The Things Mother Taught Me

My mother was buried on a Thursday, and on Friday morning the first flower appeared.

I noticed it while standing at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee between my hands. In the thin uncertain light of morning, the grass was wet with dew and silvered at the tips, and the woods beyond it stood black and close, as though they had spent the night leaning nearer.

They were not flowers I had planted. They were not flowers my mother had planted, either. They were standing beneath my mother's bedroom window. White. Delicate enough that the wind seemed capable of carrying it away, though there was no wind. The cluster rose from thin green stems, a lacework of tiny petals gathered into a flat, pale crown. Queen Anne's lace, I thought. I knew the name because my mother had taught it to me when I was small, though I could not remember when. She had taught me the names of everything. Birds. Trees. Mushrooms that could be eaten and mushrooms that could kill you. The difference between poison ivy and Virginia creeper. Which berries were safe. Which roads flooded after rain. Which people to smile at and which people not to look at for too long. 

My mother had always been good at making things feel simple. When I was little and upset, she would take my face between both hands, her palms warm against my cheeks, and tell me I was all right. Sometimes she would repeat herself until I stopped crying, softer each time, as though she were teaching me a word I had forgotten.

You didn't do anything.

She had always known what was true and what was dangerous and what I was allowed to be afraid of. She washed cuts. Buttoned coats. Changed muddy clothes before I could track dirt through the house. When I had nightmares, she told me they were only nightmares. Those are the memories I hope will never leave me. I don’t remember a lot from my childhood, but my mother? She could never truly leave me.

I had come back to the house because there were things to sort through.

That was what I told people.

Nora from work had asked if I wanted her to come with me. She had offered twice, then a third time in the careful way people offer things when they have realized you are going to say no regardless. I told her I would be fine. I told her I had grown up here. I told her I knew where everything was.

All of those things were true—I just hadn't expected the house to feel so much larger without my mother inside it.

I put the mug down and went outside.

The grass was wet against my ankles as I kneeled in the dirt at my mother’s window. They were stunning up close. They looked less like individual flowers than a single piece of lace stretched over the palm of the earth. There was a dark little floret at the center of one cluster, almost black against the white. I reached for it, and my hand stopped.

For one strange second, I could hear my mother's voice so clearly that I looked toward the kitchen window expecting to see her standing there. Don't pick them. The memory was old enough to have no edges. I couldn't remember the room where she'd said it, or how old I'd been, or whether she'd been angry. Only the certainty remained, buried somewhere beneath everything else. Do not touch them.

I laughed once, quietly, because there was no one to hear me. 

“I miss you mama”

By Sunday there were flowers beneath every window. I blamed the weather first, then the soil, then some dormant patch of wildflowers that my mother had never gotten around to pulling. 

I searched online and found nothing unusual about Queen Anne's lace, except that it was common and stubborn and difficult to eradicate once established. Sometimes it could be mistaken for a dangerous herb. I sat back in my seat. A smile spread across my face as I remembered how carefully my mother would guide me away from the white patches with narrowed eyes, as though the flowers could feel her glare.

It seemed reasonable enough. 

My mother had always hated weeds. She would have been furious to see them now.  

So I pulled the first cluster from the foundation myself. The stem came away too easily. There was no resistance from the soil, no root attached to it, just a clean green stalk ending in a ragged white thread. I threw it into the trash and washed my hands. 

Later, I woke in the middle of the night because something cold was touching my cheek.

For a few seconds I didn't move. I was still caught in that soft, shapeless place between sleep and waking where the room had no name and my body felt distant from me. The thing against my face was cool and damp, almost weightless, brushing my skin whenever I breathed. My heart was beating too quickly. I reached for my face and my fingers closed around something thin and soft.

A stem.

Slowly, I pulled it away from my cheek.

There was a flower lying on my pillow.

For a moment I could only stare at it. The white blossoms were almost luminous against the dark cotton, each tiny petal trembling with the movement of my breath. Its stem was impossibly green and delicate, still beaded with moisture. One of the flowers had come loose and was caught against my lips. When I touched it, the petal clung briefly to the pad of my finger before peeling away.

I looked at the pillow beneath it.

There was a dark crescent of dampness where the stem had rested against the fabric.

My stomach tightened.

I sat up too quickly, sending the blankets sliding into my lap. The flower moved with them. There were three more stems tangled beneath the covers, thin as veins, their white heads crushed against the sheets as though they had been growing there while I slept. One had wound itself loosely around my wrist. Another disappeared beneath my pillow.

I tore them free.

The motion left a sharp little pain across my skin. When I looked down, there were faint red lines around my wrist where the stems had tightened.

I stared at them until the room seemed to tilt.

I told myself I must have brought them in on my clothes. I must have brushed against the flowers yesterday and carried a few stems upstairs without noticing. I must have slept on them. 

There had to be an explanation. There was always an explanation.

But I could not remember being near the flowers after dark when I changed clothes. 

I threw it away and went back to bed. 

When I opened my eyes the next morning, they were the first things I saw as they stuck through the cracks in the walls. White against the dark hallway, their little heads trembling whenever the floorboards shifted beneath my feet. Then I felt the cold.

It wasn't the cold of the house. It was something deeper, a slow tightening beneath my ribs that made it difficult to take a full breath. I had the sudden, childish urge to close the door again. To climb back into bed and pull the blankets over my head and wait for someone older to come tell me there was nothing wrong.

My mother’s bedroom was directly across from mine, and it was infested with mold like grace. 

The flowers had begun climbing up and through the walls. Delicate green stems slipped into the seams between the wallpaper and plaster, disappearing into the cracks as though the house itself had grown veins overnight. White clusters crowded the windowsill. They spilled across the top of her dresser and curled beneath the bed. They had found the narrow spaces between the floorboards where age had pulled the wood apart, pushing themselves through.

For one stupid second, I thought about calling for her. The thought came so naturally that my mouth actually opened.

“Mama?”

The word disappeared into the room.

I felt embarrassed immediately, though there was no one there to hear me. My face grew hot. I looked down at the flowers instead.

They were not growing toward the window. They weren't trapped in a place with no light, seeking a way back to the soil. 

They were growing toward the dark.

Their stems bent away from the pale morning light, winding instead toward the underside of the bed, the shadow behind the dresser, the narrow black spaces where the walls met the floor. One had curled around the leg of my mother's chair. Another had pushed itself beneath the bed and disappeared so completely that I could only see the white flower trembling in the darkness.

I needed something to do with my hands. Something ordinary. Something that belonged to the world before all of this.

So I crossed the room.

The little wooden jewelry box was still sitting where my mother had always kept it. I picked it up and ran my thumb over the worn lid. The wood was smooth from years of being handled, the corners softened with age. I remembered sitting on the carpet beside her as a child while she opened it and let me try on her earrings, laughing when I caught my reflection and thought I looked grown-up.

The memory hurt more than I expected.

My throat tightened.

I opened the box.

Inside was her wedding ring, two pairs of earrings, a silver chain, and a small brass key I didn't recognize. Beneath them was a photograph. It was old enough that the edges had begun to curl. I recognized myself first. Maybe around seven years old. Sunburned nose. Missing front tooth. Hair cut crookedly around my chin. I was standing in a clearing with my hands shoved into the pockets of an oversized yellow sweatshirt, squinting at the camera as though I resented whoever had taken the picture. My arms were wrapped around the waist of another little girl. 

A red ribbon tied in her hair.

I dropped the photograph. The sound was tiny, but the house seemed to hear it. I picked it up again and stared at the girl's face until my eyes hurt. She had a crooked smile and one front tooth slightly higher than the other. I knew that face. I knew the shape of her hand. 

I called Nora and told her I was sick. She was quiet for a moment.

“You sound awful.”

“I’m fine.”

“You just lost your mom, Mari. You don't have to be fine.”

I smiled despite myself. “I'm really okay. I just think I need to sleep.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “But I'm keeping my phone on.”

I hung up and locked the door.

By afternoon, the flowers had reached the stairs. They were everywhere now, pushing through cracks in the floorboards, winding around table legs, opening in corners where there was no sunlight.

They seemed to grow faster whenever I looked away.

I tried cutting them back.

I tried pouring bleach over them.

I tried digging them out by the roots.

More just grew in their place

On Monday morning I found one growing from the drain of the kitchen sink. It was a mass of pale roots packed into the pipe, white filaments pushing through the metal grate and spreading across the basin. When I tried to pull them free, they broke beneath my fingers with a wet little snap. The smell was sweet. Not rotten. Not earthy. Sweet, like crushed stems left too long in warm water.

I gagged and ran outside.

The flowers had crossed the yard.

They came in a thin white trail from the foundation, winding through the grass in a line so deliberate that I stopped on the porch and stared at it. I knew that stretch of yard. I knew every dip in the ground, every exposed root, every place where the grass grew thin over stone. I had run through it barefoot as a child.

The flowers continued toward the woods., the soft glow of the winter light rippling over their lacy petals as if they were glittering. I wanted to lie down and let them wrap around me, but at the same time I wanted to burn them. There was something sickly sweet about their innocence and I needed them gone gone gone gone—

Instead, I followed. Hypnotized.

The trees swallowed the house, any sight of civilization disappearing between the trunks, and for one strange second I was seven again.

Laughter hummed from branch to branch, memories of kids sneaking into places they shouldn't and tasting the honey sweet scent of childhood freedom. Scrapped knees, mud covered shoes, oversized shirts, a red ribbon. Small fingers digging into my wrist. The wet sound of someone trying not to cry.

Then nothing.

I stopped so abruptly that my foot caught on a root. My stomach lurched. I bent over, one hand pressed hard against my mouth, waiting for the nausea to pass.

A mass bubbled upon my tongue and I spat into the dirt. 

A tiny white petal landed there.

I stared at it. 

I hadn't eaten anything. How–

Then, somewhere deeper in the trees, a branch snapped. I looked up. The flowers were still ahead of me. Waiting. 

I pressed both hands against my temples as I shakily came to my feet, and let my bare soles against the waiting plants.

The air changed beneath the trees. It smelled of wet leaves and old bark and something sweet underneath it all. White blossoms appeared between the trunks, dozens of them, then hundreds, opening where no flowers should have been. 

I knew the clearing before I saw it.

My body knew.

There was a patch of earth beneath an oak where the flowers grew thickest. I dropped to my knees. The soil was loose. My fingers sank into it, and something hard struck my knuckle.

I dropped to my knees.

My hands went into the earth before I had time to think about what I was doing. The soil was frozen near the surface, hard enough that my fingernails bent against it, but underneath it softened into black, wet earth. I clawed through it anyway. Dirt packed beneath my nails. Stones tore the skin around my fingers. Roots caught around my wrists and I ripped through them until my hands were shaking.

Something red appeared beneath the soil.

I pulled. 

Like a cloth from the throat of a magician came a ribbon. For one second I only stared at it, filthy and faded, caught between my fingers. It was stained with mud and grime and stank like roadkill. I threw it to the side, furiously wiping my hand across my legs with a desperate vigor. 

I dug faster.

My nails struck something hard.

I froze.

I touched it again.

Bone.

The sound that came out of me was small and broken. I pressed both hands over my mouth, but the sob tore through them anyway.

I kept digging.

There was more beneath the earth. A curve of white. A narrow arm. The fragile cage of a ribcage collapsed beneath the weight of the soil, flowers had grown through them, curling between the bones like white tendrils. I could see their roots disappearing beneath her, tangled through the earth as though they had been waiting twenty-five years for me to come back.

I leaned over her and began to cough.

At first it was only air.

Then something caught in my throat.

I gagged and spat into the dirt.

A white petal landed beside Jane's skull.

I coughed again. Another came up. Then another.

The pain began low in my chest, a tearing sensation beneath my ribs. I clawed at my throat. Something moved inside me.

Not metaphorically. Something moved.

I could feel thin stems sliding against the inside of my lungs. They scratched when I breathed. I tried to inhale and tasted dirt. I bent forward and vomited into the leaves, and flowers spilled out with it: white petals, green stems, black little centers, all slick with blood.

I couldn't breathe.

I pulled at my mouth and brought out a length of root, pale and wet and shining red at the tip. It stretched farther than it should have, impossibly long, and when it finally tore free I screamed out a sob.

“Mari?”

I turned.

Nora stood at the edge of the clearing.

For a moment neither of us moved. Her eyes traveled over me—the blood around my mouth, the flowers tangled in my hair, my bare feet black with mud—and then to the disturbed earth between us.

She saw the bones.

I watched the moment she understood that they were human.

Her face changed.

I wanted to tell her to leave. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her that I had been seven years old, that I hadn't meant to hurt Jane, that my mother had loved me so much she had buried the truth with her. I wanted to tell her that I didn't know whether the flowers were memories or punishment or something that had been waiting beneath the house all along.

Instead I took one step toward her.

My lungs seized.

I coughed into my hand, gaging as my throat tensed up around the foreignness inside.

Nora stumbled backward.

I looked down at my hand.

Something small lay in my palm beneath the blood and petals.

It was not a flower.

It was a root, pale and delicate as a thread, curled tightly around itself. At its tip was a tiny white bud.

I watched it tremble.

Then, very slowly, it began to open.