The Last Bloom of Itzel

When I was nine, my grandmother Itzel passed from a sickness that hollowed her out from the inside. Her death left a silence in our house that no one spoke about, but I carried it like a stone in my chest. Years later, at fifteen, I returned to the small cemetery behind the old chapel where she was buried. I had heard that if you visit a grave at dusk and leave something the dead loved, they might visit you. I brought a single bloom from her garden—a strange, purple flower she had cultivated, with petals like velvet and a scent thick with honey and rain.

I stood before her headstone, the name ITZEL MARQUEZ carved in letters that had already begun to gray. The air was still, heavy with the breath of the trees that surrounded the graveyard. I spoke to her, telling her about school, about my mother’s crying at night, about how I never got to say goodbye. My voice felt small, swallowed by the grass and the gathering dusk. I placed the flower at the base of the stone and knelt, pretending I could hear her answer in the rustle of leaves.

Then the scent changed. Instead of honey and rain, it became sickly sweet, like rotting fruit. I looked at the flower, and its petals had turned a deep, bruised purple, oozing a dark sap. The gravestone before me was no longer Itzel’s. The name read ELIAS VANCE, a man I had never heard of. I stumbled back, my heart hammering. The cemetery was different too—the chapel was gone, replaced by a field of crooked crosses. I was not where I had been.

A voice came from behind me, low and amused. I turned to see a man in a weathered coat, half-hidden in the twilight. He smiled, but his eyes were black, like the sap. ‘You brought her a gift,’ he said, pointing to the flower. ‘But you came to the wrong grave. Do you know what happens when you offer a bloom to the wrong dead?’ I shook my head, my legs trembling. ‘They can take root,’ he said, ‘in you.’

I ran. The cemetery became a maze of headstones, each one bearing a name I knew—my mother, my father, my brother—all with dates of death that were today. I screamed, but no sound left my lips. I collided with a stone, and the impact sent me into darkness.

When I woke, I was lying in the grass by the original chapel, the flower beside me—fresh, whole, and sweet. I scrambled to it, grabbed it, and threw it as far as I could. It landed on another grave, that of a woman named Rosa. I turned and fled, never looking back. I never returned to that cemetery, but sometimes, at dusk, I find a single purple petal on my windowsill. And I have not eaten flowers since, for fear of what might grow inside me.