It started with flowers.
Yellow, pink, pastel flowers, growing along the edges of the warmth surrounding me.
A sound, a giggle from my throat, small, just forming, made the flowers glow.
They smiled at me.
Each glow receded until my voice called them back. Sweet pastel light and smelling bloomed things surrounded me. My fingers, tiny soft nubs, reached for them.
And then the warmth thinned.
Something was wrong with the room. The corners were wrong.
The corners had leaked.
Black smoke gathered at the edges of my vision, slow and patient. The flowers in the room noticed before I did.
The petals closed.
The vines curled tight against their columns. The light that had been floating from the ceiling stopped floating. A pink petal fell and turned grey before it reached the floor.
A voice began underneath everything. It was so deep I did not hear it with my ears. I heard it in my teeth. In the small bones of my chest.
The flowers died.
Yellow first.
Then pink.
Then the pastel ones at the edge of the warmth.
They blackened from the inside.
The smell that had been sweet turned to wet ash.
The smoke was closer now.
A shape was moving inside it.
A shape that knew me.
Its hand reached out. The fingers were wrong. Too long. Too deliberate. They moved the way roots move through soil, not reaching but arriving, as if the hand had always been coming and the smoke was just the courtesy of warning.
And in the place where the hand touched the warmth, a flower grew.
Not yellow, or pink, or pastel.
A bloom the color of a bruise, with veins that pulsed. It opened slowly, and at its center was a sound.
Not a word.
A hum.
A hum that matched the hum in my teeth, and for one moment before I woke, I understood that the flower and I were the same pitch.
