The Yellow Bloom

In the summer of 1975, sixteen-year-old Eleanor lived with her family in the dusty, sun-scorched town of Cinder, New Mexico. Their house sat at the edge of town, just past a sprawling field of dried grass and prickly pear. A mile down the rutted dirt road stood the old Santos Cemetery, a forgotten patch of ground where the town’s earliest settlers were buried. The graves were marked by crumbling sandstone and iron crosses that rusted into the earth.

Eleanor’s mother, Rosa, had always warned her about that place. ‘Don’t you ever set foot in there, mija. There are things we don’t talk about.’ Rosa had heard stories as a girl, stories of people who wandered in and came out different, or didn’t come out at all. But Eleanor was sixteen, and sixteen was the age of disbelief. She thought her mother was just superstitious, full of old-country nonsense.

One blistering afternoon, Eleanor was walking to the general store when she decided to take a shortcut through the cemetery. The heat shimmered off the ground, and the silence was so complete she could hear her own heart. Amid the weeds and cracked stones, she noticed something odd: clusters of yellow and white flowers, like nothing she’d ever seen. They grew in perfect circles around the oldest graves, their petals almost translucent, glowing faintly in the sun. They looked like roses, but the petals were too thin, and the stems were a deep, unnatural black. Intrigued, Eleanor knelt down and picked a handful. The flowers were cool to the touch, a strange relief from the heat.

She brought them home, arranging them in a mason jar on her windowsill. Rosa saw them immediately. ‘Where did you get those?’ Eleanor shrugged. ‘The old cemetery.’ Rosa’s face went pale. ‘I told you never to go there!’ Eleanor laughed. ‘Why? What’s going to happen?’ Rosa’s jaw tightened. ‘Nothing is going to happen. Just don’t go back.’ She left the room, and nothing more was said.

That night, Eleanor dreamt of a woman in a white dress standing at the edge of her bed. The woman’s face was blurred, but she was holding a bouquet of those same flowers. She whispered in a language Eleanor didn’t understand, and when Eleanor woke, the flowers in the jar had grown, their stems curling like fingers toward the ceiling.

Three days later, Rosa and Eleanor were driving into town on a rare family outing. The road was empty, the sky a pale blue. It was then Eleanor noticed the smell, a sweet, sickly perfume that filled the car. She turned to ask her mother if she smelled it, but Rosa’s face was frozen, her eyes wide. She was gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white.

‘Mom?’ Eleanor said. Rosa didn’t answer. She was staring straight ahead, but Eleanor saw that her lips were moving, forming words without sound. Then the car swerved. Eleanor screamed, but Rosa didn’t react. The car veered off the road and came to a stop in a field of those same flowers, which had somehow appeared there overnight, a vast carpet of yellow and white.

Rosa turned to Eleanor. Her eyes were empty, like a doll’s. ‘You shouldn’t have picked them,’ she said, her voice flat. Eleanor opened the door and stumbled out. The flowers were all around, and they were swaying, even though there was no wind. Eleanor looked back at her mother. Rose was still sitting in the driver’s seat, but her skin was now the color of the petals, and her fingers were growing thin and black, like stems.

Eleanor ran. She ran through the field, through the dried grass, back toward town. But the cemetery was suddenly in front of her, as if it had moved. She crashed through the iron gate, and inside, every grave was crowned with those flowers, and they were all turned toward her, like a thousand silent watchers. She felt something cold wrap around her ankle. She looked down. A root, black and slick, was curling up her leg. She tried to scream, but her voice was gone, replaced by a faint rustle, like petals brushing against stone.

The town of Cinder searched for Eleanor and Rosa. They found the car, abandoned in a field, and later, in the Santos Cemetery, they found two new graves. One was old, churning with strange flowers. The other was fresh, with a single yellow bloom sprouting from the earth. No one in Cinder ever spoke of it again. But sometimes, in the summer, when the wind blows through the fields, you can hear a young girl’s voice, whispering, ‘I shouldn’t have picked them.’