Darkness Blooms by Christopher Bloodworth Read Free Book Online

like a giant black skull with red eyes and nose holes. She waited for a mouth of red close to her feet to open up and start talking.
    Shaking her head no, Sylvia watched the flowers sway back and forth.
    Looking past the porch and the huge mound of dusky flowers, Sylvia saw her car, sitting all alone, no flowers in sight.
    Good.
    Sylvia headed back towards the kitchen. She wanted to push the fridge out on the porch, but she knew it wouldn’t fit through the front door. Sylvia started to open the back door to see if there was any way she could get around to the side of the house and get at the hose. She only got the door open a crack before slamming it shut.
    The back door was covered with dusky black blooms, one of them opening in her face. She heard the sharp pistil twack into the wood of the door jam before the door slammed. From the corner of her eye she saw several things before she slammed the door.
    The backyard was a sea of black. Where there had originally been several mounds, now the whole yard was swarming in the black flowers.
    Sylvia also saw something that made cold sweat poke out on her lower back: the door to the greenhouse was cracked open a whole foot.
    Sylvia took several deep breaths, trying not to think about the black and white striped plant. Grey light angled in through the kitchen window.
    “At least they aren’t covering the whole house,” Sylvia mumbled to herself. “Oh... OH!”
    Sylvia sprinted the three steps it took to make it over to the kitchen window. There was a mound of the black flowers outside of the window, but when Sylvia crawled up onto the edge of the sink so she’d have a steeper angle to look down, she saw that there was a tiny semi-circle of mud right against the house.
    Right under the dripping faucet that Papere never cared enough to fix. A green hose attached to the spigot and extended down into the flowers, but Sylvia couldn’t see where the coils of the green hose even were.
    She didn’t think about what to do next. She grabbed all the pots from under the cabinet to the left of the stove and started filling them with water. When each was filled, she lifted it, grunting as water sloshed over the sides of the heavy pots as flashbacks of Mamere and the hot grease came to life again.
    Sylvia pressed her face to the bottom part of the windowsill, looking up to check the underside of the eaves for the black flowers. She shivered when she realized that the black and white spider plant could just as easily be lurking up there. Sylvia grabbed the surprisingly light Yellow Pages from the top of the fridge and started wadding its pages into balls. When she had ten paper balls wadded up, she checked all the angles on the window again, searching for the spider plant.
    When she was sure that it wasn’t lurking just outside the window, waiting to pounce, Sylvia pulled the window up and got to work. She threw one of the paper balls at the closest of the flowers. The wadded up paper hit several of the closed blooms and they opened along with all the other flowers in a one foot radius of the paper ball.
    What was interesting was that the plants didn’t attack the paper ball. They didn’t seem to care about the ball at all. The blooms were all angled up at her face.
    Not wasting any more time, Sylvia threw the remaining paper balls out at the flowers, opening the blooms of all of the plants closest to the spigot that she could. Sylvia stuck her head out and looked along the walls of the house. They were clear.
    “Good,” Sylvia said. “Let’s get to work.”
    Sylvia shifted the biggest pot to the windowsill along with several big cups. She looked out over the top of the water at all those red faces, staring up at her, lightly swaying in a nonexistent breeze, looking at what was hopefully their next meal.
    “Wrong,” Sylvia said before dumping the huge pot of water on the closest flowers. When it was empty, she grabbed the large cups, flinging water out in an arc to hit the flowers