28 Apr The Black Bloom

Part I

I used to think dying towns just faded quietly, like old photographs left too long in the sun.

But Langston Hollow didn’t fade. It rotted.

Every morning when I drove the cracked streets toward the library, I passed a dozen empty buildings. Their windows were boarded over or shattered, the plywood sagging like broken teeth. The gas station had closed last winter. The high school had shuttered two years before that. What few people remained walked with their heads down, moving from place to place like they were already halfway to their graves.

I told myself it was just the economy. That was the easy lie we all told.

The truth was, something worse had taken root here. Something we either didn’t see or didn’t want to name.

I noticed the flower two days after Javier Jimenez died.

The news hit the way every death did in Langston Hollow—first a ripple, then a drowning. Javier had been seventeen, full of too much restless energy to waste time with caution. People said he had been trying to cut across the tracks, the way kids had done for years, even though the warning lights at the crossing had been out of order for months. I remembered seeing them flicker and die on my way home from work. I remembered thinking I should call someone. But I hadn’t.

It was easier to think someone else would.

The afternoon after his funeral, I found myself parked near the old railway crossing without consciously deciding to go there. The air had a brittle, coppery tang, and the gravel lot beside the tracks felt as if it had been abandoned by everything living. I got out of the car, clutching a fistful of daisies I had picked from the cemetery grounds.

Javier’s memorial was already half-formed: a cluster of wilted flowers, a crooked wooden cross, a few glass candles, their wicks drowned in rainwater. I knelt awkwardly and added my daisies to the pile, feeling like a fraud. I had seen him skateboarding past the library just a week ago. He had smiled at me, lifted one hand in greeting. I had looked away.

As I stood up, brushing dirt from my jeans, something caught my eye near the edge of the tracks.

At first, I thought it was just a trick of the light—a patch of dark soil, maybe, or an old piece of rubber. But when I stepped closer, I saw it clearly.

It was a flower.

It grew straight up from the gravel bed, a slender black stalk supporting five curling petals so dark they looked wet. The petals shimmered faintly, like oil on water, shifting from deepest black to bruised purple when the light hit them just right. The bloom rocked gently on its stem, even though the air was completely still.

I stared at it for a long time. I didn’t know a lot about plants, but I knew enough to understand that nothing should have been able to grow here. Not in the rocky bed between two rusting rails, not without soil or water or anything close to life.

Without thinking, I knelt again, reaching out to touch the petals.

The closer my hand got, the stronger the wrongness became. It wasn’t the way the bloom looked; it was the way it felt. It watched me, somehow, though it had no eyes. It leaned, almost imperceptibly, in my direction.

I pulled back before my fingers could brush it.

Standing quickly, I wiped my hands on my jeans as though I had touched something diseased. For a moment, I had the stupid thought that I needed to apologize—to Javier, to the town, to the flower itself.

The sun dipped lower behind the hills, painting the tracks in long, golden slashes. I told myself I was tired. Grief did strange things to the mind, after all. Even so, when I turned back toward my car, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder.

The flower stood tall and still, waiting.

* * * * * *

I tried not to think about it over the next few days, but Langston Hollow made forgetting impossible. Javier’s death hung in the air, saturating every conversation, every radio station, even the bulletin board at the library. Half the people blamed the town council for ignoring the broken signals. The other half blamed Javier himself for being careless. I blamed myself.

At night, I found myself waking to strange dreams. I would be standing at the tracks again, looking down at the black flower, but when I reached to pluck it from the ground, the petals curled into a mouth and whispered my name. I stopped sleeping much after that.

By the end of the week, two more black flowers had appeared. One at the corner where Mrs. Banning’s car had flipped and caught fire after the stoplight shorted out. Another near the entrance to the shuttered textile mill, where a homeless man had been found hanging from a steel beam.

I didn’t have to look for them. It was like the town wanted me to see them. Every time a siren howled, I would find myself, hours later, standing somewhere near the edge of another tragedy, staring down at another impossible bloom.

Each one looked identical—black as tar, flickering faintly with purples and greens when the light struck just right. Each one moved in air that wasn’t there. Each one seemed to lean toward me when I got close.

I told no one—not yet. If I said the flowers were wrong, they would say I was being overly sensitive. If I said they were following me, they would say I needed rest.

Maybe they would have been right. Maybe I should have listened. Instead, I started to believe something else—something much worse. That the flowers weren’t just marks of death. That they were invitations. And sooner or later, they would expect me to answer.

Part II

There is a kind of silence that only comes after grief. It is not peace. It is vacancy.

Langston Hollow lived inside that silence now. Every day, I watched more people leave town. Those who stayed carried themselves as if waiting for something to come and finish the job.

By the time the second week passed after Javier’s death, I had counted six more black blooms. The flowers never appeared immediately. First came the tragedy—a house fire, a sudden heart attack, a drowning in a flooded basement. Then, after a day or two, the bloom would sprout somewhere nearby, as if the ground needed time to digest what had happened.

I stopped sleeping entirely. Instead, I drove aimlessly through the empty streets at night, telling myself I was just restless. In truth, I was hunting. I wanted to catch one of the blooms growing. I needed to know if they were born the way natural things were—pushing up through the dirt—or if they simply appeared.

I never caught them in the act. They were always just… there.

One evening, I found myself parked outside the old gas station. It had closed the previous winter, when the last owner packed up and moved to Dallas. The pumps stood like rusted skeletons under a sagging canopy, their paint scabbed and flaking.

A black bloom grew between the cracks in the concrete island where cars had once fueled up. Its petals fluttered lazily, even though the night was as still as glass.

I should have been used to them by then. Instead, the sight drove a spike of cold dread through me.

I stayed in the car, hands gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles ached. The flower seemed to vibrate faintly at the edge of my vision, and for a moment, I could almost hear it. Not a voice, exactly. A vibration, a hum, tuned perfectly to the frequency of my guilt.

I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back against the seat, forcing myself to relax.

I did not remember starting the car again. I only remembered the sound of gravel crunching under the tires as I pulled away, leaving the bloom swaying in the rearview mirror.

* * * * * *

I needed answers, and Deputy Travis Altenburg was the only person I trusted enough to talk to.

He met me late that Friday night at the diner, which still managed to keep its doors open despite the town’s decline. We sat in a back booth, the vinyl seats cracked and stuffing poking through the seams. The overhead light flickered every few minutes, but neither of us commented on it.

Travis listened patiently as I spoke. I told him about the flowers, the timing, and how they seemed to call to me.

When I finished, he stirred his coffee with slow, careful motions. His face was unreadable, but the way he avoided meeting my eyes said enough.

“Justine,” he said, setting the spoon down, “you’ve been through a lot lately. We all have. It’s natural to look for patterns when everything feels out of control.”

“I’m not imagining them,” I said. My voice cracked, so I lowered it. “They’re real, Travis. I can show you.”

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. I could tell he wanted to believe me, but belief came with a price most people were unwilling to pay. It was easier to pretend the world made sense.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said finally, offering a half-smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Maybe there’s a logical explanation. Fungi, maybe. Some kind of mold growing in weird conditions. You know how messed up the soil’s been since the flood three years ago.”

I wanted to argue, but the words dried up in my throat.

He meant well. He always had. But Travis saw the town through a window he refused to open, too afraid of what might blow inside.

I left the diner feeling more alone than ever.

* * * * * *

Sunday morning, I sat stiffly on a hard pew in the old church, trying to listen as Pastor Abigail Cole gave her sermon.

Only about a dozen people were scattered across the sanctuary, most of them older women in shapeless dresses and sensible shoes. Their heads bobbed occasionally in half-hearted agreement, but their eyes remained glassy and distant.

The building itself felt weary. The wooden beams overhead sagged, the stained-glass windows dulled by years of dust. The air smelled of old hymnals and mildew.

Pastor Cole spoke about sorrow that takes root in the soil of the heart. About bitterness that grows unchecked when no one tends the garden of their soul. I heard the words, but I felt them, too, heavy and sticky in the back of my throat. She talked about how grief, if left to rot, could poison everything it touched. Her voice was soft, but it filled the empty spaces as though the church itself was listening.

I did not remember rising at the end of the service. I only remembered finding myself standing alone at the altar steps while the last parishioners shuffled out.

Pastor Cole approached quietly, her hands folded before her, her eyes kind but wary.

“You see them, don’t you?” she said.

I stared at her, unsure if I had heard her correctly. Before I could answer, she placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Be careful what you uproot,” she whispered. “Some sorrows need a place to die.”

Then she walked away, leaving the scent of old wood and fading lilacs in her wake.

That night, I pulled every old book I could find from the library’s neglected folklore section.

Dust rose in clouds with each volume I opened, making me cough and blink in the dim light. Titles blurred together: Gardens of the Dead, Botanica Obscura, The Weeping Fields.

Most of the accounts were fractured, more rumor than fact. Stories about cursed flowers that marked the sites of betrayal, murder, and despair. Tales from places no longer found on maps, where sorrow had grown wild and choked out everything else.

One passage, scrawled in the margins of an otherwise forgotten book, stuck with me:

“Where grief takes root, beware.
Pull the weed too soon, and its seeds shall scatter on the wind.”

I sat alone in the library long after midnight, the books piled high around me, the ancient clock on the wall ticking with mechanical indifference.

The more I read, the more I realized the black blooms were not visitors.
They were symptoms.

Symptoms of something the town had been nursing for a long time without realizing it.

I thought about the boarded houses, the crumbling streets, the steady procession of tragedies.
Langston Hollow was not just dying. It was being eaten.

And the blooms were the teeth.

* * * * * *

I drove home with the heater blasting against the chill that seemed to have taken up permanent residence inside my bones.

As I passed the corner of Main and Shiloh, I caught sight of another bloom. This one had grown up through the asphalt itself, right in the center of the deserted intersection. Its petals glistened under the streetlights, as black as tar.

I kept my hands steady on the wheel, refusing to slow down or look directly at it.

But even with my eyes on the road, I knew it leaned toward me as I passed.

Knew it could feel me.

Knew it was waiting.

Part III

The night I decided to pull the flower, the sky hung low and gray, the stars smothered by heavy clouds.

The air tasted like rust.

I paced my living room for hours before making the decision. My thoughts twisted in circles, but always returned to the same truth: the blooms were multiplying. If something did not stop them, they would swallow what little remained of Langston Hollow.

I convinced myself that if I could destroy the first bloom—the one by the tracks where Javier died—maybe the others would wither with it.

Maybe I could still save something.

I left the house just after midnight. I dressed in dark clothes and wore gloves, even though it felt ridiculous. I did not tell anyone where I was going. If I failed, I did not want an audience.

The streets were unnervingly silent. When I reached the railroad crossing, I killed the headlights and rolled to a stop. The tracks stretched out before me, two thin scars cutting across the dead landscape. The makeshift memorial still stood to one side, battered by the wind. Someone had left a new bouquet of silk roses there; their colors looked lurid and wrong in the weak moonlight.

The black bloom waited near the rails, precisely where I remembered it. I approached slowly, my boots crunching against the gravel, each step feeling harder than the last.

When I reached the flower, I hesitated. Up close, it was even worse than I remembered. The smell rising from it was not floral, but damp and metallic. The surface of the flower’s petals was slick, and they were… trembling. My stomach twisted, but I forced myself to kneel. The ground beneath the bloom looked ordinary—loose stones and dirt packed hard by decades of trains rumbling past. But when I brushed the surface aside, the soil below was not brown or gray. It was black, slick, and clotted, like oil mixed with ashes.

The bloom shivered as my gloved fingers dug into the dirt around its base.

I gritted my teeth and pulled. At first, nothing happened. The stalk resisted, anchored deep below the surface. I shifted my grip and yanked harder, and the bloom tore free with a wet sound that made bile rise in my throat. Its roots dangled from the end of the stalk—long, black tendrils covered in thorn-like protrusions. Thick drops of viscous black sap oozed from the torn roots, hissing faintly as they hit the ground.

Instantly, the silence shattered.

In the distance, I heard the wail of sirens.

For one moment, I crouched there in the gravel, the dead bloom in my hand, my lungs frozen in my chest. The sound grew louder, filling the hollow night with urgency.

I dropped the bloom and stumbled back.

The sap clung to my gloves, sticky and black, refusing to let go. I tore the gloves off and hurled them away, wiping my hands furiously on my jeans even though nothing remained.

The sirens kept coming.

I did not hesitate. I rushed to the car, fumbling twice before jamming the keys into the ignition. The engine roared to life, and I peeled away from the tracks, headlights slicing through the darkness.

I told myself I was being paranoid. That the sirens had nothing to do with me. That I had not just done something terribly wrong.

When I reached Main Street, I saw the lights.

Red and blue strobed against the sides of buildings, washing the empty storefronts in color. A police cruiser skidded around a corner up ahead, its tires screeching against the pavement.

Instinct guided me to follow.

I kept a safe distance, my fingers digging into the steering wheel so hard my hands ached.

They led me to the bridge.

The old Trinity Bridge spanned the narrow river at the north end of town. It had been deemed unsafe years ago, but no one had bothered to enforce the closure beyond putting up a few flimsy barriers.

A commuter bus, the kind that ferried workers between Langston Hollow and the neighboring cities, hung at an impossible angle halfway off the bridge. Its headlights pointed uselessly into the river below. Crumpled metal and shattered glass littered the roadway.

I parked at the edge of the chaos. Moments later, emergency workers swarmed the scene. Some carried stretchers. Others climbed into the listing bus, their reflective gear flashing in the lights. Voices crackled over radios. Commands shouted. Someone sobbed openly nearby.

I stepped out of the car, moving like a sleepwalker.

An officer waved me back, but I barely heard him. I stood behind the yellow tape, staring, while the truth carved itself into my brain.

There had been no bus accident here yesterday. No bloom to mark it. But there would be now.

My gaze drifted instinctively to the cracked pavement near the bridge entrance. There was no bloom yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

I pressed a hand to my mouth to stifle the sob that clawed its way up my throat. I had not destroyed the flower. I had only moved its hunger.

I fled the scene before anyone could ask questions.

Back in my car, I drove aimlessly for hours, the highway unfolding before me like a thread I could never quite unravel. Every exit sign, every dark field, every hollow house pressed against my windows, whispering my failure.

The sun rose pale and sickly over the fields by the time I turned back toward Langston Hollow.

I expected to feel guilt, or sorrow, or despair.

Instead, what I felt was colder and sharper: inevitability.

The flowers were not just marking death. They were cultivating it. And I had helped them grow.

* * * * * *

By the end of the following week, three more blooms had appeared.

One at the hospital parking lot, after the ER flooded and several patients died.

One outside the grocery store, where a man shot his brother in broad daylight over an argument no one understood.

One at the playground, closed for years, where a teenager had hanged herself from the broken swing set.

Each bloom stood taller than the last. Each one seemed to lean a little farther toward the living.

I stopped pretending the town would survive. Langston Hollow had been crumbling for years.

The black blooms were simply the final harvest.

I sat at the kitchen table that night, staring at a map of the town spread out before me. I had marked every bloom I had seen with a small black dot.

Looking at them now, I saw a pattern forming—a slow, inward spiral.
A tightening noose.

At the center of the spiral, there was only one place left untouched.

The cemetery.

The place where I worked part-time. The place where it had all begun.

I knew what I would find there. Knew it the same way I knew the smell of rot, even before opening a dead flower’s petals.

Some things you did not need to see to understand.

The blooms were calling me home.

Part IV

The cemetery gates groaned when I pushed them open.

Their iron frames, twisted with vines of rust, screeched in protest before yielding just enough for me to slip through. I stood for a moment on the gravel path, breathing in the damp, metallic air. The scent was heavier than usual, thick with the faint, sour rot of something turning beneath the soil.

I tightened my jacket around me and stepped forward.

The Carrington Family Cemetery sprawled over a small hill at the edge of town. Rows of crooked headstones jutted from the earth, their inscriptions faded and worn smooth by decades of rain and neglect. In daylight, the place felt abandoned but harmless, a monument to forgotten names. At night, it felt like the town’s last, stubborn heartbeat—and even that rhythm had grown feeble.

I moved between the graves, my boots scuffing against gravel and dead leaves. The flashlight in my hand jittered with every step, the beam slicing through the mist in thin, wavering lines. I didn’t know exactly what I expected to find, but I knew it would be there.

I passed the graves of people I had known—old neighbors, teachers, friends’ parents—and tried not to look at the newer ones. Each name was a pinprick in my memory, a reminder that Langston Hollow’s best days were buried in the ground alongside its dead.

Halfway up the hill, I found it. A black bloom swayed atop a grave near the center of the cemetery. It was larger than any I had seen before, its petals almost grotesquely wide, as if drinking in the moonlight. The roots sprawled across the soil in a tangled mat, darkening the ground like a spreading infection.

I raised the flashlight and read the name etched into the headstone.

“Rebecca M. Carrington.”

My mother.

I staggered back two steps, the flashlight beam jerking wildly across the surrounding stones.

I had not visited her grave in months.

The sudden, sickening weight of guilt overcame me as I remembered the long, slow days of her illness. The way I had shrunk away from her in those final weeks, avoiding the hospital, making excuses about work and exhaustion when the truth was simpler: I could not stand to watch her fade.

I had abandoned her when it mattered most. And now something had taken root in the hollow left behind.

The bloom bent toward me slightly, as if acknowledging my thoughts.

I backed away, every instinct screamed at me to flee, to put as much distance as possible between myself and the thing growing from my mother’s grave. But my legs locked in place, unwilling or unable to obey.

It was not alone.

As my breathing steadied enough to lift the flashlight again, I saw the others. Small black shoots had begun to sprout across the hilltop, thin and skeletal, barely visible in the mist. They grew from graves at random—no pattern that I could see, no clear connection between the names. They swayed together like a field of tiny metronomes, ticking out some silent, terrible rhythm.

The flowers had done more than spread to the cemetery—they had claimed it entirely.

I stumbled back to my car and sat in the driver’s seat with my hands gripping the wheel, cold sweat prickling the back of my neck. I did not start the engine. I simply sat there, staring at the twisted shadows beyond the gate, trying to gather the frayed threads of my mind into something resembling coherence.

There was no salvaging this—no calling it a coincidence or a hallucination. No rationalizing it as grief or madness.

The black blooms were real, and they were growing stronger. They were no longer content to wait passively for sorrow to feed them. They were now reaching for it.

I thought about the pattern I had marked on the map—the slow, spiraling approach inward. I thought about the warnings hidden in the old folklore texts. I thought about Pastor Cole.

I needed answers—and I needed them now.

* * * * * *

The church stood crooked and empty when I arrived.

Its front doors hung ajar, creaking softly in the breeze. The stained-glass windows were dark, the parking lot cracked and overgrown. A single light flickered behind the altar, casting long, wavering shadows across the sanctuary.

I hesitated only a moment before stepping inside.

Pastor Abigail Cole knelt in prayer at the front pew. She did not turn when I entered, nor did she acknowledge the sound of my boots on the worn wooden floor. I approached slowly, unsure whether I was interrupting something sacred or whether the sanctity had long since fled.

“Pastor,” I said, my voice thin and rough.

She finished her prayer with a murmured amen and rose, turning to face me. Her expression was not surprised. It was weary, as if she had been expecting me all along.

“You’ve seen them,” she said simply.

I nodded.

Pastor Cole gestured toward the pews, and we sat facing each other across the empty aisle.

For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

Finally, she sighed and folded her hands in her lap.

“This has happened before,” she said. “Not here. Not in Langston Hollow. But elsewhere. Places the world has forgotten. Towns that dried up and blew away like dead leaves.”

“Why?” My voice cracked under the weight of the question. “What are they?”

“Grief,” she said. “Regret. Every sorrow we bury without healing, every wound we ignore. It all seeps into the ground. And sometimes, when there’s enough of it, when the land has suffered too long without kindness, something grows.”

She met my gaze with steady, sorrowful eyes. “The blooms are the children of our failures,” she said. “And once they take root, they do not stop until there is nothing left to feed them.”

I sat back against the pew, the words sinking into me.

“I tried to stop it,” I said. “I pulled one of them out. I thought—”

I trailed off, rising shame robbing me of my resolve.

Pastor Cole shook her head. “You cannot uproot sorrow,” she said. “You can only contain it. Accept it. Tend it like a wounded thing until it dies on its own.”

I thought about the sirens, the bridge, the broken bodies pulled from the wreckage.

“What happens now?” I asked.

She looked toward the stained-glass windows, where moonlight struggled to pierce the grime.

“Now, it finishes what it started,” she said.

* * * * * *

I left the church without speaking further. There was nothing more to say. The town was collapsing. I saw it clearly now, as if some veil had been stripped away.

Fires broke out in abandoned homes. Accidents and fights erupted in the streets. People disappeared without a trace, leaving only empty houses and unanswered questions behind.

Everywhere I turned, the black blooms grew thicker, rising in cracks and gutters, curling around mailboxes and lampposts. Their roots crisscrossed the pavement like veins, binding the town in a web of inevitable decay.

No one else seemed to notice. Or maybe they did, and chose blindness over terror.

The few who remained walked through the streets with hollow eyes, their movements mechanical, as if already resigned to the end. I understood, because I was no different. I had tried to intervene. I had tried to pull the sorrow out by its roots. But in the end, all I had done was scatter it wider.

Langston Hollow was dying.

And I was its last willing witness.

Part V

By the time I made the decision, Langston Hollow was no longer a town. It was a carcass.

The streets lay empty except for the black vines creeping across the cracked pavement. Houses sagged inward on themselves, roofs caving under the weight of unseen rot. Smoke rose from distant fires no one bothered to extinguish. The sky hung low and gray, heavy with the smell of ash and wet earth.

The people who could leave had fled. Those who stayed no longer looked at each other. No one spoke. No one tried to fight it anymore.

They understood the way I understood.

The blooms had won.

* * * * * *

I found Deputy Travis Altenburg outside the station house, sitting on the hood of his patrol car with a shotgun resting across his knees. He looked up as I approached, but did not smile.

His face was pale and hollow, his eyes ringed with sleeplessness. He looked like a man who had been standing guard over a battlefield long after the war had ended.

“You should get out,” he rasped. “While you still can.”

I shook my head.

“You can’t run from it,” I said. “It follows.”

He nodded once, the barest dip of his chin, and said nothing more.

We stood together for a few minutes in the heavy silence. Then I turned and walked away.

I never looked back.

* * * * * *

The cemetery gates were already open when I arrived.

I stepped through and followed the gravel path up the hill, past the crooked stones and the spreading mat of black vines. The ground felt soft and unstable under my boots, as if it no longer remembered how to be solid.

At the top of the hill, near the oldest graves, I found a bloom larger than any before. Its glistening petals towered above the headstones, wide and curling. The stem was as thick as a man’s wrist, its roots sprawling in every direction. It grew from an open grave.

I didn’t need to read the headstone to know whose name was carved on it. Still, I forced myself to look.

“JUSTINE CARRINGTON.”

There was no date beneath it. No beginning or end. Only my name, etched in deep, final strokes.

The smell of rot and sorrow coiled around me, sharp enough to sting my eyes, as I stepped closer. The bloom bent toward me, its petals trembling slightly, as if anticipating my arrival.

I dropped to my knees at the grave’s edge, and for a moment I simply sat there, breathing in the foul, heavy air, letting it fill my lungs. There was no anger in me. No fear. Only the cold, steady weight of understanding.

I had abandoned too much and allowed too much to fester. The blooms had not created the sorrow; they had only revealed it. The fault had always been ours. It had always been mine.

I closed my eyes and leaned forward until my palms rested against the cold, wet earth. The bloom’s shadow fell over me, blotting out the thin moonlight.

I heard it whisper then—not in words, but in a deep vibration that thrummed through the ground, through my bones, through the broken spaces inside me. And I surrendered to it.

The petals brushed my shoulders, soft and cold as silk. The roots wound around my arms and legs, pulling me gently, insistently, into the grave’s waiting mouth.

I did not fight or cry out. Instead, I let the earth take me.

As the darkness swallowed me, I thought I felt something shift in the town beyond the cemetery gates—a subtle easing, a slackening of the invisible cords pulling everything down.

Maybe, in giving myself back to the soil, I had bought Langston Hollow a little more time.

Maybe.

* * * * * *

Long after I was gone, after the fires burned out and the last few survivors rebuilt what they could, a child playing near the old church found a strange flower sprouting between the stones. A tiny bloom, black and glistening, waited, swaying gently where no wind blew.