A Flood of Posies by Tiffany Meuret

Author:Tiffany Meuret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Spot Books
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Sestra awoke with her nails pressed into the floor, trying to stave off the flood of her dream. It had been so vivid. So real. She could still smell the smoke from those cigarettes. The memory of James’s voice clung to her, blotting out anything else.

Her sister was there. She could have reached out and touched her. She could have grabbed her by the shoulders and screamed at her. You don’t know what’s coming. Run! Go somewhere safe. Somewhere far. But she didn’t, and Doris was still dead.

That feeling of wrongness had carried over.

It seemed like nothing at first, just a bad feeling in the back of her head, like the zing of a knife being pulled from the knife block. It was dark and it was late. Rob’s snoring hummed behind her from where he sat, rested against the wall, sleeping upright as always, despite the extra space.

What was wrong? She knew this feeling, had known it all her life. By now she’d learned to trust it. What was wrong?

The floor hatch lay ajar, propped open on its spring-loaded hinges. The boy was gone.

“Fuck,” she said, and sprang to her feet. “Fuck.”

Rob stopped snoring but did not open his eyes.

Sestra had tried for a week to get the kid to do anything beyond following her around. A boy-shaped growth had developed on her side, wrapping around her torso where his arms had clamped on and not let go. His constant watching was unnerving—she couldn’t tell if he was terrified and looking for comfort or plotting her murder. Either way, one of them was shit out of luck.

But now he was gone, and Sestra found the boy’s sudden absence far more upsetting than his clinginess. It took only a moment to understand why.

After a quick scan of the dark cabin, she bolted up the steps and onto the moon-stained deck.

She said, aloud and for herself, “Where are you, boy?”

Water sloshed up the sides of the boat—thu-thunk swish, thu-thunk swish. The night was heavy with brine, and it coated her skin like ropy tentacles. It stung her eyes until they watered. What was wrong? What the fuck was wrong here?

“Kid?”

She found him at the back of the boat, balancing on the rail, his top half staring at the black water below. Just a thin, waif-like shadow of a creature that used to be a child.

“Get down from there, kid,” she said. Her voice broke like a pubescent boy’s as she spoke the words. “Mijo. Vámonos. Now.”

The few phrases he’d managed to utter in her presence had been in Spanish, and it was only through the grace of introductory Spanish class in high school that she had any words at all to use on him. Vámonos. Rápido. Me llamo Sestra. ¿Donde está la biblioteca?

But the kid ignored her as he always did, and his trance-like stare at the water unnerved her more than it should have. Logic tried to explain away her fear—he hadn’t moved until now, in the dark, alone. Did

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