“You’re gonna be home tomorra, if not tonight,” Mamere had said as Sylvia slammed the trunk to her car.
“Yeah right,” Sylvia had mumbled under her breath.
Mamere, just as sharp of hearing as she was with always knowing what you were doing or thinking said, “I heard that, girl. Jus’ wait and see.”
Sylvia didn’t bite. She kept moving, checking that the straps on the roof of her car were tight. She didn’t have much, and she couldn’t afford to have it blowing off the roof of her car on the way to New Orleans.
“Now, LSU is a plenty good school. It’s closer too,” Mamere said, stepping in front of the car.
“I didn’t apply to LSU,” Sylvia said. “I got a scholarship to Tulane and I’m going.”
“Oh? Too good for LSU?”
“You know that’s not it,” Sylia sighed. Why did it always have to be this way? Why did Mamere always have to make everything so difficult?
“So now you know what I know? Is that how things are?”
Sylvia checked the straps on the other side. All good. She was ready. It was time to go.
Looking back at the house one last time before she got into her car, something wet smacked against the side of her face.
Sylvia brought her hand up to her face and wiped at her cheek. Looking at her hand, she saw the wet strings of tobacco-laced spit hanging from between her fingers.
Mamere stared her dead in the eyes, a little smile playing at the corners of her lips.
“That’s what you are now to me,” Mamere said, spitting agin. This time on the ground though. “Nothing more than trash. You jus’ a spit bottle.”
The words slid over Sylvia’s tongue, slipped between her grinding teeth, and shot out from between her lips. “Fuck off, cunt.”
Mamere took a step back, her filthy, shitty smile gone, then she took a step forward.
Sylvia now expected physical violence.
“You are dead to me,” Mamere said. “Don’t you ever call or come ‘round here again. I’ll take a fuckin’ knife to your gut if you do. Gut you like one of my hogs.”
Sylvia hadn’t said another word. She got in her car and left the little place behind in her dust, but now she was back in the house. Papere was dead and Mamere had lured her here.
Great.
Sylvia shook her head and walked to the front door. She had some things to say to Mamere when she called her. Oh yes she did.
Sylvia turned on the porch light, opened the front door, and started to step onto the front porch. Her foot never touched the wood of the porch though.
A huge mound of the dusky black flowers huddled up against the steps that led up to the front porch.
A single red bloom open, facing her.
7
“Fuck me,” Sylvia whispered.
The mound of black flowers was enormous. Stretching at least ten feet to all sides, there was no way Sylvia could jump it. She couldn’t even attempt it, because the stress put on the decayed wood of the porch would probably crack it in half and she’d plunge through.
After closing the front door, Sylvia walked straight for the back door.
The same thing greeted her there though: a huge mound of black flowers that stretched far enough away that Sylvia knew she couldn’t jump the distance required. Again, there was a red flower situated at the center of the mound.
Sylvia shook her head and leaned out the door to look to either side of the back porch. What she saw terrified her. The black flowers stretched out in either direction, pressed up against the house, huge mounds in front of the windows.
“No,” Sylvia said, closing the door and walking to Papere and Mamere’s old bedroom. She looked out the window there and saw a huge mound of the black flowers, a single bloom in the middle open in a red starburst of color.
Sylvia went into the bathroom that connected to the bedroom and slid open the window.
When she poked her head out, she saw that the same thing lay just outside.
The exact same thing.
Sylvia sat down on the toilet, trying to think. Her bladder cried out and she pulled down her shorts and obliged. Pants around her ankles, elbows on her knees, Sylvia tried to think her way out of this mess.
What she really didn’t understand was how quickly the plants had crept up to the house. She remembered thinking that they’d gotten closer to the house before she passed out, but they’d barely moved at all. Did they move faster at night?
And what time was it?
Sylvia cleaned up and stood, bending over to pull her shorts up.
Sylvia flushed the toilet and walked back into the bedroom, sitting on the bed. Her eyes drifted over to the digital alarm clock on the bedside counter.
It was 3:00 AM.
Thursday morning.
She’d been unconscious for five days.
8
“Five days,” Sylvia mumbled, scratching at the back of her neck. “How have I been unconscious for five days?”
Sylvia kept scratching, staring at the red numerals on the clock. When she quit scratching, she saw that she had dirt under her fingernails.
“Gross,” she said, turning her nose up and then laughing. Dirt was the least of her worries right now.
Sylvia picked the dirt from under her nails, but the dirt didn’t flake away like dirt.
It smeared.
Like plant matter.
“No,” Sylvia said, getting up from the bed. “Nononononono.”
In the bathroom again, she stripped off her shirt and turned her back to the mirror. She turned her head so that she could see the mirror from the corner of her eye and let out a defeated little, “No.”
Her neck had three purplish bumps on it, each had a twisted black root sticking out from the bump. The tip of the root was red.
The same deep red as the inside of the dusky blooms that surrounded the house.
“Oh God,” Sylvia said, a shiver of disgust ripping through her even as she reached her hand around and grasped one of the gnarled roots.
She gripped it tight, eyes wide as she kept her eyes on the mirror. She felt the root grip her hand right back, trying to pull back inside the bump.
“No,” Sylvia said, pulling the root away from her neck and watching as the bump grew larger.
She shook her head at the mirror like that would change what she was seeing, but she didn’t quit pulling. Her mouth opened wide all on its own as the bump grew to the size of a large marble. The apex of a black bulb peeked through the hole where the root terminated.
Sylvia kept the pressure steady, not giving any ground back to the root and the bulb under her skin. She kept pulling, watching as more and more of the bulb squeezed out through the hole.
The root gave one last jerk against her fingers before the bulb slipped out. It was the size of a marble and hung heavy between her fingers. Its skin was a wet, shiny black that was mottled with flakes of crimson.
If not for the twisted root erupting from the top, it could be mistaken for a bizarre egg.
“Wow,” she whispered.
The egg-looking bulb twisted in her hand and she let go of it, watching as it fell to the tile. Something deep inside of Sylvia hoped that it would crack open so she could stomp out whatever lay sheltered inside.
It didn’t break open.
It didn’t shatter.
It bounced.
It didn’t bounce high, maybe only a foot and a half off the tile of the bathroom, but high enough for Sylvia to see the bulb open up into a black flower. The new flower landed on its petals, twisted root sticking straight up into the air.
Sylvia watched as the red tip of the root poked farther out of the black sheath. The red tip lengthened and narrowed so that it terminated in a sharp point.
It stayed like that for a few minutes, and Sylvia was trying to come up with a plan to destroy it without stabbing herself on the point of the root when the point tilted to one side and then slammed into the tile, embedding the tip deep.
&nbs
p; The flower lifted up from the tile and opened completely. The edges of the petals looked damp and wrinkled, like a newly emerged butterfly’s wings do as it dries.
At the red center of the drying flower, Sylvia could see three sharp looking fangs where the pistil should have been. Sylvia stared at it, trying to figure out how to destroy it. To her right was a weight scale.
She picked it up and dropped it, topside down, onto the flower, then she jumped onto the scale, twisting back and forth against the tile, grinding the flower into nothingness.
With that finished, she kicked the scale away to see her handiwork.
The flower reared up from the tile, sharp pistils shooting at her, trying to embed their barbs in her.
The flower looked just as it had earlier. Sure, the tile had black smudges on it, but the flower was completely untouched.
Sylvia’s shoulders fell and a little defeated breath leaked out.
If grinding it into the tile hadn’t worked, then cutting it wouldn’t work either.
Sylvia walked back to the bedroom and sat on the bed, staring at the flower. It swayed from side to side as if a soft breeze blew through the bathroom.
Sylvia tried not to think about all the other places where the barbs had hit her in the back. She tried not to think about all the bulbs that grew inside her even now.
She didn’t see the point. If she couldn’t kill the flowers after digging them out, what was the point in digging them out at all?
“That’s stupid,” she said under her breath. “Can’t let them eat me up like...”
She let the sentence trail off, not wanting to thinking of Papere’s scarecrow corpse, as she stared at the swaying black flower with the fire red center.
“Fire?” She mumbled.
Sylvia racked her brain. How do you light a flower on fire in a house? She didn’t have a blow torch. She could drop a burning paper towel on top of the flower, but what if she caught the house on fire? She would then be faced with the decision of either burning to death or making a run for it and getting dragged down into one of those dark piles of flowers, eaten alive.
No, better not use a paper towel.
What then?
Mamere and Papere had never bought one of those long barreled pistil lighter things, and even if they had, Sylvia was pretty sure that that the long tip of the lighter was too short and would bring her within range of the barbs.
Sylvia broke her eyes away to search the bathroom. There was nothing she could use.
Sylvia let out a loud grunt of frustration, wracking her brain for something she could use.
“Fucking plant,” Sylvia yelled at it.
Putting her hands on her face, she rubbed her eyes, and when she opened them, found herself staring at the cabinet beneath the sink. The cabinet where Mamere kept all of her beauty stuff.
Sylvia smiled wide.
That was it. That’s what she could use.
Assuming Mamere hadn’t packed up all the beauty stuff, there would be a bottle of aerosol hairspray.
“Yes,” Sylvia crowed. “Gonna burn you up.”
Getting up from the bed, Sylvia headed to the kitchen. She grabbed two things: Papere’s book and the box of quick strikes they always kept in a drawer beside the sink.
“Yes,” Sylvia repeated. “Gonna burn you the fuck up. Get ready.”
Sylvia headed back, tossing the book on the bed and tucking the matches into her back pocket before entering the bathroom.
Just inside the door, Sylvia reached her leg into the bathtub, keeping her back to the wall.
The red center of the bloom tracked her movement.
“Yeah, keep watching me. I’m about to burn you up. Get ready.”
Sylvia leaned out of the bathtub, grabbing the scale up from the tile. The flower shot out a single barb, but it fell two feet short of her.
“Just a baby, aren’t you? That’s fine though,” Sylvia said, holding the scale over the flower. “That’s perfect. Adult, adolescent, or little baby. Doesn’t matter to me. Either way you’re fucking dead.”
Sylvia dropped the scale onto the flower. She stepped onto the scale and gave it a quick twist before squatting down to open the cabinet, saying a tiny prayer in her head to God or anyone else who might be listening.
At the back of the cabinet, in the corner, was a dusty can of Aquanet.
“Bingo,” Sylvia whispered to the bathroom.
She picked the can up and hopped back into the bathtub, heart thudding in her chest as she crouched down. She was so excited. Time to kill the little fucker, and then all the others that were in her.
After lifting the scale from the flower, Sylvia laughed when it shot a feeble barb at her, again falling way short.
“Poor baby,” she crooned as she pulled the matches from her back pocket. “Poor wittle baby.”
The lid of the Aquanet clattered around in the bathtub after Sylvia popped the top. Pointer finger held against the nozzle, Sylvia struck a match. A little smile played at the corners of her mouth.
“Fuck off, cunt,” she whispered, pressing down on the nozzle. Her tiny smile broke wide open.
9
The can of Aquanet farted, a little plume of flame ignited and then went out. The plume didn’t get anywhere near the flower.
“No,” Sylvia moaned. “Come on.”
Sylvia shook the can. She neither heard nor felt anything.
“Shit,” she said, hurling the empty can at the flower. The edge of desperation peeking around the corners of her voice scared her.
What scared her even more was the voice in her head that whispered, This is how you die, Sylvia. Mamere killed you. You’re already dead, you just haven’t realized it yet. Why don’t you just walk outside and dive into the flowers? It’ll take less time.
“I’m not finished yet,” Sylvia said, stepping out of the bathtub.
She heard a barb click against the tile behind her, but she didn’t care. It didn’t get anywhere near her ankle.
Sylvia walked to the kitchen, not thinking, just running on autopilot. She pulled open the cabinet under the sink and hunkered down, a relieved smile lighting on her face as she peered in at all the aerosol cans.
Cans of Pam cooking spray, Lysol, and scrubbing bubbles cleaner.
Sylvia picked up the can of Pam. It felt heavy in her hand and when she shook it, she was happy to feel sloshing inside.
She grabbed all three cans and headed back to the bathroom. After hopping into the tub again, she popped the lid off the Pam, setting the other two cans down. The red center of the flower swayed in the bathroom.
“Take two,” Sylvia said, popping a match before bringing it in front of the can.
She pressed the nozzle down for half a second and a huge flame erupted with a loud whoosh.
“Good,” Sylvia said. “Let’s get to it.”
Sylvia struck a new match and aimed the nozzle at the flower, leaning out of the bathtub as far as she dared. A barb shot from the flower, but again it was short.
Good.
The flower swayed back and forth in the nonexistent breeze, not even aware of its impending doom.
Sylvia didn’t say a word, pressing down on the nozzle for all that she was worth. A huge jet of flame shot out from the can and hit dead center on the flower. For a few moments, Sylvia couldn’t even see the flower through all the flame.
When Sylvia let up on the nozzle, she saw that the flame had carried all the way across the bathroom and that the cabinet was on fire.
The black flower just swayed, fire licking along its petals, not a care in the world, not even a little damaged.
Sylvia let out a scream of frustration, dropping the can of Pam into the bathtub. She picked up the Lysol, stuck a match, and lit the spray from the can on fire. When she let go of the nozzle, the flower was still swaying, flames still licking at its petals.
Sylvia sprayed it with Lysol, maybe it would work as poison. Maybe that’s what would kill it.
The flames on its p
etals lit up, but just as quickly guttered out, allowing Sylvia to douse the flower in Lysol.
Nothing happened.
The flower kept swaying.
The cabinet was truly in flames now.
“Goddammit,” Sylvia cursed. She’d been so sure that fire would kill it. Didn’t fire kill everything?
Sylvia shook her head. She knew better now.
Turning on the faucet to the bathtub, Sylvia let her cupped hands fill with water before tossing it at the burning cabinet.
She extinguished the fire on her first try.
At least something was finally going ri—Sylvia interrupted her thought, “It’s smoking.”
The cabinet was smoking, but that wasn’t what she was talking about. She was talking about the flower.
Little holes had appeared on the red center of the flower. Little, smoking holes that grew larger as she watched. The flower started to shake.
Sylvia didn’t think. She cupped her hands under the water and started tossing out handful after handful, buffeting the flower with water, screaming victory as the flower disintegrated before her eyes.
Even after the flower was laying in soggy pieces on the tile of the bathroom, Sylvia didn’t stop. She kept hitting it with water, worried that the root might try to bloom again. She wouldn’t let that happen.
Sylvia thought about the spiderweb veins of the overhead tubes in the greenhouse. It wasn’t an automatic watering system, it was a fail-safe.
Sylvia kept tossing water on the flaking root, tears blurring her vision as she thought of Papere trying to get out of the greenhouse, or trying to hit the fail-safe, but failing to reach it before the dusky black flowers took him.
She could see Mamere smiling from the back door of the house. Maybe she cut the water to the greenhouse and locked him in. Sylvia wouldn’t put it past her.
After tossing the cans out of the bathtub, Sylvia stripped. She plugged the bathtub and sat down, letting it fill with warm water.
Now that she knew how to kill the flowers, it was time to destroy them.
Once the water was up to her belly button, Sylvia turned off the faucet. She brought her right ankle up so she could see it below the water. That was the place where the barb had ripped out a chunk of her skin, but hadn’t stuck.
Darkness Blooms Page 3
