at the small, unimpressive stone, I hold the gardenias to my face and breathe in the scent. The small stretches of memory I have for this woman go back to early childhood, when she’d hold picnics with Brie, Marcelle, and I in the woods, and we’d weave crowns made of magnolias and wildflowers. She would tell us we were beautiful queens, who would one day rule the sun and moon. The oceans and stars. And every spring, she’d have a wide vase of gardenias placed out, the fragrance filling her small house with such a sweetness that will forever remind me of her.
I set the flowers down across the bed of her grave. Pulling my hand away, I gasp at the sight of blood across my palm. The red crimson seems to crawl over my hand, which trembles as I search for a source of injury. Did I prick myself on the flowers?
Hand outstretched, I twist it in front of me, watching the blood climb upwards, toward my arm. Nausea curdles in the pit of my stomach, a sweeping dizziness faltering my balance. I try to shake it off, wiping the blood onto my dress and smearing it over the floral print there.
“Look away, child.” The whisper of a voice sends me back to that night, and every muscle in my body crystalizes, turning cold and stiff.
“Look away,” Maw Maw says tearfully, while the man beside her, wearing a goat skull, draws back a long blade.
He strikes it down hard, hacking into Maw Maw’s neck.
I gasp and stumble backward, dropping the other bouquet of flowers. Every muscle in my body trembles with the visual, which is so vivid in my head, it must be real.
A memory of that night. Nothing more than a flickering scene, quickly smothered in the blackness of my mind. But that scene. That one scene lingers, and shuttering my eyes fails to erase it. The fear in her eyes. The resolution in her voice. The blood. So much blood. It sears itself into my brain like a painful tattoo that I can’t scratch away. I can’t stop seeing her face and her eyes.
“No, no, no.” I slam the heel of my hand over my temples. “Don’t do this! Don’t do this!”
Three. Two. One.
“Everything okay, ma’am?” The sound of a foreign voice snaps me out of the visual, and I open my eyes to find a man in a green shirt, with matching green hat, holding a leaf blower in one hand. His eyes regard me with confusion, and I glance down at myself to find the blood is gone. Not a trace of it on me.
Exhaling a shaky breath, I nod. “Yeah. I’m okay. Thanks.”
Whistling, he flicks the leaf blower back on and strolls off.
Hard breaths through my nose fail to calm my thrumming pulse, and with a shaky hand, I reach down into the pocket of my dress for the pills I stuffed there, and dump two into my palm. Not so many to knock me out, but enough to take off the sharp edges of reality.
After dry gulping them back, I steal one more glance toward the gravestone below me, and round up the fallen daisies I planned to leave for my father’s grave. Over the years, I’ve found the pills I take to help me sleep sometimes send me into daydreams--vivid ones that seem so real, I’d swear I was awake. I once saw my father, my real father, watching me through a classroom window at school. For a good twenty minutes he stared in on me, all while I sat quietly trying to discern whether, or not, he was real, since none of my classmates seemed to notice him there. Watching me. Like he was waiting for something.
After a while, I found comfort in these hallucinations, thinking maybe it was God, or some other heavenly force, ensuring that I didn’t forget my father. I’d talk to him, even though he almost never talked back.
That’s when Russ reluctantly gave in to the idea of taking me to a therapist. So long as I didn’t speak a word of what actually happened, that I could remember, anyway, he agreed to let me keep seeing her. The therapist, Joan, wasn’t stuffy, or intimidating, like I imagined therapists to be. She was kind. Patient. And best of all, she didn’t make me feel like there was something wrong with me. Except, after a while, she did recommend a psychiatrist for some medication, to which Russ vehemently