A Flood of Posies

by Tiffany Meuret

  Judging by the fringes of her high and the ferocity of her hangover, she figured it was between eight and ten in the morning. She needed heroin. Pills or heroin or even some heroin. Her fucking feet were soaked, her shoes ridden with holes and burns from ash and dropped lighters and that time she’d tried to light one on fire because she was bored and curious and high. By the looks of the street it must have been raining all night and showed no indication of stopping.

  People huddled under the bus-stop overhang, hoping to avoid the weather while waiting for public transportation to haul them off to work. Cars zipped by, huge wings of water spraying up in their wake. Thea trudged in the mud to avoid their assault on the sidewalk.

  Thea rubbed the inside of her elbow where the needle had bent as she’d passed out in Megan’s apartment. Though she was covered in bruises, that was all that hurt. The vein throbbed. She hugged herself to hide her trembling. She was fine, really. A blood-sugar issue. She hadn’t had a real meal in weeks, living off potato chips and cigarettes, and she was always a bit hypoglycemic. Doctors said she should have outgrown it by now. Doctors also claimed her way of living was incompatible with life. At least, that was what the last GP her mother had dragged her to had said while running gloved fingers up her arm. Thea had nearly spat in his face, but Ma had warned upfront that she’d not pay her the money she’d promised if she “cussed, spit, or broke anything.”

  Instead, Thea had yanked her arm back toward her chest and said, “You think?” She’d demanded the cash right there and then. Ma had given it to her wordlessly, knowing that if she refused, the next time she saw her daughter might be in a morgue.

  It wasn’t an easy pull, often laced with Ma’s emotional baggage and turmoil, so Thea only played the card when she was most desperate for cash.

  But she wasn’t going to die. Well she might die, obviously, just as well as anyone might—hit by a bus, cancer, stabbed by a transient under the Union Avenue overpass, overdose, hepatitis, HIV, a bad deal, terrorists—there were endless opportunities for people to ruin themselves. So she might die, sure, but it wasn’t something she thought much about. She didn’t have to—her mother had that paranoia locked up.

  Cutting though the grocery store parking lot, Thea weaved through the cars looking for opportunity—unlocked doors, purses, cell phones, anything left behind and worth having. Slim pickings in the rain. Doors and windows were shut tight in bad weather as people seemed to fear a slick of water more than an opiate-powered thief. She didn’t expect much, but looking gave her something to do.

  Stopping just short of the industrial white lights vomiting from the automatic doors of the store, Thea spun around to leave just as a large white truck caught her attention. Parked at an angle, it not only consumed the handicapped space but also the space next to it. Ford. Pristine. Nice rims and locking lid over the long bed. Thea circled it, watching over her shoulder for witnesses. The grocery doors remained vacant, and the few shoppers scuttling through the parking lot were too wet and too rushed to bother caring about what she might be up to, as long as she wasn’t anywhere near them.

  No handicapped tags. She was sure to look long and hard. Prick.

  Practiced with a knife, she stabbed at the front driver’s side tire. But rubber on a tire this big was thick and she was tired. She thought she heard a hiss from a puncture. Not enough. It was the kind of leak that the driver would find the next morning parked safely in their driveway. Not enough.

  She hit it again, but her hand bounced off the rubber, twisting her wrist. The knife splashed in a puddle at her feet. Bloop. It was gone. Shit.

  Shit shit shit.

  She kicked the tire. The car alarm sounded. Wheeeeooooo wheeeeooooo wah wah wah.

  Shit.

  Fuck it. The car sirens pinged against the rain, softened by the desolation of the parking lot. An alarm didn’t change anything. A prick was still a prick was still a prick, and she felt obliged to teach him a lesson—one prick to another. Also, his wallet in the front cup holder looked mighty healthy.

  A toppled cart lay in the gravel embankment a few cars down. Thea grabbed it, heaving it out of the mud—whoop whoop whoop—and hurled it at the truck. It clattered uselessly against the driver’s door, but it was enough to start a spidery crack in the window. Praying her jacket would protect her, she finished off the glass with a smack, but cut her arm as she pulled it back through.

  Despite the truck’s squalling, the parking lot remained empty. So she snatched the wallet and fled, not stopping for two or three blocks. Good to stay clear of rampaging dudebros whose cars just got wrecked in the rain.

  With each step, the adrenaline that carried her waned. Unable to run any longer, Thea receded into the shadows when at all possible, arms crossed to hide her injury now bleeding through her jacket. The jacket hadn’t been enough to protect her, and she spent the better part of twenty minutes picking tiny, invisible shards of glass out of fabric and skin.

  She needed a hit. She couldn’t call anyone, as she’d sold her cell phone for heroin. She’d hocked anything worth hocking for drugs. She’d sell her jacket in a snowstorm for heroin. Stopping to rest against a dumpster behind a Jack in the Box, Thea thought about food and counted her cash. Twenty-three whole dollars and some loose change.

  Water chilled right through her, pooling around her boots and siphoning up her leg through the hole near her big toe. Her lucky shoes—she’d never considered replacing them. It would be easy to lift another pair. The Walmart a few blocks south was notoriously lax. She even knew the security guard by name—Ralph. He was over eighty and felt sorry for her because she looked just like his little daughter who’d died decades ago from polio. But even though she’d stolen just about anything else, she refused to replace her shoes. They’d run when she ran. They’d carried her. They’d been there, glued to her feet, when nothing else was. Perhaps because all she did was run. Maybe it was because of the drugs and the stealing, or maybe it was because she was just that pathetic to have no one rooting for her but a single pair of busted shoes.

  She needed a phone, and without thinking, she followed her feet on their automatic path northward. It was a familiar trek, one she’d taken a thousand times before. She’d lived in the plaza most of her adult life—either bumming on couches or sleeping under streetlights, but just north of there was where her sister lived. The two were currently on terrible terms—Doris had cut off all contact, and Thea wasn’t terribly eager to resume it herself. But whenever Thea found herself at a crossroads, she simply started off toward Doris on instinct, assuming she’d figure out something before she ever reached her sister’s house (the house she’d crashed at so many times and now was no longer welcome to visit). Most of the time, she never even made it to her street. There was always something ready to beg her attention—a purse left unattended for the briefest of moments, a busy parking lot perfect for hustling (Sir? Madam? Do you have a buck or two for the bus?), or even another tweaker further gone than she was ripe for the pickings.

  Thea made a conscious choice to avoid punching down whenever possible—she stayed away from kids and others that just looked rough. It wasn’t anything scientific, but there was a glint in their eyes, a certain twinge to their mouths, that revealed all that turmoil boiling around inside. Thea understood it well and tried her best to leave those people alone. Some just looked sick or whatever, and she wasn’t going to be the one to fuck up their day even more. Her favorite picks were the Karens—the self-righteous bobbed-haired bitches that made it their life’s mission to ruin as many people’s days as possible. And Doris’s neighborhood was fucking full of them, a point heavily lobbed against her when she and James bought that house.

  “How long before you ask to see the manager for not letting you bring your chihuahua into the dentist’s office?” Thea would tease.

  Doris would shrug and ask her how long until the HOA would file a complaint against her and James beca
use Thea was passed out drunk in their driveway.

  Those were the good(ish) days. Those were the days when Doris was still speaking to her. Those were the days of pills and booze, when she was just a rowdy kid preparing to mature into something responsible, before she graduated to the grown-up disaster she was today.

  Union Avenue faded at her back as Thea crossed the threshold between poverty and suburbia. Every now and then a car would pass by overhead as it ran through the water, slick like a buzz saw. A few other unlucky wanderers huddled near the top of the concrete embankment of the underpass, threatening her with their silence. This was their space. They must have been there since before the rain, waiting it out. They were dry and hungry-looking. Thea hitched up her backpack, clutching her injured arm against her stomach. Not that it did any good. The front of her was stained watercolor red, her injury smeared like a scrolling marquee: Hey, I’m injured. Come and get me.

  Up. North. It was an association she’d never quite shaken from childhood. North was up on the rose compass, and her mind followed that path ever since. Orienting herself to the actual geography of land was difficult and unsettling, and even though she knew the path she took now was northward, it felt down—south. She got lost often, mixing up streets that she’d grown up on. Once, when their family cat got sick, Thea was volunteered to take it to the vet after school. She’d ended up being late as she drove up and down and up again Fifty-Ninth Avenue looking for the right building, which was actually located on Sixty-Seventh Avenue.

  Directions were never her strong suit, and because of it, she was ill-suited to street life. Good thing was that one didn’t give much of a shit about being suited for anything once there. If she wasn’t high or trying to get high or coming down from a high, she was thinking about getting high and walking in a big circle around Union Avenue, hoping to run into some heroin along the way.

  The Greyhound station and CASH NOW Loans faded into a ritzy bank with a solar-paneled car park and a gourmet donut shop.

  Thea was not going to see her sister. No, she was not. She just needed an easy score. Maybe needed to stop inside an urgent care for stitches (a joke, of course). All sorts of reasons for her to be near Doris’s house after being explicitly told to never come there again. Or something like that. What Doris had actually said was, “Just leave.”

  The thing with her older sister was that it never mattered what she said, but what she didn’t say. It exhausted Thea just to be in her presence; the constant duality and double-speak was too much for her. Just say what you mean or say nothing at all, she believed, and if she asked her sister, Doris would probably say that she subscribed to the same policy. But that wasn’t true. Doris was the loudest fucking person Thea had ever known. She screamed at people through clenched teeth and smiles, effortless in her disdain for them and everything they stood for.

  She and Doris never quite clicked as sisters. They never had a conversation, just a childhood of cymbal clashes. They existed next to each other, measured side by side, and Thea was always found lacking beside her sister’s glow. Doris the scholar, Doris the beauty, Doris the chosen one with her honorary name (after their mother’s favorite triple threat, Doris Day). Doris had been planned, wanted.

  Thea was the afterthought, the whoops. She joked, mostly to herself, that they simply started to write The Accident on the birth certificate but lacked the fortitude to finish even that, much like her upbringing. She’d never say it aloud, on the off chance her parents might confirm it true.

  Poor her. Poor ugly little sister. It was a nasty hole, and she’d spent a lifetime scratching her way out of it. But no matter how long she ran, she always managed to circle back here, feet plodding onward toward the one person who hated her most. Thea’s comeuppance.

  The rain had picked up. It was difficult to walk against the slanting sheets. Little droplets pinged her like needles. Bleeding, with a ripped jacket, she wandered until a sliding noise and then a long hissing whine exploded behind her. A squeal and a crunch and a slide—metal on metal—grabbed her out of her thoughts. A silver sedan with Oregon plates hydroplaned on the road and slammed into a Prius. The road churned with muddy brown water. It ran southward, against her, pulling away from the sky that dropped it. Fucking morons thinking they could drive on roads like that, let alone pass someone. The driver of the Prius popped out immediately, circling his car, shielding his eyes against the rain. The people in the sedan never so much as cracked their door. Thea recognized the glow of a cell phone.

  The weather was nasty. Something ominous sank into her bones. She needed to get out of the rain, away from the road. Thea had the sudden idea that she wasn’t safe out here. Sensing bad shit coming was a highly attuned sixth sense of hers. Her lifestyle lent itself to shit going wrong often.

  But this was bad bad. She trembled all over, unable to stop her limbs from clattering together. Her adrenaline spike faded, replaced by the grip of hunger and nausea all rolled up into one gelatinous lump of shit.

  She pressed the wound on her arm harder to try and slow the bleeding, but it didn’t help. Red poured into puddles at her feet and adrenaline spiked her legs into longer strides. She felt the sudden urge to hurry, a feeling of being watched that she couldn’t shake or outrun. Thea had learned enough times to obey that instinct when she recognized it, as if some ancient, primal receptors were picking up on a threat her mind was too slow and stupid to see. And whenever that happened, there was only one person to which she thought to turn, no matter how much they might hate her.

  Doris.

  Trying to forget about the rain, about her blood spatter trailing her path like breadcrumbs, Thea tunneled toward the only solution she had to all her current problems.

  Whether she would be allowed beyond the front stoop remained a mystery, but once the idea was there, it beat against her skull until she listened. It was a way. Not the best way, but a way, and critical thinking beyond that simply annoyed and exhausted her.

  Thea went to her sister.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Doris ignored her phone as it buzzed in her tote. Every time it growled for her attention, she would stop writing, posture drawn up like a dancer in her chair, and try to pretend it wasn’t annoying the hell out of her. She did this for an hour, until it buzzed more often than it didn’t. Her music did little to drown it out. She felt it ringing in her bones.

  She threw her headphones off her ears, whipping them to the floor in a disjointed heap. Jesus Christ, this day. It was just a little rain. Without bothering to read or listen to any of her messages, she texted James before his panicked head exploded.

  WATER IS ONLY UP TO MY KNEES. WILL CALL ONCE REACHES MY NECK PROVIDED I CAN STILL MANAGE TO OPERATE A TELEPHONE.

  Heat slapped her cheeks. She could just feel James’s indignance radiating at her through the phone.

  “Is anybody ever allowed to worry about you?” he’d asked her during one of their rotating arguments. “I get that you don’t need me. You’ve made that perfectly clear, but do you want me anymore? Have you ever?”

  Doris hadn’t answered him. There hadn’t been an answer to give, not one that would make him feel better. His question was a can of compressed snakes disguised as peanuts. She could say yes, which would be a lie. But no wasn’t any closer to the truth.

  They hadn’t spoken more than a few icy pleasantries in more than a week because of it, but not even that stopped him from refilling the vase on the table. Sometimes Doris wished he would just stop. It’d become more of a taunt now, whether he meant it to be or not. He still cared. He was trying.

  She could just leave him. No. She wouldn’t give any of them the satisfaction.

  The storm had picked up during the torrent of nauseating worry attacking her phone. The walls shuddered. Thunder shook the house from the ground up, jostling something in the attic so that it hit the ceiling with a thud.

  Tink tink tink. Little tinny pings
emerged behind her. The roof was leaking, a wet spot on the ceiling near the front door pooling in the center and dropping water onto the picture frame holding their wedding photo. She really ought to deal with it, dry the frame and leave a bucket under the leak, but the thought of standing up and bending to get a bucket and bending again to lay it down and peeling the photo free of the metal frame brackets and drying it so that it didn’t warp—simply the thought of all that sparked an exhaustive panic.

  But she couldn’t focus. Starting and stopping and erasing and starting again. Nothing worked. None of her words were right. A fog settled over her brain. Everything became sticky.

  Then came the dread, knotting her insides like the ends of a string being pulled tighter and tighter in opposite directions. The fuzzy unknown of it, something primal screamed at her, You’re in trouble. Something is wrong.

  It came and went all afternoon. Panic, then a moment of rationalization and a scan around the rooms to convince herself she was crazy. Just a little rain. Just another shitty day. Times like these, she enjoyed going out onto the back porch with a cup of herbal tea, but the water crept dangerously near the lip of her patio, and honestly, she didn’t want to open any of the doors. But it wasn’t because of the rain. It was something else.

  Her mind instantly went to James, and she again checked her phone. Nothing since her last text. Quiet. Her words had obviously hit their mark. But even so, James couldn’t not dictate his every move to her. If he was coming home, he’d have said so.

  Her mother, perhaps. No, she hated the rain. She hated driving. Her mother would not come here today, which Doris learned to treasure as the only positive to a weather most despised.