Page 52 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
She sighed. Almost gave up.
Then her fingers caught on a smaller, worn book wedged between two sketchpads. Leather-bound. No title.
She opened it.
The land remembers the ones it claims.
Classic grandfather cryptic bullshit.
The following pages were a mess of flora notes and desert fragments. Silence, shadows, heat. But in the middle of a page on cacti, like a grenade in a garden, she found this:
She thought she could harness it. Thought her love was enough to command the wild.
But the desert does not bend. It does not listen. It does not need love.
It needs surrender.
The bloom burned too fast. She opened too early. The roots never held.
She turned to ash before spring.
Nora stared at it.
Okay.
She read it again, slower.
Then a third time, squinting like that might help it make more sense.
“The bloom,” she muttered. “Turned to ash. Right. Sure.”
She shut the book and sat back in the chair, arms crossed.
The bloom burned too fast.
She hadn’t thought much about the word before. It had shown up here and there, sprinkled through the journals like pollen. She’d assumed it was metaphor. Just more desert poetry her grandfather had latched onto.
But this felt different.
This was a warning.
And it was written like he’d seen it happen. Or been told by someone who had.
A bloom wasn’t just a concept.
It was a person. A woman.
One who tried. And failed.
One who opened too soon.
Who burned.
Or was it about her? A warning? A prophecy? A passive-aggressive subtweet from the grave?
Whatever it was, it was uncomfortably specific.
Opened too early. Turned to ash.
