Darkness Blooms (5 page)

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 petals 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.

The wound was red, but she didn’t see one of the twisted black roots sticking out and when she probed it, she couldn’t feel a bump under the surface.

“Good,” Sylvia said under her breath. “One less thing I have to pull out of my body.”

Sylvia put her leg back straight, tilting it to the side so that she could get at the back with her fingers. Three purplish bumps pressed out against her pale skin.

She grasped the root poking out of the bump closest to her knee and applied steady pressure. This bulb didn’t pull back against her fingers. It slid out of her with the same amount of effort that the one on the back of her neck had.

Sylvia held the bulb in front of her face, frowning.

It wasn’t smoking.

None of the holes were appearing.

What the hell?

Sylvia was about to toss it onto the tile when the flower bloomed right in front of her face. Feeling the root try to grab hold of her fingers, she shook it loose from her hand with a scream.

It flew through the air, turning end over end, right for the water at her feet.

Sylvia pulled her knees up to her chest right before it plopped into the tub. The flower vibrated beneath the water like fat thrown into a hot pan.

The water bubbled and steam rose. Soon, the water stilled and the flower was no more. There was nothing left. No bits of root, no flower petals, nothing.

Sylvia shook her head. “So only the inside is vulnerable to water. Wonderful.”

Sylvia didn’t chance another accident. She pulled the remaining two from her leg, tossing them onto the wet tile and waiting for them to open before deluging them with handfuls of water.

She did the same with the six on her back and one of the two on her ass. She left the two in her neck.

When she pulled out the last one from her ass, she dropped it into the tub on purpose after stepping out. The bulb sunk to the bottom of the tub, gently swaying as the water rolled back and forth from Sylvia’s departure.

She watched what happened, or rather what didn’t. The bloom didn’t open. Whether there was an intelligence that knew it was surrounded by water or it was just a survival mechanism, Sylvia didn’t know and didn’t care.

The bloom wasn’t opening and that was all that mattered.

Not bothering to dry off, Sylvia headed to the kitchen. She grabbed two empty coffee tins from above the stove where Mamere always kept them. Mamere poured grease into them after frying something.

Heading back to the bathroom, Sylvia’s thoughts drifted to the cooking lesson she’d received at the hands of Mamere. The lesson she’d never told Papere about.

When Sylvia had been little, she always wanted to be Mamere’s helper in the kitchen. One day when Mamere was napping—she always napped after watching her daily dose of
Days of Our Lives
—Sylvia snuck into the kitchen to make Mamere breakfast in bed.

It was really lunch on couch, but Sylvia didn’t know any better. She got the big pot up on the stove and filled it to the very top with vegetable oil before clicking the burner.

She was very quiet so as not to wake Mamere.

When the oil felt hot enough—Sylvia held her hand over the pot like she’d seen Mamere do—and looked hot enough too with the little clouds of what she thought was steam rolling off the top of the hot oil, she dragged a chair over to the fridge. After hopping up onto the seat of the chair and opening the freezer, Sylvia pulled out a whole frozen chicken.

Mamere had fried chicken legs, wings, and breasts, but she’d never fried a whole chicken before.

Sylvia would surprise her.

Dragging the chair over to the stove, Sylvia dropped the whole frozen chicken into the pot.

To say what happened next was a disaster wouldn’t do the word disaster justice.

The pot erupted as the displaced oil surged up and over the edges of the pot, dripping down to the burner where it burst into flame. Standing next to it sounded like standing next to a roll of Black Cats being lit on New Year’s Eve.

Sylvia screamed, as much at the noise and the flames as the burns on her arms where the oil splattered.

Terrified, she stepped away from the burning stove, stepping right off the back of the chair.

She fell to the linoleum of the kitchen floor, crying out as her ankle twisted under all of her weight.

Mamere burst into the kitchen, eyes wide and teeth bared.

She looked at Sylvia crying on the linoleum and sneered. “Oughta let you burn up for this.”

Mamere turned her back and walked away. Sylvia thought she was being left to burn alive and screamed at Mamere to help her.

Mamere kept walking.

“Mamere, help me,” Sylvia cried.

Mamere didn’t turn around. She kept walking away, but she never left the kitchen. Instead she opened the pantry and pulled out a box of baking soda. She walked back to the stove and smothered the fire with the baking soda.

Sylvia looked up at Mamere like she was a conquering hero, the tears of fear turning into tears of happiness that she wasn’t going to be burned alive and that she had such a brave Mamere.

Mamere closed her eyes and nodded at Sylvia in a knowing way. Sylvia stretched her arms out to the woman. Wanting her to take the pain in her ankle and on her arms away.

“Jus’ a sec,” Mamere said as she pulled on a pair of oven mitts and turned away again. She picked up the pot and moved it to a different burner.

Sylvia watched Mamere as she paused for a moment and then jostled the pot hard enough so that a big wave of oil rolled over the edge and into the air.

Sylvia watched the oil fall toward the linoleum, confused as to why it was falling toward her outstretched ankle. The hot oil splashed against her ankle and shin and Sylvia screamed as the skin sizzled.

Mamere was on her then. So fast that Sylvia didn’t even know what was happening. Mamere grabbed her shirt collar and ripped her up off the linoleum. She picked her up so hard that her balled fist caught Sylvia on the underside of her jaw and Sylvia’s teeth clicked.

Fresh pain blossomed in her mouth and she tasted blood.

Mamere pressed her nose against Sylvia’s, their foreheads touching.

“I’m sorry,” Sylvia cried out, pushing against Mamere. “I’m sorry, Mamere. I’m sorry.”

“Not sorry enough,” Mamere said, dragging Sylvia by the collar of her shirt over to the stove.

Sylvia put her hands out to stop herself from falling into the pot. The hot oil still on the stove burned the palms of her hands and she screamed as Mamere brought the hand not balled up with the front of her shirt to the back of her head. Mamere guided her head toward the hot oil still in the pan, little islands of baking soda rocking on the surface.

Mamere’s hot breath blew into Sylvia’s ear. “You ever fuck up my kitchen like this again and I’ll put your face in the oil next time. See what a pretty girl you end up then.”

Sylvia had blinked away her tears and the one thing she never forgot was the crackling sounds her tears made as they fell into pot.

Back in the bathroom, Sylvia shook her head, looking at the still submerged bulb. It was still pristine. Nothing wrong with it.

Sylvia set the coffee cans on the edge of the bathtub and fished the submerged bulb out of the water by the root, tossing it away from herself on the bathroom tile. The bulb bounced and bloomed, catching itself on its petals.

Sylvia waited for the root to embed itself into the tile.

The root embedded itself, but it didn’t go for the tile. It hooked into the drywall and lifted itself up to face Sylvia.

Sylvia snorted, not really sure why she would be surprised at this. She shook her head and started dousing the flower with water. It disintegrated away into nothingness like all the others had.

She nodded at this before filling both of the coffee cans up with water. She reached around to the back of her neck and pulled out the two bulbs there by the roots.

She dropped a single bulb into each can of water and sealed them both. With that done, she turned to look in the mirror, checking her neck, back, and legs for any bulbs that she might have missed.

Once she was satisfied that all the bulbs were gone, she got into the shower and turned it on, allowing the spray to shoot into the holes left by the vacated bulbs. She rubbed soap over the holes, irrigating them with hot, soapy water. When her pinkie slipped inside one of the holes left by a bulb, she bent over and retched. After her stomach stopped heaving, she glanced down at the porcelain of the bathtub, and saw black drops splashing down on the white porcelain. Sylvia decided it would be better to finish up with her eyes shut.

Sylvia stayed in the shower for thirty minutes, letting the scalding hot water clean her.

She stepped out from the shower, and dried off. It would be easier to get dressed if she was dry, even if she was planning on getting right back into the shower.

Sylvia pulled on her clothes and started going through the closet.

All of Papere’s clothes were still hanging there. That alone made Sylvia frown. The lack of dust on the clothes made her teeth grind.

She knew Mamere. Mamere hated cleaning more than anything else in the world. There was no way that Mamere would dust off Papere’s clothes for a whole year. She would’ve just tossed all of his stuff in a closet and left it there.

That meant that Papere hadn’t been “missing”, a.k.a. dead, for a whole year.

Sylvia wondered how long Papere had been out there, mounted to the post like a scarecrow, and her mouth fell open.

What she’d thought in the beginning wasn’t even close to the truth.

Papere hadn’t gotten trapped inside the greenhouse and he surely didn’t mount himself to the post and just wait for the carnivorous room to twist into life and devour him.

“No,” Sylvia said to herself. “No, someone strapped you to those posts. Someone put that mask on your face and that coat on your back. Someone...”

Sylvia was quiet for a moment. Thinking things over. Mamere was frail when Sylvia left home so there was no way that ten years later she would be strong enough to lift Papere against the posts long enough to mount him there.

So who would’ve helped Mamere?

Who would have a reason?

Sylvia didn’t have the faintest.

From the closet, Sylvia pulled out a long sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt, a light jacket, and a heavy jacket. She pulled out three pairs of pants and three pairs of socks. She also pulled out Papere’s steel toe boots. On the top shelf of the closet she found a heavy beanie, a Kangol, and a trucker hat made of mesh on the sides and back and foam on the forehead. There were also a pair of gloves. They’re were driving gloves though, fingerless and perforated.