Nightmare Flower by Elizabeth Engstrom

Author:Elizabeth Engstrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2020-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

3

Fogarty snapped awake, his body rigid with fear. Then he heard her soft breathing in the silent night and he relaxed. So strange to have someone else with him. In his bed. He looked at his bedside clock. Five-­thirty. He looked over at her, a lump under the quilt, barely visible in the starlit darkness, and he could see shine on the little bit of curly hair that rested on the pillow.

Married you are, Fogarty, and he smiled up at the skylight. Married.

A vision of mounds and mounds of festively wrapped gifts swam up before his watery eyes.

His heart thudded. A gift! I must be giving my bride a wedding gift! He slipped out of bed and put on clothes that were clean as of the day before. He left her sleeping and walked quietly up the stairs and out into the early morning chill.

He gave a mighty stretch and a yawn, then rubbed his arms in the cold. The morning stars winked down on him as he saw the first faint glow of false dawn in the east. East. That’s where he would find a present for his wife. In the east.

He walked past the old rusted boiler and gave it a little pat, hearing the hollow sound of its deep interior. Again, as always, his mind played on it for a few moments. That big old boiler was big as a house almost. It had a big use in it, just waiting to be discovered, he knew that. Maybe he needed to spend a few hours with it, just the two of them alone, and he could feel what the old thing was about, feel what it wanted to do with the time it had left as an old boiler before the rust turned it into something else. It was real big, and good, and mostly dry inside. He would spend some time with Mr. Boiler soon.

Fogarty walked on past the boiler, toward the lightening sky. He walked up and down the hills of trash, through the areas he knew by heart. He’d picked over all this place long, long ago, and while the landscape always shifted, changing with the winds above and the decay below, the substance never really altered.

Dawn grew brighter, and the orange glow spread horizontally. Fogarty stopped for a moment to just watch as the clouds in the sky caught fire, and then he caught his breath as the surface of the debris of the dump turned yellow/orange for miles in front of him. He wheeled around and sure enough, the stars still held their ground in the west, waiting until the last minute before fading out.

Fogarty found an old, dented suitcase half buried under some plastic bags full of some rotted something, old weeds, probably, and he pulled it free and sat down on it to watch the sun make her appearance. He sat and watched, seeing the patterns in the clouds, luxuriating in the richness of the colors spread before him. Dawn was his favorite time.

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