Darkness Blooms by Christopher Bloodworth Page A

key out from behind the old shingle where they’d always kept it. Faded blue paint flaked off onto her fingers as she put the shingle back.
    The floor inside the house was better, studier. The rooms all had the same dead perfume smell that they’d always had, only now they were empty. Sylvia walked through the old house, breathing in the old smells of her childhood. She walked room to room, lingering longer in some than others as memories rolled over her.
    Papere’s stuff was all still in the bedroom he shared with Mamere, although it felt like a stranger’s things without her Mamere’s stuff beside it all.
    Sylvia went straight for the desk in the corner. That held the thing she wanted, assuming Mamere hadn’t changed her mind or just lied outright and had taken something of Papere’s back to Baton Rouge with her.
    Pulling open the middle drawer, Sylvia smiled.
    The book was there.
    Alone in the dark.
    Hers.
    A memory came to mind of sitting on Papere’s knee as he wrote. She couldn’t read at the time, but there had been drawings and maps in addition to the quick, clipped letters that made up Papere’s handwriting.
    Sylvia pulled the book out, smiling. It was a leather bound book dyed a green so dark that it almost looked black. When she pushed on the cover, it gave way under her fingertips, then pressed back against the indentations her fingers left, like it had that expensive Swedish foam stuff just beneath the surface of the dark leather.
    She opened the cover of the book, smiling at the antique key she’d watched her Papere draw. Color more like. The whole page was black, and in a black a shade lighter than the rest of the page was an antique key. It had taken Papere several weeks to draw that. She remembered sitting on his knee, listening to his wallet chain clink against the wooden chair as he worked, watching as he brought the pen to the top of the page and drew a line straight down the page vertically. He would let out his breath after every stroke, as if he’d been holding it. He pressed so hard on the paper, the tendons in his hands standing out like cables that sometimes Sylvia thought the paper would tear or the tip of his pen would snap off.
    When he got to the key, he kept almost the same pressure on the paper, only letting up a tiny bit when he got to the place where the key was, then he’d go right back to full pressure.
    She remembered watching as the image took shape over the weeks. On his knee as he drew the final downward stroke on the page, she’d let out a sigh too, but what happened next scared her.
    “One,” Papere had said under his breath. “Seventeen to go.”
    He brought his pen to the left and started from the beginning, pressing the pen down into the paper on the left most side of the page and carving downwards, retracing his first line.
    Sylvia never sat in his lap again after that.
    She did go in to watch him from time to time.
    It took a year for him to finish his eighteen passes on the page.
    After that, he closed the book, put it in the drawer where she’d just pulled from, and never opened it or talked of it again.
    He’d done that cover page after the rest of the book was filled with words and images, and now the book was hers.
    Sylvia sighed, closing the book and tucking it under her arm. She started walking back out of the house when another thought occurred to her.
    The greenhouse.
    Her grandfather had collected orchids at one time, keeping them in a tiny greenhouse he’d built himself behind the house.
    Sylvia set the book down on the kitchen counter as she walked to the back of the house. Opening the door onto the back porch, Sylvia stepped out and frowned.
    Scattered around the backyard were several black mounds. Sylvia counted them off. 18 total.
    From the porch, the black mounds looked like piles of burnt rags. Encircling each mound was a perfect circle of pristine soil, almost as if the grass had shrunk back, or as if—Sylvia voiced her thought aloud,