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In the garden...

In the garden grew the most beautiful flowers, and they were all poisonous.

Wretched blood from the decaying veins of putrefying bodies that could not be buried close enough to Hell below the soil, had seeped like a cancer in to everything that dared live around it.

We never planted any seeds. The corpses we buried, five feet from our kitchen window, didn't deserve fond remembrance, and the Harvey family weren't in the habit of covering up ugly truths with pretty lies. Nor were we in the habit of telling the truth, but our lies were real enough for people to buy, boring enough that people quickly lost interest in our stories.

We lay below the radar, at least we did before Dad died. Since then, every Tom, Dick and Harry had shown an interest in our pain by baking pity pies and curtesy 'sorry for your loss' baskets of muffins. They all got taken out with the trash. Even the baskets and trays they came in. Like I said, my Dad didn't deserve any rememberance, through pity pies, muffins or flowers.

But if it's one thing I've learnt in my seventeen years, evil is hard to defeat, it doesn't always stay dead.

From the mass grave, virbrant green shoots sprouted up towards the brilliant blue summer skies, and the most delicately gorgeous white roses bloomed.

The sight was disturbing to say the least. Made me sick to my stomach. I heard my mother throwing up her worry into the ensuite of the guest bedroom. She didn't want me to know. I didn't try to soothe her, she never once came to comfort me.

I tried to tell myself it was the goodness in Daddy's heart tearing through the chaos and destruction of the bodies below, rising proud and victorious, to show us that he loved us all along, that it hadn't all been a lie. But it was plain as a whopping big plaque had been planted next to the damn ugly roses reading 'unnatural, poisonous, deadly'.

If my dad was truely rising, there wasn't a single thing that was good about it.

We tried to rip them up from the dirt, but those suckers were gripped in the soil so tight, it was like trying to remove gum from your hair. So we dug up the ground in hope we could dig them up along with it, but their roots were threaded too deep for comfort, too close to danger. I knew if we were to dig to their source we'd find them woven thick and tight as an anacondas grip, around twisted, broken bones.

We piled the dirt back into the grave, amongst the roses, and prayed the humidity of Death Valley air would be enough to suck the life right out of them.

What a bizarrely hopeful thought.

The beastly things thrived right through the sweltering summer. Even when I felt I'd pass out from the heat myself, they seemed to rise in defiance, taunting me with their strength, reminding me I was only human.

The resilient little bastards became great concern for our busy body neighbour, Mrs Crossdale. The tiny witch was head of Beatty in Bloom Society. As I liked to call them the BBS, bitches with bullshit. Yes their gardens looked a little less dead than everything else in Beatty, but their souls were anything but pretty.

Their mouths ran around town spreading rumour like wild fire. There's not one person they wouldn't burn for their own personal agenda, that stretched far beyond their brightly blooming Moss Roses of their rock gardens.

Mrs Crossdale didn't have much to like about our family. She didn't appreciate our nocturnal activity, it disturbed her chickens sleep. They stopped laying eggs for the first three months of our arrival to this dusty town. Mrs Crossdale set up cameras thinking she was being vigilant against foxes and coyotes. She thought we were the devil.

My mother had been fobbing Mrs Crossdale off since we moved here ten years ago that she didn't know a damn thing about gardening, and that much was true. Sure she could dig a bloody big hole the size of a canyon and half way to China when motivation kicked her so far up the back side. But trying to make anything thrive in an already half dead town like Beatty, well, mum had no interest in that. Survival was her number one priority, thriving was beyond her care. I'm very much like her in that case, it's hard to think much of the future when you don't know if you'll be breathing tomorrow.