A Flood of Posies

by Tiffany Meuret

  Her breath puffed from her mouth and disappeared as she stalked through the empty field. Look, I’m smoking! She was big and grown and she could handle this, just like adults did that were old enough to smoke. They wouldn’t be afraid of some stupid school.

  Which was when she saw it. At first it seemed like nothing but a shadow shifting under a distant streetlight across the street, nothing to worry about, until two long gray arms broke away from the shadow. Doris saw just enough of them as they knuckled at the ground like a runner at a starting block, gearing up to charge her, before she launched into a full run in the opposite direction.

  Dropping the broom, she ran as hard and as fast as she could until the school was out of sight.

  It wasn’t until the next day that she returned home. Police cars spun their lights in her driveway, and her mother sprinted across the lawn to snatch her up. Missing, they said. Fourteen hours. Her mother dug her nails into her shoulders so hard she drew blood, shaking her.

  “Where were you?”

  But every time she tried to answer, her mother barked over her.

  “What happened?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Where were you?”

  “I thought you’d left me again.”

  “I thought you left.”

  Thea wailed in the other room. No one seemed to hear it. Police oozed around her, shining lights on her and asking fast questions that Doris didn’t feel like answering. And Thea cried and cried.

  She escaped her mother’s grasp and sought out her baby sister with a parade of adults behind her. She was in her crib. Where her head lay was a wet stain. Doris yanked the baby free and tucked her against her chest. Thea didn’t stop crying right away, but her shrieks mellowed enough that she could stop gasping.

  As if feeding from the same hysterical teat, just as Thea calmed, her mother ramped up. Such serenity would not do when mother was just so upset. First her father, then the cops had to physically restrain her as she tried to claw her way toward Doris.

  “Where were you? What happened to my baby?”

  She didn’t see her mother for the rest of that day. Maybe they sedated her or cuffed her to the fence in the backyard—Doris never asked. Eventually, the fear would fade. The hair color of the policewoman who had softly pulled her aside would be forgotten, the screeches of her mother would sound like all the rest, and all that would stick to her till adulthood would be the slither of monsters and the smell of her baby sister’s head as Thea fell asleep in her arms.

  Doris gripped the edges of the ladder. Three-year-old Thea sat at the top of the slide.

  “Ready?”

  Thea nodded.

  “Hold on.” Doris shook the ladder, softly at first, and her sister giggled.

  “More. Sissy, more!”

  So she shook harder. Thea had a high tolerance for danger, and it was Doris’s job to make sure she knew the line and when not to cross it. It didn’t matter that Thea was only three. It didn’t matter that she herself was only thirteen. As Thea’s laughs turned to whimpers, Doris considered stopping. She hated scaring her, but this was the game. She had to scare her so that Thea understood what it meant to be scared.

  “Sissy!”

  She shook harder. Thea’s hand lost its grip, and she wobbled to one side.

  “Sissy, stop!”

  Doris stopped just as Thea was about to topple headfirst over the side. “That’s what it feels like.”

  Thea released herself and squeaked down the slide. “Earf-quake,” she said.

  “Yes, earthquake.” Her baby sister had been terrified of earthquakes since last year, when one struck in the middle of the night. No amount of consoling or treats could stop her wailing.

  Thea paused, keen eyes watching. Doris folded her arms, observing the sequence of signs that preceded an explosion of compressed toddler. Blink. Rub the nose. Sniff sniff.

  But then she grinned and screamed, “Monster! Monster!” The little girl sprinted off, head turned over a shoulder, expecting a chase.

  Doris launched after her. It was almost dinnertime. Thea screamed like fireworks, and if Ma figured out what they were up to, she’d separate them again.

  “Monster!”

  This was the game, and like all good games, it was meant to teach. Late at night when both were meant to be sleeping, they’d climb under the covers of Doris’s bed and talk about what scared them. For Thea it was nearly always earthquakes, and for Doris it was monsters. Thea needed to know what was out there and how to be prepared if she met it—or it met her.

  It’d been years since her last monster sighting, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there, watching and waiting.

  Doris tried to keep Thea quiet, but couldn’t shush her if she tried. Instead she chased after her, hoping to corral her near the back of the yard, farther away from prying eyes.

  They had to be stealthy about it, though. Ma didn’t approve of such uncouth talk like that of monsters and earthquakes, and sometimes would peek a head in Doris’s room as they read, pinching her lips together as she listened. It bothered Ma that even though Thea’s room glittered her blind with princess sequins and frilly pink, it was the matte dark of Doris’s brooding teenagerhood that appealed to the little girl. Though that could have been simply for the fact that Doris herself was there. Things like darkness and sadness never penetrated little Thea. Perhaps she was too young, or maybe she was just too thrilled to have ten fingers and ten toes that she didn’t even realize they were there.

  Doris refused to allow her sister to be caught off guard like she herself had been that day. She would never let that fear get ahold of Thea. And since Ma had forbidden talk of anything but frills and perfect teeth and dinner parties, she had to be covert in her training, or Ma would employ the most tactical weapon in her arsenal: keeping the sisters apart.

  “You need to keep quiet, Thea. Or Ma will hear.” Doris said.

  The yard was a big square of yellowing bluegrass with a shed near the back wall that had nothing in it but a lawn mower and a nest of black widows. Did spiders live in nests? There were a lot of them, anyway, and along with the shed being dangerous, it was also Thea’s favorite place to play. It was where she was heading now.

  Doris overtook her, putting herself between Thea and the shed. It’d been plopped in the yard as if a tornado had spun it over the fence and her parents had just decided to keep it there. As such, there was a two-foot space between the back of the shed and the wood fence. A perfect burrow for tiny humans with zero sense of personal safety.

  “You’ll get stuck,” she said.

  Thea giggled and tried to pry her sister’s legs apart so she could crawl through them.

  “There’s spiders.”

  “Spiders,” she repeated, but didn’t stop.

  Very few things scared Thea, and that infuriated and terrified Doris. Thea was small and didn’t know any better, but Doris didn’t think that really mattered. Nothing seemed to faze the kid. She pushed through mud and bugs and heights and falling, shouts and screams and fights and breaking plates when Ma got particularly ornery. She sat through the stories that Doris read at night with lessons about monsters in the woods and witches that ate children. Nothing settled beyond that innocent glitter perception that was childhood. Thea was smart. She didn’t question the truth; she just didn’t think it would ever get to her. Unless it was an earthquake.

  And then there was Doris, looking over her shoulder enough for them both. She grabbed her little sister by the wrist. “Did you find anything good?”

  Thea perked. “Maybe over there?” She pointed toward the house.

  The faucet turned on at the kitchen sink. The plumbing was bad, and it clunked like a bowl of rocks every time it was used. Ma was at the window.

  “No. Not that way. Let’s go sit by the tree.”

  “No
, sissy. Over there!” Thea exploded down the center of the yard. Doris was about to thunder after her when the girl’s foot caught in a hole, and she tripped, chin hitting ground before anything else. It was a slight not even tough three-year-olds could forgive, and she burst into a wail.

  Doris was the first to reach her, though Ma wasn’t far behind. “What happened?”

  “She tripped.”

  Ma leveled a deadly stare at her firstborn. “What were you doing?”

  Ma’s eyes turned to the crying Thea, expecting validation, but Thea said nothing and continued to cry in Doris’s arms. Ma sized the pair of them up with a huff.

  “Why don’t you come inside, and I’ll give you a cookie?” Their mother lurched a hand toward her crying child and Thea accepted. No allegiance could defy a cookie, and Doris released her so that she could hobble away toward the kitchen. She’d forgotten about her limp before she even reached the door.

  Doris thought she’d snuck under the radar until her mother craned her chin over a shoulder and called to her, “Clean yourself up. You look homeless.”

  Thea skipped inside the house, shouting, “Homeless! Homeless!” Her toddler lisp made it sound more like home-wess. Doris grinned despite herself, following her family back inside the house.

  Ma and Thea had their backs to her as she entered through the sliding door. Thea was pulling boxes out from the bottom shelf of the pantry in a frenzied hunt for snacks while Ma pecked around her like an agitated crow. “Put that back. Not those. Thea, stop—no candy! Where did you even find that?”

  Their dad plunked himself into his blue velvet recliner, acknowledging Doris’s presence with a curt sigh as he reached for the remote. She fled to her room, shut the door, locked it, then immediately unlocked it.

  Ma wasn’t totally wrong—her shirt and hands were covered in gray from the metal ladder of the slide. It was an old and dirty thing purchased when Doris was little. It’d just sat in the yard being consumed by weeds until Thea had grown old enough to use it. To this day, Doris had to trim back the plant life with Ma’s kitchen shears (though she never told her mother this) to keep the earth from claiming it entirely.

  She changed. She washed up. She pulled her hair into a smooth ponytail. The click of her father’s recliner signaled the start of dinner, and Doris followed the noise like a farm bell. If Ma was lacking anywhere, it wasn’t as a cook. She made some damn fine food.

  Tonight was roast with potatoes. Just by smelling it, Doris could pick out the individual spices her mother had used—garlic, onion powder, black pepper, cumin, and some bay leaf. Nothing fancy, but good food didn’t need to be.

  Thea poked the plate with her fork, and Ma rapped her hand. She didn’t speak, just folded her hands in silent prayer and waited for the rest to follow. Dad didn’t bother, just lifted the paper to his nose until it was done, but the girls didn’t possess such luxury.

  Since this started six months ago, Doris had learned not to make a noise until her mother spoke. Ma said they needed some spirit in their lives, whatever the hell that meant.

  “What have you two been up to today?” Ma asked, scraping a broccoli floret from her plate with a fork. Apparently, the prayer was over.

  “Just playing.”

  Thea scooped up some rice. She wasn’t listening.

  “Playing what?”

  “I don’t know. Games. Tag. Hide and seek.”

  Ma crushed her vegetables between her teeth. The constant gnashing filled the small void between sentences.

  “That’s all?”

  Dad folded his paper and started shoveling food down his throat. Thea missed her mouth, raining potato bits onto the floor.

  “Do you know what they were playing?” Ma asked her husband. He groaned.

  “Games, so I hear.”

  “Not just games. I was watching.” Ma ignored her food while leveling a vicious stare at Doris.

  “We were just playing, Ma.”

  “You were doing that damn monster game again. I saw it. I heard your sister while I was slicing potatoes.”

  Running her finger along the tines of her fork, Doris stared at the plate of food in front of her that she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to eat. “It’s not a monster game.”

  “No,” Ma said. “It’s a hideous taunt.”

  The usual retorts spun circles in her head, but she said nothing.

  “Do you really want to be known as the girl that talks endlessly about these things? A girl that speaks of monsters? People talk. Kids talk.”

  “I don’t really care.” She said it even though she knew she shouldn’t. It was the truth, but it wasn’t her feelings they were talking about.

  Thea crunched her food happily.

  Ma’s eyes scorched the top of Doris’s bowed head.

  “It’s unbecoming!” Her mother spoke as if she was about to spit a broken tooth at the table.

  “What do you know?” Doris stared at her now. The conversation lit the room like a match every time it was brought up. A part of Doris couldn’t wait to snuff out her mother’s flame with a bare fist, just to prove herself.

  Ma talked about monsters like she knew them. She didn’t know shit, because if she did, she’d have noticed the one sitting at the table with them.

  Dad pushed his chair away from the table, picking up his plate. He left the room in a squeak of wood to linoleum. It was his loudest acknowledgment of the nonsense. Or, at least, that was how he’d have put it if he’d bothered to speak.

  “You need to stop this.”

  The TV kicked on in the living room, volume just loud enough to make them shout.

  “Why can’t you just leave us alone?” It couldn’t have been heard over the television, but it was cathartic to speak the words aloud instead of just thinking them.

  “What did you say?”

  She wanted to tell Ma to go away. She wanted to run away, but for real this time. She wanted to take Thea with her. She wanted her mother to hug her. She wanted a thousand things that she knew she’d never get.

  “You speak up when you’re talking to me, girl.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Stop lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  Ma pounded on the table. “Don’t you dare lie to me! And you don’t fill your three-year-old sister’s head with monsters. There’s just things you don’t do, and you’re old enough to know the difference.”

  Taking an aggressive bite of food, her mother dropped her fork on her plate before she realized what she was doing. It was rude to drop a fork like that. Doris absorbed the sound of it without reaction, but Thea giggled, then dropped her own silverware onto the floor.

  Her laughter was like an echo of hiccups until Ma reared back and slapped it right out of her. The sound of her open palm striking Thea would never leave Doris’s mind. It was irradiated, like toxic waste. The kind of thing a person kept with them forever.

  It wasn’t until Doris jolted upright and snatched her close that Thea began to cry. Ma white-knuckled the edge of the table and screamed, “You see what you’ve done?”

  Clutching her sister close, Doris clamped her teeth together and stared at the Mr. Coffee pot drying on the rack by the kitchen sink. She stared into it like a portal to another place—seeing herself grabbing it and hurling it at her mother’s face; smashing it on the floor in a froth of shattered glass; or rubbing it like the magic lamp in the stories she read to Thea, wishing for the genie to give her wings.

  In the time it took for her mother to pry Thea away from her, Doris saw all these things, and her teeth were just beginning to peek through her lips in a smile when a rough shake yanked her back into the kitchen—the real kitchen. The kitchen where Thea was howling, and her mother was shrilling, and Doris was praying she could melt into the floor.

  Ma had slapped Doris more th
an once, but for some reason, it never hurt like this.

  “Go!” Ma said and pointed toward the hall. “Just go.”

  She meant to her room, but Doris went to the front door instead.

  “Don’t you dare— Larry, stop her!”

  Larry—Dad—kicked his recliner into place as if constipated, forcing a too-slow lurch that missed his lithe daughter by a mile. Doris was three houses down and could still hear her mother shrieking, but that was fine. Ma wouldn’t dare chase her now, not in public like that.

  Twilight made it dark and fuzzy outside, with just enough light to keep the shadows away, but not enough to see well. She marched down the street to the sound of her pulse throbbing in her ears like a battle drum, wondering what she was going to do now. She couldn’t go home for a while—probably not until she was sure Ma had gone to bed, or else there’d be hell to pay—and she was already exhausted. The fight was gone. She thought of Thea’s scarlet cheek and pulled her arms against her chest.

  Ma would dote on her; Doris was sure of that. Ma would make her forget, at least for tonight. Knowing that just made Doris feel worse and walk faster.

  Toward that corner. Toward that bush and that broken streetlamp that had never gotten repaired, even after Ma complained about it at the HOA meeting.

  The neighborhood still buzzed with people—cars up and down the street, headlights into driveways, kids playing, and other kids being called inside as the streetlights popped on. Outside smelled like exhaust and the sour stench of the blooming carob trees that guarded the entrance to the school. She hated how those trees smelled—it was an artificial, almost antiseptic scent that shouldn’t come from trees. It didn’t help that they produced a poor replacement for chocolate that tasted as offensive as the blooms smelled.

  She was running away again, but only for the evening. Her feet ached in anticipation of the long night, remembering her fourteen-hour adventure three years ago. Ma had thrown the nightgown she’d been wearing that night in the trash. She’d said it was because it was ruined. What she didn’t know was that Doris had snuck out a second time the morning of trash pickup and fished it out again. She wasn’t sure what instinct made her do it, but on nights like tonight, she was so glad that she did. The grittiness of the fabric, the tears and stains were all a comfort to her. They were like stamps or tattoos; they marked her. She kept pieces of it on her always, usually in a pocket or stuffed in her backpack. Then when she eventually did leave for good, she could leave it out like a letter, saying all she ever wanted to say but couldn’t, and imagine her mother eating crow.