed calls. Thirteen text messages. She’d silenced all notifications this morning for this very reason, predicting a panic equal to the storm.

  Rain. Oh God, the rain. And she without a caregiver.

  Tossing it aside, Doris dragged her fingers along the keyboard of her laptop, feeling exhausted at the thought of doing anything. Nothing enticed her, but there was only so much television she could watch before she wanted to scream, only so many books to read before they all began to sound the same. Copywriting forced her into a routine, and while the money was poor, it was money nonetheless. She still couldn’t work a regular job in her state, and even extended bouts at a computer were too much—pain like lightning radiated against her spine after only an hour. The computer screen itself was also an enemy, causing migraines after so little as thirty minutes of uninterrupted work, which prior to the accident had never been an issue.

  As tends to happen when a person is faced with an excessive amount of time to think, all the items around the house that needed tending to populated her mind at inconvenient times. Things like the weather stripping under the front door that had peeled off, leaking puddles of water into the house after heavy rain. Rain like today’s rain. Soon enough, the hardwood would warp from the moisture, and considering she never remembered to take care of it until it was too late, she was resigned to stuffing towels beneath it until the wood gave up the goose completely.

  Thinking better of working at the kitchen table, Doris decided to retreat to her office near the front of the house. James had set up an automatic lift chair in there, and while she resented the hell out of having to use it, it was extremely helpful and more comfortable than she’d ever admit. Plus, she could watch for James’s return. She hated being surprised by his arrival.

  The walk there was slow and shuffling, but not as bad as usual. She’d placed her laptop and phone in a small tote, having learned the hard way what happened when she was forced to bend over and retrieve them after dropping them. Bending was the most painful process in her new repertoire of discomfort—an act most don’t consider until the ease of it is swept away. It felt like a car radio on the loudest volume, shocking her eardrums in surprise as the ignition turned over, but instead of her eardrums, it was her entire body. Instead of noise, it was pain. And instead of the shock fading away by the end of the drive, it lingered forever until the thought of bending made her want to vomit.

  The front yard seemed to hold up better than the already-flooding back. Small puddles formed in the pockets of the yard with blades of grass peeking through like rheumy swamp reeds, but that was all. Good. It could use a good soak anyway.

  She was a silver-lining kind of person.

  Although Doris’s phone pelted her incessantly, demanding attention, she left it in her bag and settled into her raised chair in preparation for the roller-coaster ride that was small business copywriting. James had initially tried to move her office into the living room, for her comfort and ease (he claimed), but Doris balked, furious that he’d dared.

  He’d just been trying to be nice, her mother had explained. James probably thought he was being considerate, even as he chose to ignore the glaring insult of it. It never occurred to him how much of her personal autonomy had been stolen, and now he wanted to take even more? As if she couldn’t be trusted to exist alone in a space for a few hours without dying in misery? James felt compelled to keep her under his thumb for her own good, willfully ignoring all prior evidence to the contrary. But it was for her own good, and of course, she must understand that. Her physical therapist seemed to think so. So did her mother. So did everyone. It seemed that the only person they didn’t consult was her.

  Obviously, Doris just couldn’t be trusted to make up her own damn mind on the matter.

  Their house sat on the bulb-end of a cul-de-sac, street sloping toward her so that all the loose pieces of her neighbors’ recycling bins always collected around her mailbox. Rain thock-thock-thocked against the roof; the lazy storm had grown comfortable and decided to stay awhile. Doris hated the weather and being stuck inside her house. Her last memory of rain was just after the accident. She’d wandered into the street as water pelted her and cried. Out in the wet, nobody could tell she was crying, so she’d kept doing it until her husband had discovered her, ushering her to the house like a flight attendant’s cart on a cheap airliner.

  It wasn’t really the water she hated.

  There was something about being cold that didn’t suit her. Cold infected down to the bone. It was something that clung to her like a parasite, impossible to peel away. Doris preferred the stinging heat of summer and the way it slapped at her skin. She imagined it often on cold days like today—the heat reaching out to her, striking her like a match, bringing her back to life, sweaty and out of breath from jogging. Like all normal people, she hated to jog, but now it was one of her therapy goals, so she thought of it often. It was this incendiary hope of recovery that kept her going most days, stopping her from leaving her kettle on the stove until the whole place burned to the ground.

  Discordant with her sour mood, the laptop pinged cheerfully. Good morning, human. I am awake!

  She had four emails—two from a client and two from her mother. It’d become instinct to simply delete anything sent from her mom, but today she happened to glance at the subject line.

  THEA

  In all caps, of course.

  “Great,” she said to no one. Then she remembered her phone and all those missed calls. Just great.

  Three more missed calls from James. Five from her mother. Ten additional texts from a combination of them both.

  Was this it? The thought crossed her mind every time her mother called. Was this it? Even after Doris decided she no longer cared, that she was done with Thea, she couldn’t stop the thought and the hike of her blood pressure whenever her sister’s name was mentioned. She tried ignoring Ma’s calls, but then the emails started. No matter where Doris went, so too went Thea.

  IS THE HOUSE FLOODED?

  DO I NEED TO COME HOME?

  SORRY FORGOT TO GET WEATHER STRIPPING AGAIN.

  CALL ME.

  CALL ME.

  CALL ME CALL ME CALL ME CALL ME.

  Her gut stopped churning, her worst fear still unrealized.

  It’s just a little rain. Jesus Christ.

  Tossing her phone back into her tote, Doris resolved to meet her deadline, make some money, and forget about all of them for an afternoon.

  Minutes later, the email still open on her laptop, she realized that this would be impossible. If it were possible, she’d be far away from here. Another state. Another country. She’d have disappeared into the mist and never looked back.

  Something tethered her here, and that something happened to be Thea, her younger sister. Doris could pretend it was noble a gesture done out of love, but that would be a lie. It was fury that kept her here, and an overwhelming urge to be vindicated, that bound her even more tightly to Thea than her current predicament.

  Outside, the storm raged in turn. No doubt that Thea sat at its center, manipulating the wind and rain to suit her whims.

  Doris returned to her work.

  Thea shoved her belongings into a backpack. Turns out hospitality was null and void when the houseguest passed out in the hallway with a needle still stuck in her arm. Lots of tut-tutting and sad looks that Thea couldn’t stand anyway, so it was just as well. It didn’t take her long to pack, as all she owned was an empty pack of gum and a bag of roasted almonds that she’d stolen from the Circle K across the street. She didn’t even have any cig
arettes left.

  She and Megan had gone to school together since they were fourteen, so Megan hadn’t batted an eye when Thea had shown up at her doorstep looking for a place to crash. Megan somehow had gotten her shit together after the clusterfuck that was her high school career, got herself an apartment and a nice boyfriend/fiancé (depending on whether he was within earshot). She waitressed at a dump of a café a few blocks over that teetered on county closure on a constant basis. Thea only knew this because she’d shot up in that bathroom on more than one occasion, often right after stealing some tip money left on one of the corner booths, and witnessed the disapproving rotation of alphabet letters indicating the café’s health inspection status: C, B, C, CLOSED, C again.

  Somehow that yellowing half-apron gave Megan license to shake her head, pretend to cry, and stare like a feral cat whenever Thea came into the room. Her friend had always maintained lofty opinions of herself.

  Thea left without saying goodbye. The second-floor apartment opened to a narrow walkway with stairs that dropped into the parking lot below. Thea tripped in a pothole while dragging her hungover ass through the complex toward Union Avenue. Water sloshed against her ankle. Only then did she realize that it was raining.

  God, was Union Avenue a sight for sore eyes. She’d spent more than one night on the bus-stop bench on the corner after being kicked out of a long list of friends’ and family’s homes, laundromats, and back seats of unlocked cars from the night-shift crew at the grocery store.

  Most bus stops were a gamble. Aside from vicious competition from other urban loafers, they were heavily monitored in this area. Not the best place, honestly, but just nice enough that when vagrants like her started collecting en masse, they set police officials to the task of removing them. Set in front of a post office, tucked against the busy intersection of Union and Nineteenth, the bench was untouchable before ten p.m. Then everything just stopped. There was nothing so destitute as an after-hours government facility. To Thea, it was the only peace she knew.