The Sulfur Bloom

The night before, we’d celebrated Maren’s promotion with a party that spilled from our apartment into the stairwell and then onto the fire escape. Now, the morning sun slanted through the blinds like a guilty verdict. My head throbbed in time with the drip of the kitchen faucet. Then the smell hit me: a gut-churning reek of rotten eggs and burnt wiring, so thick it felt like I could taste it. I gagged, rolling over to escape, and found I couldn’t move. My limbs were dead weight, pinned to the mattress as if by a great invisible hand. I tried to call out for my roommate, Leo, but my tongue was a slab of dried meat. Panic clawed at me, but I was a prisoner in my own body. I lay there, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like a map of a forgotten country, for what must have been an hour before the paralysis ebbed and I could sit up.

When I finally stumbled out of my room, the smell followed me like a loyal, putrid dog. I threw open windows, checked the bathroom, the kitchen, even the utility closet. Nothing. Leo came in from his run, sniffed the air, and said, ‘What’s that smell? Did you burn something?’ But when I asked him to describe it, he just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know… toast?’ I knew then that something was deeply, personally wrong. That was my first brush with the waking nightmare they call the Old Hag.

Years later, after I’d found myself in a church pew most Sundays, my marriage crumbled like week-old bread. The divorce was final on a Tuesday. By Friday, I was back in a new, sterile apartment, trying to rebuild a life out of cardboard boxes and half-empty bottles of antacids. I’d taken a sleeping pill, a glass of cheap wine, and a prayer that I’d be too tired to dream. I woke in the black heart of the night to that same stench, fouler than before, like a gas leak in a carcass. My bedroom was dim, lit only by the amber glow of a streetlamp through the blinds. And I was paralyzed again. My heart hammered, but my limbs refused to obey. I could move my head, just a little. At the foot of my bed, hovering a few inches above the floor, was a face. It wasn’t human. It was all wrong: the skin a mottled, grayish green, like something left too long in the deep. Its eyes were black pits, and its mouth stretched at an unnatural angle, frozen in a silent, mocking laugh. It bobbed, pendulous, as if enjoying my terror. I tried to scream, to speak the name I’d been taught to call, but only a strangled wheeze escaped.

I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed, a desperate, rapid stream of words that felt like they were getting lost in the dark. When I opened them, the thing was still there, but it seemed to waver, like a heat mirage. It leaned closer, and I could see that its ‘mouth’ wasn’t laughing at all—it was agony. Then it whispered, a voice like rustling leaves, ‘You cannot bloom where you are planted.’

A cold panic seized me, and I felt a surge of something else—a fierce, furious defiance. I focused on the faint smell of my own sweat, the rough texture of the sheets, and I forced one finger to twitch. Then my hand. Inch by inch, I clawed for the bedside lamp and knocked it to the floor. The bulb shattered, and in the sudden pure dark, the stench vanished as if a door had slammed shut. I lay there, shaking, covered in a cold sweat, until the paralysis finally released me.

I never told anyone the full story. How would they believe me? But I did learn something. The smell, the witch, the paralysis—they came to me when my mind was a dark, loamy soil, rich with grief and resentment. The church taught me to uproot those weeds. But now, years later, I sometimes catch a faint whiff of sulfur on a still night. And I wonder if I’ll ever truly be free, or if that thing is just waiting for the right moment to plant me again.