A Flood of Posies

by Tiffany Meuret

  An urgency crept into her gut, winding up to her chest. She was missing something, forgetting something, but what?

  A cluster of neighbors and Ma’s friends—so total strangers as far as Thea was concerned—huddled around the loud man, drinking him in like the prized possession he must have been to have been invited in the first place. The few other men in attendance remained congregated in the back, where they could burn shit and pretend their testicles weren’t still in the house, lost somewhere in their wives’ purses.

  A firm hand dropped onto her shoulder. “You look ill.”

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  “You were up there for twenty minutes.”

  Jesus fuck, did she need a smoke. Something was off. The fireplace was roaring but it was so cold inside. She should have smoked with the bathroom fan on. Ma wouldn’t have said anything with all these people here. It murdered Ma’s sense of propriety to have such a young daughter that smoked those cancer sticks. Just twenty years old, and look at those lines around her mouth, look how brittle and dry her hair was, just look at her, Helen.

  Thea didn’t actually know any of Ma’s current friends’ names, but Helen was a good moniker for the kind of lady Ma dragged home at the end of her social grappling hook.

  Like a breeze that shouldn’t exist indoors, Doris slipped down the stairs, head turned toward the crowd. Her presence distracted Ma enough that Thea could slip from her grasp and flee into the kitchen.

  Their mother descended on Doris, sweeping her eldest daughter into the crook of her arm with a grin. New Guy—whoever he was—had to reach out and snatch her away. Doris accepted his hand.

  Thea filled a tall glass with ice from the fridge ice machine, dumped it out in the sink, and filled it again.

  “There’s ice in the cooler, dear,” Ma said without looking.

  “I know.”

  The drinks were lined up along the kitchen island, and she thumbed through the plastic jugs of soda and punch, until she finally settled on the beer. Nothing but Coors. At least it was better than Bud Light.

  She never did end up needing that ice.

  Beer in hand, she drifted to the nucleus of the party. Time to observe the fresh meat.

  Mid-story, New Guy was spinning a yarn about falling on his ass while skateboarding when he was a teen. Yak yak yak. Same old shit. He was handsome enough, same chiseled jaw and haircut straight out of the Marines that Doris seemed to like so much, but Thea quickly grew bored of his self-deprecating tales. It was never the men that captivated her as much as the way her sister swung them about like jewelry. She wound her arm through his; she smiled; she nodded. She did all the things a good girlfriend should do—an enamored, beautiful, perfect girlfriend. And yet Thea could fit a fucking boot through the space she maintained between their bodies.

  She orbited her sister and New Guy—the stars of the party, whatever the fuck it was for. Probably just to celebrate the fact that Doris had graced them all with her presence. Doris showed up, thinking she was just going to introduce this new guy to the folks, and the second her regal feet touched the foyer, their mother rang the entire fucking neighborhood. My God, everybody! She’s here! Hark, oh hark, ring the steeple bells.

  But Ma was stupid, because all that fanfare did was back Doris into a corner. It made her edgy and sharp and sullen. Thea skirted through the people unnoticed, the same family as Doris—same born-again uncle, same noxious auntie, same neighbors across the street who’d watched her grow up. The neighbors that had hand-painted Christmas ornaments for them every year, but it didn’t matter how many ornaments had her name glued onto them. Thea skipped over the top of the family like a rocket. Everyone glared—oh, they looked at her, all right—but their attention fizzled out just as quickly. They darted away from her as if she was about to burst into flames. She might. Maybe she already had, and everyone could see it but her. Look at that girl, waltzing through the chicken skewer buffet as if she’s not shooting sparks everywhere. Thea’s head had been soaked in a fog lately. Perhaps they all knew something she did not.

  But her mother didn’t seem to notice. The tilt of the room was off, but Thea couldn’t quite place it. She wished Doris would just leave. Then the party would collapse, and Thea could escape.

  Doris was like gravity—everything spiraled out of control without her around.

  Thea was itchy for some nicotine. Water dripped somewhere she couldn’t place, and the noise of it agitated her beyond measure.

  Dad nodded at her as she escaped to the side yard to smoke. It was a nice place—dark and hidden, and she had a lawnmower and an old garden hose to keep her company. The exterior light had gone out last year, and to his credit, Dad kept it broken despite Ma’s nagging. Or Thea liked to think he did.

  If not for the treacherous orange end of her cigarette, no one would ever have known she was there. So when she heard the crunch of approaching footsteps in the gravel, she knew it was someone looking for her.

  “Mind if I join you?” said the man. Doris’s man.

  “Are you following me?”

  “Forgot my lighter.” The shadow of a cigarette bobbed between his lips.

  “And you follow strange women in the dark on the off chance they got one?”

  Though she couldn’t see too well, she could feel the white of his teeth aimed at her.

  “Your sister has told me a lot about you.”

  Thea extended her lighter. “That so?”

  “Sure.”

  Thea laughed. He was a terrible liar, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

  “I’m cutting back,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “They say they’re bad for you, but I say that no one who’s ever been a smoker would say something so stupid.”

  Even in the dark, she covered her smile, not wanting him to know he created it. “Seems to be going well in there.”

  “They’re easy.” New Guy dropped his ash into the rock and coughed. Cigarettes really were awesome.

  “Unlike Doris.”

  “So you say.”

  This time she laughed for real and not in the kind way. She just loved the “you don’t know her like I do” talk from new flings. As if their dick tapped into some top-secret emotional reservoir.

  “She’s going to eat you alive,” she said.

  He glared at her, cigarette pinned between his lips. “What fun is an easy life?”

  She could have thrown up right there if not for the cigarette keeping her mouth busy. “Your funeral. Don’t come crying to me when she spreads your ribs with her fingernails.”

  Water sloshed around her feet, gathering at a rate that should alarm her, but this guy was fucking bugging her. The water could wait.

  “Goddamn, you two really are alike.”

  Thea crushed her cigarette and immediately lit another. Ash dropped into the sloping rivulets forming on the side yard. “So, she has spoken of me.”

  “You talk like the entire world is nothing but sharp teeth.”

  “Well, shit.” She sucked in half the new cigarette in a single drag. “Maybe we are onto something.”

  “You’re both obsessed with monsters.”

  “And what would you know about monsters?” The response was immediate and defensive. What did this motherfucker know about anything? What right did he have to even bring it up? He corners her in the dark and starts prying at her mind like he owns real estate there or some shit, and what—is she supposed to just be happy that anybody cared enough to ask?

  New Guy snuffed his cigarette underneath his shoe and started to say something but stopped.

  “What’s your deal anyway?” Thea asked. “It’s not like you’re marrying her or something.” Water now soaked both their feet. They ought to go inside soon, before this really got out of hand.

  And finally, he had nothing to say. Th
e party spun into sudden clarity. The punch and the beer and the people—people everywhere—and the fascination with New Guy. The way Doris wound herself around him.

  “Well, aren’t I dumb? And me without a gift. When’s the happy day? Or I suppose that doesn’t really matter, does it? Since it’s you telling me all this in a dark corner rather than my lovely sister.”

  “To be fair, there was a party.”

  Any other time, she might have laughed, but not now. At this moment, indignation overrode her common sense. Was she the last to know? Or had she just not been listening? Not that this was ever important, so long as she showed up and followed the rules. Like Doris. Always like Doris, yet always not.

  “I suppose it’s appropriate that I know my future brother’s name.”

  “James.” Thankfully, he didn’t bother to offer a handshake.

  James was a fool. He would always be a fool. Frankly, she’d thought better of Doris before having met him. The water was up to his waist now, and he didn’t even notice. Just kept smoking his stupid cigarette.

  “I believe this is my cue.” She had to swim. Time to swim. The flood was coming.

  He didn’t try to stop her as she escaped through the side gate, though she thought she heard him whisper some dumb shit like, “Nice to meet you, Thea.”

  Nice to meet you, brother.

  Then the water washed him away, cigarette and all.

  Sestra awoke with her nails pressed into the floor, trying to stave off the flood of her dream. It had been so vivid. So real. She could still smell the smoke from those cigarettes. The memory of James’s voice clung to her, blotting out anything else.

  Her sister was there. She could have reached out and touched her. She could have grabbed her by the shoulders and screamed at her. You don’t know what’s coming. Run! Go somewhere safe. Somewhere far. But she didn’t, and Doris was still dead.

  That feeling of wrongness had carried over.

  It seemed like nothing at first, just a bad feeling in the back of her head, like the zing of a knife being pulled from the knife block. It was dark and it was late. Rob’s snoring hummed behind her from where he sat, rested against the wall, sleeping upright as always, despite the extra space.

  What was wrong? She knew this feeling, had known it all her life. By now she’d learned to trust it. What was wrong?

  The floor hatch lay ajar, propped open on its spring-loaded hinges. The boy was gone.

  “Fuck,” she said, and sprang to her feet. “Fuck.”

  Rob stopped snoring but did not open his eyes.

  Sestra had tried for a week to get the kid to do anything beyond following her around. A boy-shaped growth had developed on her side, wrapping around her torso where his arms had clamped on and not let go. His constant watching was unnerving—she couldn’t tell if he was terrified and looking for comfort or plotting her murder. Either way, one of them was shit out of luck.

  But now he was gone, and Sestra found the boy’s sudden absence far more upsetting than his clinginess. It took only a moment to understand why.

  After a quick scan of the dark cabin, she bolted up the steps and onto the moon-stained deck.

  She said, aloud and for herself, “Where are you, boy?”

  Water sloshed up the sides of the boat—thu-thunk swish, thu-thunk swish. The night was heavy with brine, and it coated her skin like ropy tentacles. It stung her eyes until they watered. What was wrong? What the fuck was wrong here?

  “Kid?”

  She found him at the back of the boat, balancing on the rail, his top half staring at the black water below. Just a thin, waif-like shadow of a creature that used to be a child.

  “Get down from there, kid,” she said. Her voice broke like a pubescent boy’s as she spoke the words. “Mijo. Vámonos. Now.”

  The few phrases he’d managed to utter in her presence had been in Spanish, and it was only through the grace of introductory Spanish class in high school that she had any words at all to use on him. Vámonos. Rápido. Me llamo Sestra. ¿Donde está la biblioteca?

  But the kid ignored her as he always did, and his trance-like stare at the water unnerved her more than it should have. Logic tried to explain away her fear—he hadn’t moved until now, in the dark, alone. Did he do this every night? Had she truly been that oblivious? Did she really have so little grasp on this child, boxed up in the floor, that she’d had no idea he was sneaking out every night?

  But that’s not what unnerved her.

  What was he looking at? That was what propelled tremors down her arms. That was what made her legs refuse to cooperate with her brain.

  “What are you looking at, kid?”

  Thu-thunk swish. Thu-thunk swish. Thu-thunk thu-thunk thu-thunk thunk thunk thunk.

  The water changed, disturbed, because there was something in it.

  “Kid!” she said—screamed it, actually. His feet tottered on the rail.

  Fury, terror—a slew of confused emotions corralled her senses, and sprinting for the boy, she caught him by a heel as he tipped his weight over the top of the rail.

  “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck off, you sonofabitch!” Angry words poured out of her, uncontrolled, not stopping until she had the kid pinned on the deck underneath her knees.

  She expected fear out of him—big confused eyes, watery and terrified—but instead, he looked past her as if in a trance. “Conmigo,” he said. “Conmigo.”

  “What are you saying?” she said, gripping him until the flesh of his arms turned white.

  His gaze snapped away from the sky and onto hers.

  Rob appeared in front of her, splitting his disapproval between her and the boy.

  “He was looking at something,” she said. “I didn’t see what.”

  Crossing his arms, Rob didn’t speak.

  “Just . . .” Sestra fought to catch her breath and her nerves. “Just take him downstairs.”

  “Ses . . .”

  “Take him the fuck downstairs!”

  Rob kept his attention on her a moment longer before motioning to the kid. Helping him up, he thrust the boy toward Sestra. “You take him.”

  Then he disappeared again, escaping into the engine room.

  Upset water rapped against the boat. “Go,” she said. “Go go go vámonos, Mijo. Vámonos.”

  She was leading the boy by the shoulders across the deck, nearing the stairs, when the boat lunged. It bellowed as if the earth split in half and they were being sucked into its molten center. White, foamy water broke across the deck, and the boy skidded out of reach. His eyes were big now, all white and full of fear. This time he caught himself before being flung overboard.

  Sestra toppled forward, splayed on her belly. The water whipped her skin.

  Then it was done.

  Just the one wave.

  A hand thrust its way out of the engine room, followed by another gripping a long pipe, followed shortly by Rob’s face and body. After a militaristic survey of her and the boy’s condition, he took off toward the back of the boat.

  The bite on her ankle stung from the salt, but otherwise she felt okay. The boy scrambled along the slippery deck on his hands and knees, his spindly limbs like a spider, scrambling toward Sestra, then beyond her into the cabin, not stopping until the floor hatch slammed down with a splintering force.

  The boat resumed its usual rhythm, and if not for the wet deck, she might not have guessed anything was wrong.

  For all her run-ins with posies, she’d never actually seen one. Just bits of it, a smear just under the surface. But it was big and was always in more than just one place. She and Rob could watch in opposite directions and see it at the same time. That gluttonous marine-blubber skin, iridescent gray—could be a whale. Maybe a dolphin. Fuck, a shark even. A shark was fine. But then it was there and here and there and everywhere, and it was clear that it was
no damn shark or whale.

  That’s what scared her the most. Eyeballs alone bigger than her own head, and yet it eluded her so easily. It was faceless and pervasive, and she didn’t know when or why it would come or when or why it would leave.

  “Do you see it?” Rob said from somewhere else.

  Thu-thunk swish.

  “No.”

  Somehow manifesting just behind her ear, Rob said, “Maybe it left?” The pipe dove pointy end down into the deck. His knuckles were white around the other end.

  “It’s still there. It could be under the boat.”

  Under the boat, just a few planks of rotting wood between the boy and the monster he was hiding from.

  Grabbing the pipe again, Rob paced the boat. Circles and circles, staring at the water and grunting.

  “What are you going to do with that pipe anyway?” she asked.

  “I’m going to kill it.”

  “With that?”

  “You got anything better?”

  “I’m not trying to kill it.”

  “What are you planning to do then?”

  She didn’t honestly know. “Watch it.”

  “Watch it kill you.”

  “What if I do?”

  “Then why bother at all?” He stomped off toward whatever part of the boat Sestra did not occupy.

  Sestra had little plans to move anyway, so his maneuvering was all for naught, though sometimes the act itself was all the catharsis a person needed.

  Why bother at all? What he meant was why didn’t she just kill herself? She wondered that sometimes. Why keep fighting? Fighting was exhausting, and she was so tired.

  And then she’d think about those slimy-skinned monsters waiting for her down there, and she’d rather be anywhere but with them. She’d die alone, sun-scorched and dehydrated on an old tire, before giving those things the satisfaction of taking her.

  A slap against the surface of the water just to her left sent her spilling her way toward the sound—a cat on ice, not a sliver of grace left within her. Rob beat her there, but whatever had made the noise had disappeared.