Flowers for Dead Girls by Abigail Collins

Author:Abigail Collins [Collins, Abigail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The unraveling day is over by the time Astra gets home. She can tell, because she walks in to the smell of garlic and oil, and, for once, it doesn’t smell like it’s burning.

Maria Vaughn is in the kitchen, chopping vegetables at a half-cleared counter while a pan behind her sizzles on the stove. She’s wearing a simple blue dress with a long gray cardigan, but her wrists are covered in a rainbow of glass beads that clink together as she chops, and there’s a silk scarf around her neck that keeps dangling onto the cutting board.

“Hi, sweetie,” her mom says when Astra walks into the kitchen. There are at least a dozen spice jars out on the counter again, and Astra really hopes her mom doesn’t plan on using them all in whatever she’s making. Among them, she spots chili powder and cumin, which she thinks would be just fine, but the cinnamon and nutmeg pushed up against them might not work so well. And, right on the end—cardamom.

“Hey, Mom. Are you feeling any better? Do you need any help?”

Her mom sweeps around like a ballet dancer, turning the stove down, moving pots around, and shuffling through drawers looking for something that she never manages to find. She hums low in her throat and starts putting the spice containers back into the cabinet, one at a time.

“No, honey, I’ve got this. It’s the least I can do to thank you for covering my shift. The store wasn’t too busy, I hope?”

Astra shakes her head, but her mom’s back is turned. She clears her throat. “It wasn’t too bad. We sold some jewelry and one of those big ceramic jars you brought in last week.”

“That’s great, sweetie.”

She thinks about bringing up the flyer, but there’s no point in mentioning it now that it’s gone. She’s not even sure that she didn’t just imagine the whole thing. She was thinking about Isla, so maybe her mind was just filling in the answers to some of the questions she wants to ask but knows she never will.

She’ll ask Isla about it, just to be sure, but her mom doesn’t need another thing to stress about right now.

“By the way,” her mom continues, while actually wiping vegetable juice off the counter instead of letting it dry into a tacky mess like usual, “thank you for cleaning up the kitchen while I was in bed. And for making more tea. You know that always helps on days like these.”

Astra looks around, and the kitchen does look a little neater than usual. The fake pears are back on top of the fridge, and just enough stuff has been cleared from the counter to fit a cutting board on one end and the toaster on the other. The dishes are washed, and the top of the stove looks like it’s actually been wiped down as well.

And there’s a mostly empty cup with a tea bag in it, sitting out next to the sink—a cup that Astra definitely didn’t fill.

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