A Twisted Tale Of: The Blooming

Inspired By 'Tiptoe through the tulips'

“The Blooming”- By Jennifer

Elric was obsessed with the smell of flowers; he loved sticking his nose inside of those tiny pollen blossoms always leaving the parks with a bright yellow circle on the end of his nose. Elric was hypnotised by their colours, their petals and their tiny green stems that he refused to pluck from the ground. He wanted one for himself. He wanted his very own garden.  

‘Your sisters got hay fever’. His mum would say.

‘- But mum!’

‘It will affect her sinuses, I am not wasting my money on some garden, now pack it in’, she would say.

She didn’t have to join him and the flower he had thought. How can one child have so much authority?

Elric decided to save up pennies and pounds from their dampened sofa corners and from inside their messy wardrobe doors and over time had enough to buy a singular packet of sunflower seeds and a bright blue shovel to pop them in the ground.

Somehow, Elric found no matter how many seeds he pressed into the dirt, or how many watering cans he emptied the soil beneath him refused to let them grow. He moved them to different patches, looking for the sunlight to reach out to them, but each part of his garden was grey and rotting from patch to patch. The dirt was the only thing that stayed.

This wasn’t fair.

He yanked at his mother’s hair as she knelt beside the hearth. ‘Why won’t they grow?’She winced. ‘Elric, let go.’

He pulled at his father’s shirt, his muddy fingers planting a layer of desperation and soil on his chest, ‘make them grow Dad!' His father sighed. ‘The earth gives when it chooses. Not when we demand it.’

Still, Elric kept demanding. The garden ignored him. It seemed only the dog was able to add something extra to the garden.

He stomped his way to Marianne’s room. A place as dark and dull as her personality as Elric had said. It seemed she believed hay fever was contagious just from colours. As her face was smothered with eyeliner and her clothes were a detergent for anything living.

‘Oi Marianne help me, help me.’

‘Go away Elric, I am busy.’

‘You witch. Only you can help me, you’re the reason the garden hates me, I know it.’

‘Leave me be Elric, if the garden doesn’t like you, it's because you made it hate you.’

‘No, I never.’

‘Go give it a gift or something, maybe then you can have your snotty flowers.’

 He knocked the book from her hands, tore the hat from her head, and twiddled her nose until she snapped.

‘Go to the garden,’ she said flatly, brushing her curls back into place. ‘If people find you annoying, I am not surprised the garden does too!’ Elric didn’t need to be told twice.

He stomped his way to the darkest corner of the garden, where the spiders and beetles hid. It had once been called the "flowery end," long ago, before something strange had settled there. The air was heavier in that corner. The weeds grew in unnatural patterns, and Elric had been too scared before, but he couldn’t get any more desperate.

‘I wish for flowers! I want them I want our house to be pretty! I want people to come visit us and for them to never stop growing! I will work with you.’

There was no answer.

‘Let me grow them!’

Just as he turned to leave, a breeze brushed his neck—cold and deliberate.

A voice followed. It sounded female, but wrong like it was being pushed through the cracks of a broken music box.‘Give him a flower that he wants now so bad.’

He spun, startled.

There was someone—no, something—in the garden. A figure stood among the tall grasses, her form barely clinging to human shape with weeds and roots clambering across her face. Her fingers gnarled and moss-covered raised. Before he could speak, a white light struck Elric’s chest.

His mouth opened in a scream—but no sound came out. Instead, something thick and green began to push from his throat. His body spasmed, convulsed, and then fell still as the garden around him rustled.

The garden seemed to have a plan for him.

Marianne awoke the next morning to silence.

Elric’s bed was cold despite the sun shining within his room.

At first, she was relieved. Maybe he'd taken her advice and worked his frustration out in the dirt.

But by mid-morning, unease began to gnaw at her. He had never missed breakfast.

She ventured to the far end of the garden to see what magical idea he had come up with this time.

What she found made her freeze.

A single flower stood tall where the weeds had once ruled—a grotesquely beautiful thing. Its petals shimmered with hues she couldn’t name. Veins of red pulsed gently through green stalks. The bloom itself was warm to the touch and, though she could not explain it, familiar.

She leaned in, squinting.

The centre of the blossom almost looked like a human face. Almost looked familiar.

It was not quite formed, but enough to stir something dreadful in her chest.

‘Elric?’ she whispered, her voice caught in her throat.

The flower swayed.She stepped back and screamed.

They had never found the boy.

The villagers searched the fields, the woods, even the river, they dug up the grounds near the house in case someone- or something had done their worst, highlighting each searched area with bundles of new flowers and grass just as he would have wanted. But they never seemed to venture into the corner of the family's garden.  No one ventured there after dark. Most simply muttered, ‘The garden took what it owed’ and closed its doors a little tighter. They ‘guessed’ Elric had run away from his struggles or in a tantrum got himself lost.

Only Marianne knew the truth—or of what little she dared accept.

From her window, she could see the large flower swaying in the breeze and even swaying in the silence. It stood tall, season after season, drawing insects and flowers to surround it. The people who walked close enough near it could sense someone smiling, and a few claimed they heard a boy’s voice humming from within the stalk when the sun was at its highest point in the sky.

Marianne visited until she couldn’t get past the flowers that surrounded it.

Sometimes, at night, she’d hear a soft tapping against her window.

Like leaves brushing glass.

Or fingers.

She pulled the curtains tighter and didn’t look.

Because deep down, she feared he had grown beyond the garden’s edge.

Or that he still wanted her help with making the flowers grow.