Bury the Children in the Yard (9 page)

Definitely disability, she thought.

He also wasn’t as old as she had thought. Certainly not old enough to be retired. He was maybe only ten years or so older than she was. He had beautiful eyes. They were something like blue but not. Or not like any blue she had ever seen before.

She coughed, trying to break her trance. It wasn’t her intention to make him feel like some kind of circus freak.

“Umm, sorry, Mr. Johnson. I think this is for you.”

Confusion filled his eyes until she proffered the package toward him.

“I think it’s flowers or something,” she offered. “I didn’t think they should be left outside.”

Then his eyes lit up and maybe, just
maybe
, there was a little bit of madness there.

“Ah, yes! That’s very good indeed. I can’t believe they sent them to the wrong house. Come in out of the cold. Please.”

“Well, I just live right next door. I’ll be okay.”

“No, come on in. You have to see this flower. A girl like you should appreciate beauty like this.” Her cheeks blushed past their already cold-reddened state. He wiped a hand across his mouth, his eyes now greedily glued to the package. “It only takes a minute to look, right? Besides, we won’t see flowers for months around here.”

He took the box out of her hands quickly and turned around, heading into the house.

She hesitated for only a second before following him. There was something inviting about his house once she stepped all the way inside. It was incredibly warm, for one thing. Balmy. And it smelled good. She struggled for a second to think of what the smell reminded her of and then she had it. The ocean. Brent Johnson’s house smelled like the ocean.

He sat the box down in the center of the oak kitchen table and grabbed a knife from one of the drawers to the right of the sink.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this at all.”

Expertly, he sliced open the box. Rather than just cutting the tape and lifting the flower out of the box, he cut along three edges of the side that faced him. Then he slid the knife out of the box and held it up to the fluorescent light that hung over the table.

“Would you look at that,” he said, his eyes sparkling with wonder, his lips turned up in a smile, deepening all of the scars that covered his face.

She didn’t know what to think. She didn’t really pay that much attention to flowers but this one was certainly impressive. It reminded her of an orchid, the way the blooms hung at the end of a long stalk. But the blooms were huge, probably the size of her fist. They were a purple color, deep deep purple and it almost looked like they had been dusted with glitter. And they looked wet, as though something was oozing out of them.

“That’s very pretty, Mr. Johnson.”

“Oh, please, call me Brent. I’m so sorry. So distracted by the flower that I didn’t even get your name.”

“Oh, I’m Amy Bradshaw, from next door.”

“You must be the daughter.”

“That’s right. What do you call it? The flower.”

“Well, see, that’s one of the good things about the flowers
I
collect. They don’t have names.”

“But I thought people who collected flowers were like obsessed with names.”

“Some of them are. Some of us aren’t. These flowers don’t really come from your standard-type places. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. I think the name removes some of the mystery from them. When I look at my flowers, I see them for what they are. It is more complex and runs deeper than any word could ever describe. Would you like to see some more of my flowers?”

“Sure, I guess.” She didn’t think it would do any harm and she found herself feeling pretty comfortable in this house and, besides, what could possibly happen with her parents right there next door?

She followed him through the house and down into his brightly lighted basement.

What she saw down there hit her all at once. She felt like she was going to be sick but, for some reason, she didn’t run.

“When you woke up this morning,” Brent said. “Did you ever think you were going to die?”

This knocked her even further off guard.

She tried to back up but could barely move. She felt limp. The heat or bright lights or the things dangling from the walls stole something from her. I feel wilted, she thought, collapsing onto the bottom stair, desperate and terrified. Those weren’t the only things she felt. Somewhere deep inside of her sparked the smallest grain of excitement. Or maybe it was adrenaline. She didn’t know, didn’t have time to analyze it. She only knew that it was something she hadn’t felt in a very long time.

“You don’t really want to leave,” Brent said, wiping his mouth in that way that made her think he needed a drink of water.

Maybe he was right, she thought. At least, for now, maybe it was best to make him
think
he was right. It would give
her
time to think of a way out.

Tasting bile in the back of her throat, she looked around the brightly lighted basement. The gentle cerulean walls were only a background to the horrors standing out from them – a mixture of exotic plant life and human death. Or something like death. She wasn’t really sure if the people hanging, pressed against the walls, were dead or not. Dismembered certainly, but maybe not dead. If they
were
dead, then they had been preserved remarkably well. Their skin still shone. Some of them appeared to breathe.

But everything breathes if you stare at it long enough.

She counted to ten.

Whatever they were or whoever they had been, they were something else now... That something else wasn’t as disgusting as she had initially found it to be. The closer she looked at them, the more beautiful they became.

Across the basement in front of her hung a woman. Her left arm was gone. A thick, bright green vine grew out of the shoulder, as if replacing the arm. In place of her eyes were two deep blue blooms, undoubtedly larger than her eyes had ever been. A dark green carpet covered her legs. Was it some kind of moss? Amy wondered.

To the woman’s left was another figure. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Its head was thrown back in something like revelation or ecstasy. The body’s torso was either missing or hidden, serving as fertilizer in some form of sick flowerbed. In its place, in a sloppy vertical line, grew three bright orange blossoms.

She should have turned and run. She knew this. She wanted to. Everything inside of her, everything in her being except for that wilted feeling and that spark of excitement, told her she
had
to get out of this place.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Brent asked her.

“Are they ... are they dead?” Her voice was thick. It was an effort to push out any sound at all.

“Dead? No, they’re not dead. They won’t be coming back to this world anytime soon, though. They have gone some other place.”

“Where did they go?”

“Well, I can’t say exactly. I’ve only seen it in glimpses myself. I think of it as the land of the flowers. That’s where all of these come from. The flowers take you to the land and they come from this land and it is all very confusing. The flowers are not very good at, uh, invoking clarity. And this land ... it ...
changes
with each flower.”

He stopped talking and surveyed the basement, as though drinking in the ugly beauty surrounding him.

“Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said. “See, this place, I can only get there by consuming the flowers. I don’t know where the flowers come from. I
think
... I
think
they come from over there. It wasn’t until I moved here that I started getting them. Each month, these boxes would show up. The first one had instructions in it. Very explicit instructions on how to eat them. It was like something out of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. I had to try it. The first time, I tried it alone. It changed me. I won’t lie to you. I haven’t been the same man since. But, after that first time, I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do alone. No, it was something I wanted to share. And that’s why the others are down here. I know it looks like I have done something bad to them but, truthfully, I don’t know if it is all that bad. And I can tell by the look on your face that
you
think I’ve done something bad to them. So maybe I have but ... well, let me ask you this...”

He crossed the room and held his hand in front of one of the flower figures, one with a radiant and fleshy purple bush for a head.

“Does
this
sound like pain?”

He rubbed his hand down the figure’s side. A moan came from somewhere on the figure, perhaps somewhere in the bush that had replaced her mouth. It certainly wasn’t a moan of pain. Amy had made moans like that with her first and only boyfriend. But it went even beyond the moans she had given her boyfriend. The moans she had given her boyfriend were more for his benefit and ego. This moan escaping the woman hanging from the wall ...
that
moan was what an orgasm would sound like, Amy thought.

“Now I have to ask you if you would like to go to this place with me. I won’t lie to you. You might end up just like these people. I really don’t know. Maybe it’s happiness. Maybe it’s misery. I wouldn’t know, because I’m never allowed to stay. No matter what happens, I always come back. I don’t know why it happens. I don’t really even know what happens when I’m over there. I just know that I come back and I have more scars to mark my voyage and a sense of longing greater than any need I have ever had before. But
these
people ... these people are there all the time.”

Amy didn’t know. She didn’t feel like she had a whole lot of time to decide. In front of her sprawled a fate that was horrifying yet wild, mysterious, and potentially pleasurable while, out there, well,
out there
just seemed so boring now. How could she ever go back
out there
without having at least given this a chance?

She knew that was what every addict thought when trying their chosen vice for the first time.

A thick sweat had greased her skin since coming to the basement. She felt light-headed. She raised her head up from between her knees and said, “I’ll go. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

As she spoke the words, she was surprised. That was not what she wanted to say. Clearly, something had happened to her since coming down here and now a sudden panic gripped her. What if this enchantment could not be undone? What then?

Now, even while thinking about how much she wanted to quit this insanity, she spoke again, “What do you want me to do?”

“Oh, well, it’s nothing too complex. You are the youngest one to go with me. That concerns me a little bit. See, when I told you before that I didn’t name flowers, well, that was a little bit of a lie. The flowers all had names to begin with.”

He walked over to one of the figures that had something like calla lilies growing down her left leg and patted her. She moaned as his hand touched her.

“This one,” he said. “Is named Monica. That one...” he pointed to the one next to her. “Is named Celina.” He pointed to one on the far side of the room. “And that one, unfortunately, is named Tonya.”

Then he held out the flower that came for him today, elevating it under the bright fluorescent light so the light caught on the sparkles covering the petals. “And this one,” he said. “I suppose this one will be called ‘Amy.’”

He plucked off two of the petals, balancing them gingerly on the tips of his index and middle fingers.

“All you have to do is eat this. It doesn’t really take any time at all.”

Slowly, he crossed the basement toward her. Swiping the back of his right hand across his mouth, he extended his left toward her, the petals softly sitting on the tips. A cough would have sent them spiraling to the floor.

Without hesitation, she reached out her own hand, taking one of the purple petals into her slender fingers. More to fully savor the experience rather than any sort of cautionary measure, she held the petal up to her nose and inhaled a deep breath. It smelled like fruit. No fruit that she could place immediately, but it smelled fresh and wonderful, whatever it was. Brent stuck the remaining petal onto his tongue and chewed it slowly. Following his lead, she did the same, thinking of it as some kind of bizarre communion wafer.

An impossible amount of juices splashed the inside of her mouth. It didn’t seem right that something so small as a flower petal could contain that much liquid and that much intense flavor. The potency of the flavor was almost biting but there was an underlying sweetness there. That sweetness, that was something she immediately wanted more of. She had the instant urge to run to the plant sitting on the floor of the basement and begin pulling the petals off and shoving them into her mouth. She forgot about Brent entirely. The only thing she wanted at that moment was to have another taste of that flower because the petal she had put into her mouth was already gone, all dissolved, and it had taken its taste with it, rudely gobbling it up like a miser, leaving nothing in its place. Nothing. And this sense of nothingness felt even greater because what it was the alternative to was so great...

Amy wasn’t in the basement anymore.

She didn’t know how that happened. The plant had taken her to this other place. Instead of the rich sweetness of its taste, the plant now offered her this dreamscape.

She stood in the street, in front of Brent’s house, her own house behind her. Theirs was a dead end street and she should have been staring into a field on the other side of a rusted barb-wire fence but what she stared at instead was a vast ocean. It was a beautiful blue ocean. More beautiful than the waters she had seen in travel brochures for the Caribbean. And above the ocean sprawled a sun-filled deep blue sky. What made this odd was that, where
she
stood, on her street, she stood in ankle-deep snow and darkness. She should have been cold but she wasn’t. She was merely filled with the desire to walk toward the ocean, to feel its warm waters wrap around her.