The Hour My Family Pretends Doesn't Exist

Chapter 3 — The Flower

I picked it up.

I knew I shouldn't. I knew that the sensible thing that the girl I had been twenty four hours ago would have done was to leave it there, go back inside and find a rational explanation. Wind. Birds. A seed from somewhere.

But the girl I had been twenty four hours ago had not looked through a window at 3:47 AM and seen something look back at her like she was the answer to a question older than this house.

So I picked it up.

It was small. Heavier than it should have been for its size, the way certain things carry more weight than their appearance suggests. The petals were closed tight, dark as deep water, the color of the sky in the last moment before full dark takes over that particular shade that is not quite black and not quite anything else. No roots. No soil. Just the stem, clean and dry, as though it had not grown from the earth at all but had simply appeared.

The moment my fingers closed around it, I felt it.

Not pain. Not heat. Something stranger than both a vibration, faint as a whisper, moving from the stem into my palm and up through my arm and settling somewhere in my chest. Right where the thread had been pulling since last night. Right where the pull lived.

I stood up.

I looked around the courtyard.

Empty. Morning light. The mango tree, the cracked path, the rusted gate. A crow on the far wall, watching me with its head tilted. Everything still, everything ordinary.

Except for the feeling in my chest that said he is still here. He never left. He is watching you right now and you cannot see him and somehow that is worse than when you could.

I took the flower inside.

I put it in a glass of water on my windowsill. I did not know why. It seemed important that it had water, even though some part of me suspected this flower did not need water the way ordinary flowers did. Did not need anything ordinary at all.

I stared at it for a long time.

The petals stayed closed.

All day they stayed closed through breakfast, through the silence at lunch, through my grandmother's careful eyes following me around the house, through my mother's deliberate not looking, through the afternoon and the evening and the long slow darkening of the sky outside my window.

Closed.

I ate dinner without tasting it. Answered questions without hearing them. Went through every motion of being a normal girl in a normal house having a normal evening, while inside my head the same thought circled over and over

What are you? What are you? What are you?

Not about the flower.

About him.

I went to bed at ten. I did not expect to sleep. I lay in the dark and watched the flower on my windowsill a dark shape against the darker square of night outside and I waited.

I did not know what I was waiting for.

At exactly 3:46 AM one minute before the flower opened.

I watched it happen. Slowly, completely, the petals spread wide in the dark of my room, and from the center of it came light faint, silver edged, the color of moonlight on still water, the color of something that did not belong to this world or this hour or any ordinary thing.

It lit the room in silver.

I sat up.

My heart was doing the thing again the wrong rhythm, the one it had developed last night, the one that did not feel like fear.

I looked at the flower.

I looked out the window.

I looked at the clock.

3:47.

And from somewhere below from the courtyard so quiet I should not have been able to hear it, so quiet it seemed to come from inside my own head rather than through the air

A sound.

Not a voice. Not quite. More like the feeling of a voice. The shape of it, without the sound. The particular impression of someone saying one word, very softly, the way you say a name you have waited a long time to say out loud.

My name.

He said my name.

And I was already at the window before I had decided to move.

— End of Chapter 3 —