In Bloom

by T.R. Steele

My sister is only here for three days each year.

I wait for her as the last of the meltwater trickles away. She always returns to the same spot—on the slope, overlooking the creek that flows into the pond and then into the lake. She sits and stares out at the world as it wakes up: leaves unfurling, birds nesting, foxes yowling in the dark.

I bring her a bucket of clean water and my softest washcloth. She scrubs away the dirt on her hands, her feet. She does this every year, and every year the dirt clings to her again. She will never be free of it.

“Thank you,” she says. Her cheeks are ruddy from the cold spring wind, her lips red from worrying them with her teeth. She looks thin, frail. But she has a voice as strong as tree roots. I forget just how much strength she has in her until I see her again.

“You’re looking good,” she says. Her pale brown eyes sweep over me. “What did I miss?” 

She smiles. That’s our little joke: we act like she was gone a day, maybe less, maybe only a night. My lips twitch. If only it were sleep that separated us.

I smile back. I can’t help it. Even as I yearn for something, anything, to be different, I am happy, too, because she is here, still here where we buried her, among the little white flowers that appear only for as long as she does each year.

T.R. Steele is an author of fantasy and gothic fiction living and writing in Toronto. He shares his home with a cat, a blue-tongued skink, several houseplants, and an expansive library of plant and animal reference books. His work has been published or is forthcoming in A Coup of Owls Press, Hearth Stories Magazine, Tales to Terrify, Plott Hound Magazine, Heartlines Spec, smoke and mold, and PodCastle.