Excerpt: The Yellow Flowers

She woke with the terrible sensation of having left her sister in the attic. The white sheets were bright against her back, the darkly painted ceiling a cloud before her eyes. A large, dusty file box weighed on the mattress near her left foot, its scent of age and privacy creeping up the length of her body to remind her nose that something needed to be done.

She pushed herself out of bed, for a long moment failing to care that the only place this effort got her was bare-kneed on the hard floor. Her elbows sunk like the box into the layers of fabric and spring. She lifted her face to the clock on her far wall—the distance was great. She squinted the Roman numbers into focus, perceiving the two vertical lines indicated by the short hand as a two.

With a profound exhalation of air so stale she did not believe it had been harbored in her lungs, she straightened her legs and her back and managed to stand. She kept her knees pressed against the bed frame for balance, and the palm of her left hand fastened itself to her face for much the same purpose.

The sheer white nightdress she wore slipped over her skin as she blinked into her hand. After a long moment, she felt the air on the back of her legs. The window was open. She half-turned to find a black square where she had expected a bright aperture of light; she blinked again. The two morphed into something more congruous in her mind, and as she faced the room again she became suddenly aware of the shadeless fluorescent lamp on her nightstand.

The guileless appliance gave her private chambers all the radiance of day without its softness, and for a third time Natalie blinked against the heaviness of sleep.

She shuffled around the bed, dodging the old-smelling cube which sat like a weight on its surface. Reaching the lamp, she extended a set of fumbling fingers to twist the ridged knob protruding from its neck. The thing resisted only briefly before giving way in a quiet click and allowing the room to flash into darkness.

Natalie stood for a long moment staring into this new confusion before she, slowly, lowered herself back down onto the softness of the bed. Her eyes were wide and blind in the heavy absence of light, but gradually, as she stared straight ahead, they began to perceive the deep, shifting grays blackish blues of the clouded night. These manifested first on the angles of her dresser and the smooth flatness of the white wall, but within several unblinking moments they had given shape and a mute sort of color to the entire scene.

She raised a hand to brush cold, heavy hair from her face. She had apparently gone to bed with the dark mass still damp. Her fingers hovered before her eyes, a pale, fragile gray in the silent room. Her heart quickened in her chest even as the warmth drained from her face. Her eyes reflected a light which was not present in the room, feverish in their own sleep-hazed inspiration.

Bringing together her parted lips, she roused herself and slipped beneath the cool smoothness of her covers, crowding to one edge of the bed. She settled her head deeper into the lenient pillow, letting her hand rest on the swell of fabric before her face. She closed her eyes against forgetfulness and the strong odor of the box, and in a moment she was lost to a heavier darkness.