A Flood of Posies

by Tiffany Meuret

  The words tumbled out, all the things she’d sworn never to repeat. Her face stung, but when she tried to cover it, she found her arms pinned to her sides by Rob.

  “She told me about the monsters! She told all of us and now look where we are!” It was funny. So funny. Fucking hilarious, really. Her body seized in a fit of cackles. Lookee here! Look at all this mess! Look at her. Look at them.

  A violent shaking erupted below her, as if they were skimming the top of a boiling pot of water.

  Look for them. They’re here.

  She was mad. She was perfectly aware that she was losing it. None of this was normal—she wasn’t normal, the posies weren’t normal, the water wasn’t normal, the flood wasn’t normal. Nothing was right and she was suddenly bereft at the idea that nothing, ever, had gone according to plan. Maybe if it had, none of this would have happened. Doris would be alive. James would be alive. Ma, hopefully, would still be dead.

  And she would be floating somewhere—between men, drugs, jobs, but always floating.

  The shaking worsened, pulling the world apart with a roar. Unrestrained, she clutched her ears. Light leaked away; down the drain it went.

  They’re coming.

  They’re here.

  She screamed, calling for Mijo and Rob. Calling for her sister.

  So loud was the noise that it soon became an entity of its own. It couldn’t be heard, because she couldn’t hear anything—the screaming had just always been, like a tinnitus she’d learned to ignore.

  There was a yank, something massive anchoring itself to the molecules that made up her body. It didn’t feel like a rope or a restraint, more like a state of being, and her current state was drowning.

  Swell.

  Just fucking great.

  They’re coming . . .

  . . . they’re here.

  And then it was black, aside from a voice she was certain did not belong here.

  Although the dead didn’t belong anywhere.

  It was James. What was he doing here? He was talking to her. What was he saying? Why was he here? What the fuck was going on?

  Why was this happening again? James was dead.

  I’ll drive you.

  Thea had laughed in his face. Where was James planning to drive her? To his house? But it wasn’t shame that ultimately made her refuse. She reached into her front pocket and rubbed the torn leather just to make sure it was still there. His wallet had been so easy to swipe. She could have dangled it right in front of his face, and he’d have let her take it. He was so damn ashamed. Guilty. But something about him walking through the front door, reaching for it, that gut-punch when he couldn’t find it . . . Or maybe the next morning, while getting ready for work, he’d ask Doris if she’d seen it. The thought was thrilling to Thea. So fucking satisfying.

  She supposed she should feel guilty too. The memory was a blur, an aftershock to her high. She’d just shot up in the bathroom of Café Lex, snaking her way down the hall back to her corner booth to her order of ice water and toast, when a chirpy little voice had called her name. She hadn’t seen either James or her sister in months, having been tossed out by Doris after going through her kitchen drawers. Thea had been looking for scissors to snip the scratchy tag of her shirt, but Doris hadn’t bought that. Thea wasn’t sure she did either, honestly.

  Words were said—misses you this, call me that, are you okay, and other such addiction pleasantries. We care. Well, thank God for that. Thea fully admitted she was an addict—not all addicts would say as much—but the problem was she didn’t fucking care. She wasn’t responsible for their fucking feelings anyway.

  He’d slid into her booth, looking terrible. Thea knew the symptoms of sleep loss, and he had them. She might have asked if he’d been sleeping on the couch, and he might have laughed a little and then gone quiet. She might—might—have felt a pang of sympathy for the guy. Because she knew exactly what it was like to feel that way. Perhaps they’d talked for a long while, because she hadn’t spoken too much to anyone in weeks, until the waitress asked them to leave. Or they could have just walked to his car together after he’d paid for a plate of pancakes and some coffee and then offered her a ride to wherever she was staying.

  He’d probably tried to give her money, and she probably took it if he did—to get on her feet, of course. The details had melted away in a haze of desperation and sadness and the comforting lull of heroin dropping a curtain over her inhibitions. Whatever the steps, the fact remained that she’d stolen his wallet without shame or sympathy, reveling at the ease of it, of how stupid he was, and then she was sitting behind a dumpster feeling the foam innards of his old leather wallet bursting from use.

  He’d asked where she was staying.

  “A friend.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  He’d drive her to rehab, he meant. As if transportation was the only thing holding her back.

  The cracks in the concrete etched at her skin as she rifled through the wallet. Her jeans were weathered to almost nothing. A few dollar bills spilled to the ground. The air smelled different—like monsoons. The sky flickered in her peripheral vision, dust billowing up around it. A haboob, people were calling it. A shitload of dirt with just enough rain to make it a muddy brown paste that stuck to fucking everything. She needed to get high.

  Visa, MasterCard, voter registration—shit, brother-in-law Boy Scout was an organ donor too. Thea turned the wallet inside out. She could use the cards for today. He wouldn’t know it was missing for at least an hour, not until he came to senses, and it wasn’t like he was going to dispute the charges.

  Yeah, I need to speak to someone about my cracked-out sister-in-law who stole my wallet after I swore I wouldn’t have contact with her. Don’t tell my wife.

  It was funny, and she laughed. A wedding picture tumbled out, and she kicked it out of sight. Thea remembered the wedding fine enough without the photo sentiment. James, perhaps, could use a reminder.

  Snatching up the credit cards, she dumped the wallet over her shoulder, and something metal clinked against the cement. Thinking it was some loose change, she scrambled for each precious cent, only to find James’s wedding ring. White gold, she figured by the dents in it. White fucking gold. Who the fuck was this guy? She was almost disappointed he was this stupid.

  Gold.

  Boy, things were really starting to look up.

  From the bottom of the sea, up was the only place left to gaze.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Doris stood in the middle of the road. Her bare feet stamped the asphalt in blood from a cut on her heel. She couldn’t feel her toes anymore. It was cold—heavy breaths issued from her mouth, steam rising like clouds before her eyes.

  This was what it must be like to smoke. That’s what her friends would say, and though that couldn’t possibly be true, she liked to pretend along with them—two fingers to her pursed lips, blowing clouds behind the monkey bars.

  Look at me! I’m a grown-up.

  It was fun because she wanted to be a grown-up. She wanted to have responsibilities and a job and her own house. She wanted to go far away. She wanted to be able to decide whether she could smoke. Instead, she was still a stupid kid without any shoes wandering the streets in the dark, thinking about things that were too far beyond her to be a comfort.

  The street tumbled forward through a severe dark that looked like a wall of rock, something she just didn’t have the tools to penetrate.

  She’d been running a few blocks, but a noise had made her stop. Or she thought she’d heard a noise. A car, a person walking a dog. She should be home in bed with the baby monitor tucked under her ear. Most girls don’t sleep with baby monitors, and she wasn’t supposed to either, but every night after Ma fell asleep, she snuck into her room and stole it. There was something about her sister’s cries that kept her up at night—they were wild and unmanage
able. Ma called it colic. Doris called it fear. Even her baby sister, just months old, understood what came to cradle her in the night. Even a baby knew that Ma was worse than any bellyache when she got in a good fit. So Doris took the monitor, and when Thea cried, she made sure she was the first to reach her.

  It was then that she realized she’d left the monitor on her bed. Ma wouldn’t hear her if she cried tonight. No one would, but Doris had to keep that thought stuffed deep down. She couldn’t worry about her sister now, not when those things were out there. Those monsters.

  Lights reared behind her as a car turned the corner and cruised toward her. Without thinking she sprinted forward, slipping unnoticed into the dark space under the broken streetlamp.

  Not a rock after all, just an absence. From the shadows, she watched the sedan crawl by and disappear around another curve. She hadn’t been spotted—not by the people in the car, at least.

  A crunch made her turn. There was nothing up or down the street to have made the noise. It sounded like tires on gravel—a pressed and heavy sound. The tears came, and she hated herself for it. She couldn’t cry. She had to stop crying. Crying was for the guilty and the uncomposed. Crying is what attracted them.

  She only saw them when she cried. Only when she was terribly upset. She’d been six or so the first time. Ma had taken her candy away for smarting off, and she had gone wild. Much of the moment washed away in a blur, but what had stuck was the brightness of the sun as Ma pulled away from the window, the rattle of her candy down the sides of the metal trash bin, and the thing—the monster—watching her through the window while Ma’s back was turned. It was made of teeth and arms, iridescent and angry and smiling, its dozens of hands pressing against the glass as it leaned in to watch her.

  She screamed when she saw it then, cried as she remembered it now. Ma had sent her to her room without dinner that night, telling her that she could eat when she stopped making up stories to garner sympathy. At the time, Doris didn’t even understand what that meant, but she quickly learned to keep quiet about it. Though that didn’t seem to stop them from coming—to her school, to her dreams, to her bedroom window at night. Then, like tonight, outside Thea’s window.

  Doris flung herself through the front door in search of it, but her adrenaline quickly evaporated into terror. What started as the noble protection of her sister morphed into a flight for her life. She ran at them and from them at the same time, and now she was blocks away, bare-legged in nothing but a nightgown, hiding in the shadows and waiting for a monster.

  What she would do when she found it remained a mystery.

  She looked around for her mother, expecting her to pop up from behind a bush or climb down from her perch on a street sign. Ma was like liquid—she could be anywhere and everywhere. Every noise out here made Doris jump, just like at home. Because she knew she was doing something bad, just like at home.

  The middle school ahead buzzed in a spray of yellow light, shadows of streetlights and trees crosshatching its boxy profile. This was the school she would go to one day, when she was bigger. She shouldn’t be here at nighttime—she shouldn’t be here at all, being only ten, but that had never stopped her before. The storage shed facing the racquetball courts was usually unlocked. There might be extra shoes and shorts in there. Maybe a hockey stick or something to swing with.

  Avoiding the front parking lot, she snuck along the perimeter of the school until she reached the chain-link fence surrounding the field. The track looped through the center of it like a bullseye, the shed she aimed for just beyond the track. Fingers clasped around the metal links, she hopped over easily, just like all the other times she’d tried to run away. There were sand pits for long jump and tennis courts on the other side, but no playground. No swings or monkey bars or any of the good stuff. It always made her sad to think about the kids sitting around with nothing to do. They must be so bored.

  Another pair of headlights rounded the street, landing on her like searchlights. Panic hit with a suddenness, and her body reacted in kind. As the car approached, she scrambled up the fence, flopping on the other side. She didn’t look back to see if the driver stopped, imagining an angry adult shaking a fist at her as she ran.

  Darn kids!

  There were fancy words for what she’d just done, words she didn’t know yet, but that didn’t erase the gravity of it—fear was reliably inarticulate. Her feet hit grass, then the bouncy rubber of the track, alternating again as she crossed the second half of it. She didn’t stop until she hit the racquetball courts. Cement shocked her shins into submission, and she slumped next to a water fountain to catch her breath.

  There weren’t any trees here, not like at her school. The entire field, in all its vastness, sat exposed and unprotected. The storage room was just around the corner.

  Allowing her small body a moment to calm, she was just about to get up when that noise came again. That crunching sound, but this time there weren’t any cars to blame it on. Every molecule froze, sweat sticking her back to the metal fountain despite the chill.

  It was just her imagination. That’s what Ma would say. Just her silly little brain creating silly little nightmares for no good reason. Just her imagination. All she had to do was get to the shed and then she could go.

  Crack.

  Like the snap of a twig, but there weren’t any twigs on the racquetball court. Her heart pumped all other sound out of existence, and her mouth was dry. It was there, watching her, that monster with its dozen hands and terrible grin. That thing that loved to watch her. The thing she chased away from Thea’s window. And she was alone with it, exposed in the night, with nothing to keep them apart but a rickety water fountain.

  She imagined it squirming on the other side, felt the displacement of air as it shifted. It was there; she knew it was there.

  Without looking, she flung herself upright and broke into a wild sprint. The slap of her bare feet against the pavement echoed through the empty courts. She didn’t stop until she reached the storage room, swinging the door open and slamming it shut in one swift motion. This, as it turned out, was a huge mistake.

  There were no lights and no windows in this tiny room. It was dark as pitch. She couldn’t see a thing.

  Back against the cool metal door, she patted herself down, making sure she was alone more than anything. Legs and arms, fingers and toes, everything was there. Something clattered to the floor a few feet away and she screamed. Probably a bunch of stacked equipment, maybe a rake or a broom by the sound of it. Still, her mind ran amok with the possibilities.

  Her vision tried desperately to adjust, but there just wasn’t enough light to see anything. It was just her and the dark and that thing out there somewhere.

  She spent minutes listening for movement. A bird chirped oddly somewhere in the distance, rotating different calls as if on a loop. It was probably the same bird that would keep her awake some nights. Her dad had said it was mockingbird. They liked to call at night for some reason, which she knew because it was dad out in the night bum-rushing the tree in the front yard in his underwear as Ma yelled about that damn bird keeping the baby awake.

  “That’s what mockingbirds do,” he’d say. “What do you want me to do? Shoot it?”

  Now, all its hollering was comforting. Birds were usually the first to take off when danger was afoot. If the bird was yelling, maybe it meant the monster had gotten bored and left.

  Feeling a little bit bold and a lot blind, Doris risked cracking the storage door just a tiny bit just to allow some light inside. Spying the field through the sliver of an opening, it appeared that she was alone, and so began rifling through the mess of basketballs and orange cones for anything she might be able to use. There wasn’t much—there was one pair of old cleats that looked and smelled as if they hadn’t been used in years and a chest plate like the one they used when playing kickball at school. The hockey sticks were gone, and the rest she
could see were maintenance items like trash bags and a yellow mop cart with a broken wheel. Unless she planned to pelt the monster with a few deflated dodgeballs, she didn’t have many options.

  Somewhere in the time she’d been tossing equipment about, the mockingbird had fallen silent. She wouldn’t have realized it if not for it starting up again, loudly and suddenly just outside the shed. She was considering the broken handle of a broom when its screech bounced through the room. It could have been just outside the door.

  This time she didn’t scream, not even when she clattered backward, landing hard on her butt, resulting in a severely bruised tailbone. Keeping the broom handle close to her chest, she was beginning to lose sensation in her fingers as she gripped the splintering wood with all her strength.

  Birds don’t do what this bird was doing. They don’t follow little girls in the dark. They don’t leave their comfy trees for empty fields.

  She thought about just staying here all night and waiting for someone to find her. Slam the door shut and wait it out. Someone would find her. They’d find her and keep her safe. They’d take her home.

  And then she’d be home. Ma would be so angry. What would Doris say then? I saw the monster? I was running away? I was sleepwalking? Nothing would work. There wasn’t any excuse that would make Ma not be furious.

  She had to get out of here. She was cold and scared, and at least if she was running for her life, she’d have something to do besides think about how much trouble she was going to be in later. Who knew how far away she might get if she took off now and never stopped?

  But making the decision didn’t make opening the door and facing it any easier. Peeking through the opening, she searched for anything—a bird or a monster or her mom, anything.

  Nothing moved.

  Using the end of the broom handle, she knocked the door open just wide enough for her small body to slide through. The creak of the door was deafening, but as it whined to a stop, she was more relieved than anything. Nothing else was there. The mockingbird was gone.