Page 90 of Girls Night
Full Bloom – Jason Hes
Prologue
Seedlings
A middle-aged woman with a copper eye gets out of a Phantom parked along the sidewalk as the gathering nimbus clouds from earlier finally burst. She's alone on the street, save a scrawny house cat sitting on a rusted gate. Its coat stiffens and spikes against the fat droplets falling from the sky. The cat reluctantly slinks into the open window of a neighboring apartment building, glaring at the woman before disappearing. The woman, seemingly unaffected by the heavy downpour, takes her time scanning the street for any other signs of life. To say she's in a rough part of town would be an understatement. It's so close to the projects she can almost smell the stench of poverty that hangs thick in the air. Her stomach would roil at the mere sight of the neighborhood but it has a certain charm to it. A rusted bicycle left abandoned under a street lamp. The sounds of a couple yelling at one another muffled by the rainstorm. A rat, further down the street, feasts on what's left of the twisted body of a pigeon. A baby, no doubt filthy and ill, cries out from somewhere deep within the wet night, only to be ignored by its whoring mother.Yes, there's a certain beauty to be found in even the most maddening of environments, she thinks as she makes her way to the decrepit building in front of her. As she steps through the rickety door, soaked to the bone, lightening streaks along the sky. The street lamp flickers spastically and bursts. The baby suddenly goes quiet.
Inside the Phantom, the woman’s bodyguard casts a nervous glance at the glistening street littered with swollen garbage bags and dead leaves. She cracks her coin-sized knuckles and steels herself for the eventual drive home. Navigating dark streets in a storm can be difficult. She understands this more than most. It's been four years, and she still can't get images of the boy in the raincoat skipping across the highway out of her thick-sloped skull.
Within a vacant room inside the bowels of the building the woman with the copper eye has just entered, past the crying hooker in the stairwell and the junkie slumped against a mattress in the corridor, cowers a little girl in the dark. She brings her knees under her chin and wraps her arms around her legs, holding tight. She rocks back and forth, back and forth. The girl tries to forget the nightmares that brought her to this building. A bolt of lightning from outside paints the room silver for a split second, making the splintered floorboards and shredded wallpaper come alive around her.This is my life now, she thinks. Her tiny heart wilts behind her ribs. There's no going back. Never again. A crack in the wall grabs her attention. It runs up to the ceiling, where it deepens and webs out like the roots of a tree.
In the corridor outside, the woman with the copper eye places a gloved hand on the doorknob and twists it. The ten-year-old she's come to find is behind the door. The eye has led her here, and it's never wrong.
The girl does not anticipate the unexpected guest, not that anything would prepare her for what the woman has in mind anyway. All she does is stare, and stare... and stare.
Miles away, in a quiet brownstone in the more affluent side of town, another little girl watches in awe as green shoots sprout from the pores of her sleeping stepfather's skin. In a matter of seconds, the shoots become stems tipped with buds that bloom into flowers of brilliant reds, purples, and yellows. The girl crouches down and smiles, plucking a flower from her stepfather's blossoming corpse as he becomes her special garden. Just like Granny had. And the nanny with halitosis.
The flower in her hand is delicate, possibly the most precious treasure she's ever seen. It makes her heart swell, knowing that true beauty always blooms from within anyone. Even drunk stepfathers.
From these moments onward, the little girls' fates are linked forever and shall twist, coil and entwine around one another in time. Not like vines, nor deadly vipers. But like wild and poisonous flowers in full bloom.
Chapter One
Oshibana
Pop culture and Hollywood will have you believe that black cats, ravens, and broken mirrors are omens of bad luck. But it’s human botflies one should be wary of.
Dermatobia Hominis. Fat and hairy, and parasitic. They infest human skin by laying eggs just beneath the surface, only for their larvae to hatch, plop to the ground and pupate.
Human botflies are nasty. Once considered the godspawn of a grotesque deity, nowadays they’re seen as nothing more than harbingers of a filthy magic that leaves a rank taste on the tongue like spoiled milk.
So, when I see my landlady approach me in the corridor outside my apartment with an envelope in her hand — her face a mosaic of raw lesions and bumps — I know shits about to go south.
“Hi, Wendy.” My voice cracks, much to my embarrassment. I step backwards, even though the other woman is still a few meters away. I press against the door to my apartment, and the amber security charms that swirl in lazy figures of eights send vibrations down my spine. I’ve seen and experienced crazy things. Mad, eldritch terrors, blood curses and mystical vermin. But botflies? Nothing drags me back to thirteen years ago, when I was alone and frightened in that derelict building Copper-Eye found me, like those obscene insects and the havoc they carry with them.
“Delphi,” the older woman breathes. Her voice is phlegmy and hoarse, as though the insects have laid eggs in her mouth. “I have something for you. It was left in my mailbox by mistake. Funny how that happens sometimes, right?”
Hilarious. I look down at the envelope in her hand. An adult botfly lands on it, then rubs its legs together before buzzing toward Wendy’s mottled face and rests on her left eyelid. There’s no way I’m touching that envelope.
I force a smile, though I’m pretty sure it comes off as more of a grimace than anything else. Wendy doesn’t seem to notice. The vibrations at my back become a painful prickle, so I reluctantly step away from the charms on my door. The landlady is still at a safe distance.
I shrug and stuff my hands into my jean pockets. The fingers of my left hand curl around the switchblade I carry with me wherever I go. It’s not magic, but it is sharp. “You can throw it away, Wendy. I’m sure it’s nothing important. Thanks, though.”
Wendy cocks her head to the side. A cum-colored larva with dark rings around its plump body tumbles out of her ear and onto the carpet. I’d laugh, but it really isn’t funny. “But, it looks so personal, not like a phone bill or speeding fine.” She slowly crouches down and props the envelope against the wall next to my door. “I’ll leave it here in case you change your mind.”
She straightens up. I hear her bones click. As Wendy turns and makes her way back down the corridor, I call out to her and she stops.
“Are you feeling okay?” I say. It’s a stupid question, but I feel better for asking it. It’s not my landlady’s fault she got caught up in whatever bad mojo is on its way.
Wendy politely nods her head. “Just a headache, Delphi. I think I’m going to lie down.”
I wait for her to disappear before kicking the envelope further away from my apartment door with my right shoe. I then remove said shoe and leave it in the corridor, opening my door and stepping inside.
I call up my brother the moment I find my phone underneath a greasy pizza box I’ve yet to throw away. My place is a mess — all dirty dishes, stacks of abandoned grimoires and boxes of talismans. Clothes lay strewn over the pale blue carpet and the curtains are shut tight. There’s no point in allowing cheeky spirits with celestial hard-ons to peek inside.
He picks up after the tenth ring and sounds like he has a cock in his mouth. He’s clearly hungover, which isn’t a surprise. Copper-Eye kicked him out once for his uncontrollable drinking habits, but let him back into the house after a week. He was fourteen at the time, and drank to forget the trauma he’d been subjected to by his biological family. Copper-Eye hadn’t erased his memories like she had mine. Nowadays, he just drinks because he enjoys getting wasted.
My brother is pissed off that I’ve woken him up early. It’s two in the afternoon. He tells me to grow up, that human botflies are nothing more than heralds foreshadowing events and cannot latch on to material objects like envelopes. I ask him how I was supposed to know that whenhewas the expert on dirty magic, not me. He asks me what I’m an expert in, and I say, “How the hell should I know?” Copper-Eye never had me specialize in any kind of magic. She’d constantly have me jump from one sub-type to the next. My brother calls me a whiny jack of all trades and a master of none. I call him a drunk bastard. He tells me to stop being a pussy and get the envelope from outside before someone non-magical finds it, then hangs up the phone.
