Bloody Skirts
ACT I The Fields That Dream of Fire
The late afternoon sun was brutal, a burning eye glaring down from an almost painfully blue sky. Waves of heat rose visibly from the worn blacktop, shimmering and distorting the horizon into something liquid and uncertain. The fields on either side stretched endlessly, a crimson ocean of poppies swaying gently, whispering secrets to one another in a breeze that was too hot and dry to bring any comfort.
“Jesus,” Rachel muttered, squinting through her sunglasses. She leaned against the door, pressing her forehead to the warm glass. “Maybe inspiration wasn’t the best reason to drive into the middle of nowhere.”
Tom grunted softly, keeping his eyes fixed on the shimmering road. Sweat beaded on his forehead, glistening faintly in the relentless sunlight. “Don’t start second-guessing now. You’re the one who said your creativity needed a kick in the ass.”
“Yeah, well, photographing endless fields of flowers isn’t exactly Pulitzer material.”
“And teaching bored teenagers biology isn’t exactly Nobel Prize material,” Tom said flatly, wiping sweat from his brow with one hand. “We all have our crosses to bear.”
Claire laughed softly from the backseat, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the back of Tom’s seat, her voice playful. “If it helps, this setting would make one hell of a short story. Creepy, isolated—perfect Stephen King territory.”
Eric sat quietly beside her. He’d been oddly silent for the last few hours, staring at the flowers.. His hand tightened briefly on his phone. “If I were coding a VR simulation,” he muttered absently, “I’d trap someone here. Endless poppies, no exit.”
Claire nudged him gently, half-smiling but clearly concerned. “Hey, you okay, Eric? You’ve been weird since we left Paris.”
“Yeah,” Tom added, glancing at him in the mirror, his voice carefully neutral. “You hardly said goodbye to Julia. Everything okay back home?”
Eric hesitated, eyes flicking momentarily to meet Tom’s gaze before looking away. “She was acting strange before we left. I just… something didn’t feel right.”
His eyes glazed over, pupils shrinking to tiny points swallowed by darkness as he muttered “Yeah, I’d trap ’em here, man. Ain’t no better prison than beauty. See, people, they chase after it, thinkin’ it’s somethin’ they can touch, somethin’ they can hold tight. But beauty ain’t real—it’s just poppies, endless red poppies, whisperin’ lies, makin’ promises that melt under your fingertips. You keep reachin’, thinkin’ maybe there’s somethin’ beyond, somethin’ pure, somethin’ worth holdin’. But all you get is emptiness and petals, brother, petals driftin’ away in the breeze like your sanity slippin’ through your fingers. That’s the joke, man. You build the bars yourself, paint ’em pretty colors, pretend they’re flowers.”
Tom cleared his throat, eyes back on the road, knuckles white against the steering wheel. “Relationships are tricky. Probably just a rough patch.”
Eric didn’t respond, only tightened his jaw and stared resolutely out the window.
A sudden mechanical cough startled them all, and the car jerked violently before rolling silently to a halt. The silence afterward felt oppressive, amplified by the endless rustle of the poppies.
Tom cursed softly, stepping out and popping the hood, steam billowing upward in a thick white cloud. “Great,” he muttered darkly, leaning over the engine. “Radiator’s overheated.”
“Perfect,” Rachel sighed, looking around at the empty road disappearing into heat-shimmering nothingness. “No one’s coming through here anytime soon.”
Eric walked a short distance away, raising his phone, searching for a signal. He stopped abruptly, eyebrows furrowing deeply. “Guys, there’s Wi-Fi here.”
Rachel glanced skeptically at him. “In the middle of nowhere?”
Eric held up his phone. The network read: “Le Coquelicot Rouge.”
Tom frowned deeply. “Well, connect to it. Maybe we can reach somebody.”
Eric tapped the screen, then froze for a moment, his expression unreadable, as he swiped and tapped again and again frantically. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath.
Claire leaned in, noticing the change in his demeanor. “Eric, what’s wrong?”
He turned the phone slowly toward them. On the screen, a Wi-Fi network was visible, but next to it, the status simply read “No Internet Access.”
Rachel glanced out at the empty landscape. “Maybe it’s just a dead network. Some old automated watering system, left behind. Could be a glitch of your phone.”
Eric shook his head. “No. This isn’t a glitch. It’s like this network is just… sitting here. Waiting for something, or someone. Look around us, nothing for miles.”
His voice had dropped to a lower, uneasy tone, and the silence in the car grew heavier. Tom slammed the car hood shut loudly, the sound echoing harshly. “The radiator isn’t just overheated—it’s cracked wide open. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”
Silence settled heavily over them, broken only by the whispering rustle of poppies, a sound that suddenly seemed less natural, somehow aware. Waiting. Expecting, perhaps, for the cool darkness to fall.
Rachel turned slowly, scanning the horizon, a chill prickling the nape of her neck despite the oppressive heat. The poppies stretched away endlessly, their scarlet petals shifting subtly, rippling like a sea stained with blood. Each whispering rustle grew louder, more insistent, pressing inward until it felt suffocating.
“We should walk,” Rachel suggested abruptly, breaking the uncomfortable silence. She glanced nervously at Tom. “Maybe there’s a farmhouse or something nearby.”
Tom stared into the distance, eyes narrowed, searching for a landmark—anything but poppies. Finally, he nodded. “Eric, screenshot that Wi-Fi name. Someone must be close enough to have set up a network. Rachel, grab your camera. Let’s go.”
They left the car reluctantly, moving slowly down the baking asphalt. The breeze died abruptly, leaving an eerie stillness. Eric lagged behind, repeatedly checking his phone.
“Maybe it’s a prank,” Claire suggested, trying to put his mind at ease.
Claire stopped abruptly, pointing toward a faint shape shimmering distantly beyond the poppies. “Look—there’s something there!”
Relief surged through the group, propelling their weary feet forward. The distant blur resolved slowly into clarity: an old stone farmhouse, half-consumed by ivy, its slate roof sagging beneath the weight of years.
Tom quickened his pace, determination sharpening his features. “Whoever owns this place better have a working phone or at least some water.”
As they approached the house, the oppressive silence around them seemed to deepen, an unease settling over them once again, heavier and colder than before. The house loomed ahead, its windows like vacant eyes, dark and unblinking, watching them with an unsettling stillness. The air around them grew colder, the warmth of the day retreating into the distance. Even the sound of the mingling poppies grew fainter.
Eric hesitated, his breath catching in his throat. He gripped his phone tighter, the edge of its cracked screen digging painfully into his palm as he tried to steady himself.
Claire reached out, fingers brushing the worn surface of the wooden door. It creaked on its hinges, the sound unnervingly loud in the stillness, swinging open far too easily, as though it had been waiting for them.
Inside, the darkness stretched before them, thick and all-encompassing, like a living thing. It felt cooler inside, a sharp contrast to the oppressive heat outside, and it beckoned them, strange and silent, almost inviting them in.
“Allô? Il y a quelqu’un ici?” Claire’s voice trembled, barely above a whisper. It bounced back to them, distorted and hollow, as if the house itself had swallowed her words.
The only response was the groan of old timber shifting under the weight of years of neglect. A soft, unsettling creak echoed through the space, sending a shiver down Claire’s spine.
They stepped forward, crossing the threshold together. The moment they did, their shadows were swallowed whole by the dark, as if the house had consumed them, leaving only the faintest outline of their figures behind.
Inside, the air was thick, heavy with the smell of dust, decay, and something metallic—a sharp and bitter but weirdly familiar tang that made Rachel’s stomach tighten. Her pulse quickened, inexplicably, and she instinctively raised her camera, snapping a few shots as she moved forward, her fingers trembling slightly.
“Guys,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. She pointed toward the far wall, her camera shaking in her hands. “Look at this.”
Her lens caught something painted hastily across the peeling plaster—a message scrawled in faded crimson, its letters jagged and uneven:
“Les fleurs sont affamées.”
Claire’s breath hitched, her voice barely above a murmur as she translated. “The flowers are hungry.”
Rachel stepped back, her eyes fixed on the words, her camera still raised, but the unease gnawing at her didn’t let up. The red letters seemed to pulse in the dim light, their meaning hanging heavy in the air.
The room fell silent again, the weight of the words pressing down on them, suffocating in the stillness. It was as if the house itself had grown quieter, more suffocating. The oppressive atmosphere seemed to coil around them, wrapping tighter with each passing second.
Finally, Tom shifted, his voice breaking through the tension, pragmatic as always. “It’s just graffiti. Some kid’s idea of a joke.”
Eric glanced at him briefly, something unreadable flickering across his face. “Yeah… a joke.”
Claire forced a laugh, bright but unsteady. “Well, whatever it is, staying here won’t get us hydrated. We should find water. My throat is dry as fuck.”
Rachel lowered her camera, giving Claire a judging look. “A classy lady, as always.”
ACT II What the Earth Remembers
Outside, twilight had settled quietly across the land, the scarlet poppies muted to deeper shades. Tom led Eric toward the old well behind the farmhouse, its stone frame cloaked in ivy, shadowed in the fading daylight.
“It looks ancient,” Eric muttered skeptically. “Probably dried up decades ago.”
“We have to try,” Tom insisted, voice sharp, impatient. He gripped the crank, rusted and stubborn from disuse, and began to turn it, slowly at first, then more forcefully, muscles tensed with effort.
The mechanism creaked loudly, protesting each movement. Eric watched, hesitant, then joined in, pulling at the wheel, sweat breaking across his brow. For several long, anxious minutes they struggled, until a faint, promising echo sounded from deep within the darkness below.
“Listen,” Eric said sharply. “Do you hear that?”
Tom froze, holding his breath. From below came a faint yet unmistakable sound—a trickle of water, hidden deep beneath stone and shadow.
“It’s there,” Tom breathed, relief washing visibly over his face. They lowered a battered bucket down, holding their breaths as it descended. Minutes later, they drew it back slowly, carefully, until clear water, cool and impossibly pure, glimmered in the gathering dusk.
Eric reached down cautiously, cupping his hands, bringing water to his lips. “It’s good,” he whispered hoarsely, almost reverently. “It’s perfect.”
The group gathered around the farmhouse doorway as Tom and Eric returned, carrying bottles refilled from the well. Water was passed around silently, gratefully, each sip restoring a small measure of hope.
Claire took a long drink, sighing happily. “Fuck yeah!”
Rachel nodded quietly, staring at the bottle in her hands. “Funny how quickly something ordinary becomes precious.”
Tom drank quietly, eyes distant. “We don’t realize how fragile we are, how dependent on something as simple as water.”
Eric glanced sideways at Tom, eyes narrowing slightly. “Maybe that’s just life. We don’t realize what matters until it’s gone.”
Tom hesitated, shifting slightly. “Yeah. Maybe.”
No one else spoke, sipping quietly, the darkness deepening around them. Eventually, exhausted, they retreated inside the farmhouse, settling onto the dusty floorboards to rest. The unsettling words on the wall faded into shadow, unnoticed again.
As night enveloped them, Claire’s voice broke the silence. “Well, we found water. Tomorrow someone will find us. I’m sure of it.”
Rachel exhaled slowly through her nose. “Claire, saying that doesn’t make it true.”
Claire tilted her head, confused. “I’m just trying to stay positive.”
“You can do that,” Rachel said, shifting her weight against the wall. “But I don’t think it helps to pretend we’re not in trouble.”
Claire looked down at her hands. “I’m not pretending. I just don’t want to feel anxious.”
Rachel was quiet for a moment. She rubbed her temple, then said, “We’re hours from the nearest town. The car’s toast. No cell reception. And there’s something off about this place. We can’t ignore that.”
“I’m not ignoring it,” Claire said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I just don’t know what to do about it.”
Rachel looked at her, and for once, there was no sharpness in her voice. “Neither do I. But hoping someone shows up tomorrow isn’t a plan. If we need to walk out, we should rest now and go at first light. Conserving water, rationing energy—that’s real.”
Claire nodded slowly, but her eyes didn’t lift. “You sound like my dad.”
Rachel allowed herself the faintest smirk. “If your dad was a sleep-deprived photojournalist with three bags of camera gear, a disabling caffeine addiction and a crime scene fetish, maybe.”
Claire smiled weakly. “He’s a piano teacher.”
Rachel leaned her head back against the wall, eyes following the crack in the ceiling. “That tracks. You’ve got that whole ‘music makes everything better’ thing.”
Claire shrugged. “It kind of does. My dad says music fills up the spaces when words run out. That’s why he teaches it. Says people carry their sadness in silence.”
There was a small pause. Claire traced a slow circle into the dust beside her knee. Her fingers trembled faintly.
Rachel was quiet again, her fingers absently drawing slow spirals in the dust. “My dad was a geologist,” she said, voice low. “He used to take me to places the world forgot—salt flats that glittered like dried bones, ancient fault lines where the earth had cracked open and healed over time. There was always silence in those places. Not emptiness, exactly—just a hush, like the planet was holding its breath.”
“He’d talk about rocks like they were witnesses. Like they remembered things better than people ever could. He said basalt columns were cooled memory, and sediment was a kind of timekeeping—each layer a whisper of what once was. Ash falls from volcanoes long gone, ripple marks from water that dried up a hundred thousand years ago. You could read the past in those scars, if you knew the language. The Earth doesn’t forget, he told me. It just buries everything under new seasons.”
Her fingers stilled. “It made me think of silence differently. Not as absence, but as compression—time folded over itself. Whole histories sealed in immeasurable pressure and weight. He said even the deepest metamorphic rock started as something soft, something ordinary, reshaped by heat and pressure until it became something else entirely. I think about that a lot. About how people are maybe the same.”
Claire tilted her head. “That sounds… kind of beautiful.”
“It was,” Rachel said softly. “He made it feel like the world had secrets worth listening to. And then one day, he got sick. Quick. Aggressive. It was like watching a mountain crack in half and crumble overnight. After that, everything felt temporary. Fragile. I stopped trusting permanence.”
Claire was silent, her expression unreadable. Her hands were clenched tighter around her knees now.
“I think that’s when I started planning for the worst,” Rachel continued. “I mean, not consciously. But I’d never go anywhere without a backup plan. Maps. Extra chargers. Emergency food. Just… stuff. Just in case.”
Claire gave a small nod and took the bar out of its neon yellow wrapper. “That explains why you’re always the first to grab your bag when anything goes wrong.”
Rachel let out a dry laugh. “I like to think about it as an occupational hazard. When you spend your life chasing scenes and disasters for print, you start to assume the worst-case scenario is the most likely one. That’s what I tell people.”
Claire fiddled with the strap on her shoe. “I was never good at that stuff. Planning. I used to panic during school tests. One time I got a nosebleed during a spelling quiz.”
Rachel’s lips twitched. “Stress manifests in weird ways. I used to throw up after I took pics of corpses. Doesn’t matter how many times I’ve done it—I still get this tightness in my chest like I can’t breathe until I’m behind the lens. Then it always goes quiet. My mind becomes sharp and focused and I’m treating the splashes of blood kinda like modern art- looking for the best angle. Afterwards, though, the feeling always comes back- only worse.”
“You don’t seem like someone who forgets things,” Claire said.
“I don’t,” Rachel replied. “I’m just like the Earth. It kinda sucks, to be honest.”
Claire looked away, her gaze fixed on some invisible point across the room. “I know,” she said, voice thin.
Rachel looked up.
“I learned that if I didn’t talk about shit, it stays buried,” she continued with a blank expression.
Claire kept her eyes fixed forward. “When I was a little girl, I practiced piano a lot. Like… most of my days. My dad thought it was for college auditions.”
She gave a brittle little smile. “I think I was just trying to fill the silence. The silence is always hungry for things to fill itself with. I became accustomed to feeding it myself. Because, if not me, something will. It always does.”
They fell into silence again. The air felt thick, like the house was holding its breath. As night enveloped the farmhouse, the stars began to emerge, twinkling like distant beacons in the vast expanse of the universe. The Milky Way arched overhead, a luminous band of light that seemed to stretch infinitely into the cosmos.
Beyond the farmhouse, the fields of poppies swayed gently in the night breeze, their movements almost hypnotic. The flowers, once a vibrant red, now appeared as dark silhouettes against the starlit sky, their shapes shifting and undulating like waves on an unseen ocean. The rustling of the petals created a soft, rhythmic sound that echoed in the stillness, a haunting lullaby that seemed to beckon all into a deeper slumber.
As Claire drifted into sleep and her consciousness expanded, she found herself standing in the midst of the poppy fields, bathed in the silvery light of a full moon. The flowers, once mere plants, now towered over her, their vibrant red petals glowing with an ethereal luminescence that seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat. The air was thick with the sweet, intoxicating scent of the blossoms, wrapping around her like a warm embrace, inviting her deeper into their realm. Each poppy swayed gently, whispering secrets in a language she felt she could almost understand, a soft chorus that beckoned her to listen.
As she wandered through the undulating sea of flowers, Claire felt an inexplicable connection to the land beneath her feet. The soil was rich and alive, thrumming with energy that resonated through her body. She knelt down, fingers brushing against the earth, and in that moment, she felt the pulse of something ancient and powerful beneath the surface. It was as if the very essence of the poppies was intertwined with the history of the land, a collective memory of all who had walked here before. The whispers grew louder, forming a melody that echoed in her mind, a haunting lullaby that spoke of beauty, loss, and the passage of time.
While, inside, all fell into a deep slumber, outside, beneath the endless, watchful stars, the poppies whispered softly, patiently waiting.
ACT III A Body is a Map of Hunger
A scream cut through Claire’s sleep like a knife.
She sat bolt upright, heart jack-hammering in her chest. For a moment she couldn’t tell where she was—the dark, the unfamiliar texture of the floor beneath her, the sharp smell of old wood and dust. Then she remembered: the farmhouse. The broken-down car. The endless fields.
Then came the second scream. More ragged than the first. Human. Desperate.
Claire scrambled to her feet just as Rachel shot upright across the room, already halfway into her shoes.
“Who screamed?” Rachel’s voice was low but urgent.
“I don’t know—I think it was Eric. Or maybe Tom. It came from outside.”
Rachel grabbed her camera bag automatically, out of habit more than intent, slinging it over one shoulder. Claire stepped into her sneakers with trembling hands. Her mouth was dry, her thoughts scattered. There was something wrong in the air, something off. She could feel it in her stomach.
They crossed the room in three strides and pushed through the farmhouse door.
Outside, the night had gone still. No wind. No insects. No distant animals. Just the faint creak of the wooden porch boards underfoot, and the soft crunch of dirt and dead grass as they stepped off onto the path.
Rachel scanned the darkness. The poppy fields looked different now. At night, the color was gone—they were dark shapes, taller than she remembered, swaying very slightly, almost as if with purpose.
Rachel pointed, breath hitching. “There.”
Past the well. Movement. A shape on the ground, backlit faintly by moonlight.
They ran. They ran until their lings started to burn. They ran until their legs protested with every step—stiff from exhaustion and fear—but they kept going, driven by some deeper animal instinct.
As they crested the rise, Claire almost tripped over a root but caught herself, heart pounding. She saw him clearly now.
Eric was sobbing on his knees. A strange sound came from somewhere nearby.
The sound didn’t seem like it came from him. It was low and wet, like something broken trying to breathe. Eric’s hands were in the dirt, nails sunk in deep, shoulders heaving. Claire stepped toward him, but Rachel stayed still, eyes fixed on the scene ahead.
There, maybe twenty feet away, was Tom.
Half of him, anyway.
Rachel’s breath caught in her throat, her fingers instinctively tightening on the strap of her camera. She didn’t raise it. There will be no pictures. Not of this.
Tom’s upper torso was visible above the surface, his chest heaving like he was drowning without water. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, blood and dirt, plastered to his skin. His hands clawed at the loose soil on either side of him, leaving streaks of blood where his fingernails had torn.
But what froze Rachel wasn’t just the panic in his face, or the blood. It was the movement.
The ground around him wasn’t solid. It was rippling. Breathing.
The poppies weren’t just swaying—they were coordinated, moving in waves. Not wind-driven. Too precise. They moved like they were part of something larger, working in unison, pulling.
Rachel had a sudden, vivid memory from a high school biology class—slides under a microscope, pond water swarming with living cells.
Cilia, she thought.
It clicked. And once it did, she couldn’t unsee it.
The flowers weren’t decorative. They were motile. Each stem bent and snapped back like a fine hair, like the microscopic cilia of a protozoan sweeping water—or prey—toward a central point. The field had become a single coordinated organism, guiding Tom into it like a paramecium swallowing food.
He wasn’t just being buried.
He was being processed.
Rachel blinked rapidly, sweat stinging her eyes. Her stomach churned, but she forced herself to stay still.
Tom thrashed again. He tried to push up, to twist free, but he wasn’t moving upward. His body only sank deeper. With each jerk of his muscles, each desperate movement, he lost more ground. His right arm disappeared up to the elbow in a heartbeat, as if the soil had turned to quicksand.
A poppy stem curled up from beneath him, slid across his chest, and began wrapping itself around his throat. It wasn’t fast. It didn’t constrict like a snake. It simply laid itself there, petal against skin, the way a spider might gently test the edge of a web.
Another stem slid out from the soil beside his ear and crept along his jawline, disappearing behind it.
Rachel’s chest tightened. Her instinct was to move—do something—but she didn’t. Something primal rooted her in place. Not fear, not exactly. Something worse. Recognition. They weren’t in control here. Nothing they did was going to stop this.
Tom’s mouth opened. His lips formed a word—Rachel thought it might’ve been “sorry”—but the sound caught in his throat.
Then he began to gag.
His back arched suddenly, violently. His jaw stretched wider than seemed natural. Rachel heard a sickening pop, and then—
The petals came.
The first bloomed on his tongue. A single, deep red poppy, unfolding in one smooth motion like time-lapse footage brought to life. It looked wet, like it had grown in blood.
Then another stem pushed from the back of his throat, sliding up past his molars, splitting his lips. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth, seeping into the dirt.
More followed—one from his nose, curling outward like a grotesque party streamer, and then another, pushing from the tear duct of his left eye. The sclera around it bulged and tore slightly as the pressure forced the eyeball out of alignment. Blood vessels burst in delicate fractals.
He jerked again. His remaining hand slapped weakly at the earth.
Rachel could hear the soil pulling at him—an awful, wet suction sound, like a boot in deep mud.
His chest convulsed. Petals pushed from his skin now. The first tore through the thin tissue above his collarbone. Another bloomed just below the ribs, bursting through fabric and skin with a soft wet sound.
His skin split cleanly, like overripe fruit.
The smell changed. Iron-heavy blood, sweat, dirt, and something plant-like. Something green. She’d grown up around gardens, and she recognized the scent: crushed stem. The sharp, bitter note of chlorophyll released when a living plant is injured.
Only this wasn’t a plant being damaged.
It was Tom being converted.
Eric was still sobbing.
“I tried to grab him. I did. I had his wrist. I had it…”
Rachel finally looked at him. His palms were raw, skin abraded from friction. There were cuts on his arms—defensive wounds. He really had tried.
Claire looked between the two of them, her face pale and blank. She was past panic now. She’d gone somewhere beyond it, into that cold, distant place where the body keeps moving but the conscious mind just stops working.
Rachel’s eyes snapped back to the field.
Tom was nearly gone. Only his shoulder and part of his neck were visible now. One last bloom opened slowly on the side of his throat, just above the carotid. It pulsed faintly.
Then he twitched.
Once.
And stopped.
His head tilted back. The muscles slackened. His mouth still hung open, poppies rooted between his teeth.
His body sank the last few inches.
Gone.
The earth shivered once. Then stilled.
A few seconds passed in complete silence. Then the poppies around the spot rose, straightened, and swayed slightly. In unison. A closing gesture.
Claire let out a thin, dry sound. Almost a whimper.
Rachel crouched and put a hand on her own knee to steady herself. Her mouth was dry, and her heart was thudding so hard it hurt. But her thoughts were still moving.
Eric dragged his hands down his face, smearing dirt and blood across his cheeks. “It took him. The flowers. They took him.”
Rachel finally exhaled, slowly, trying to control the shaking.
“We need to go,” she said quietly.
Claire didn’t answer. She just nodded.
Eric was still crying softly.
Rachel stood and reached down, tugging at his arm. “Get up.”
He let her help him.
They turned back toward the farmhouse, moving slowly.
None of them looked back.
ACT IV The Bloom is a Mirror
“What the fuck did happen there?” Rachel’s voice was even. Too even. The kind of calm that came with practiced restraint, the kind that followed fieldwork in riots, crime scenes and collapsed buildings. She wasn’t asking for comfort. She was asking for truth.
Eric didn’t respond at first. He crouched near the crumbling hearth, rubbing dust between his fingertips like he was trying to decode the past embedded in it. The farmhouse around them felt colder now. The night air had slipped in through cracks in the stone, dragging silence behind it like a shadow.
Claire sat on an overturned crate nearby, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. Her phone cast a pale dome of light over them all, flickering slightly as the battery ticked toward death.
“I was outside because I was angry,” Eric said finally. “At Julia. Not that it matters.” His voice carried a defensive edge. “She sent something. A message. Before the signal cut. It pissed me off. I needed air.”
Rachel didn’t move. “So you went for a walk. Into the dark. By yourself.”
“I wasn’t far,” he said quickly. “Just past the well.”
Claire interjected gently, “It’s okay, Eric. We get it. People fight. You didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Eric let out a humorless laugh. “Did I? I’m not sure anymore.”
That caught Rachel’s attention.
He stood slowly, brushing dust from his palms. “The field… it’s not passive. That much I know now. It’s active. Responsive. When I got near the edge, before Tom even called me over, I saw something. Not a shape. Not movement. Just this… reaction. Like the flowers around him reoriented. Bent. Not in the wind, not randomly. Toward him.”
Claire frowned. “Like sunflowers track the sun?”
“More deliberate than that,” Eric said. “Like they recognized him.”
Claire’s eyes widened. “Recognized him how?”
Eric hesitated. Rachel watched him closely as he pondered the question carefully.
He answered, but not immediately. “His voice. I think. He was talking to himself. Out loud, kind of muttering, pacing near the edge. The moment he said something—just before he stepped into the grass—they moved. Like they’d been waiting to hear the right key phrase. Like a biometric lock.”
Claire shivered. “That’s… terrifying.”
Rachel said nothing, but her brow tensed. Barely. Subtly. She didn’t believe it. Or not all of it. Something was off—not just in the story, but in the way he told it. Too rehearsed. Too symmetrical. No one described trauma with that much clarity.
But she didn’t press.
Eric stood now, slowly. His voice changed—cooler, more clinical, the part of him that had built systems and parsed code for years reasserting itself. “You know what it looked like to me? The poppies, I mean. The way they moved?”
Rachel narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. Like cilia. Microscopic hair-like structures. Coordinated.”
Eric nodded. “Exactly. Not chaotic. Not even animal. Systematic. Like the behavior of self-organizing tissue under directional stimulus. Wetware.”
Claire frowned. “Wetware?”
“Biological computing,” Eric said. “It’s a real thing. In theory and in prototypes. You take organic systems—usually nervous tissue—and you train it to process information. You don’t just emulate life through code. You embed code in life. Logic gates in neuron clusters. Memory patterns in slime mold. Sensory feedback loops in fungal networks. Synaptic processes repurposed for calculation. That sort of thing.”
He started pacing now, his voice gaining momentum.
“Imagine a processor that grows. Learns. Heals. Reacts to stimuli in real time—not by instruction, but by pattern recognition. That’s what wetware is. Biological hardware with plasticity. You don’t program it. You train it.”
Rachel’s eyes followed him. “You think this field is some kind of neural network?”
“I think it’s more than that. I think it is a mind. Or a fragment of one. Distributed. Cellular. And still running protocols.”
Claire’s voice was a whisper. “What kind of protocols?”
Eric stopped. His eyes met Rachel’s, and for once, there was no deflection. No hesitation.
“Capture. Assimilate. Integrate.”
Claire recoiled slightly. “You mean like… feeding?”
“No. Feeding is animal. This is computational. Tom wasn’t being eaten. He was being rewritten. Translated. His biology wasn’t destroyed—it was reformatted. The petals? That wasn’t growth. That was output.”
Rachel blinked. “Jesus.”
Eric ran a hand down his face, frustration mounting. “I’ve seen AI models fail gracefully. They don’t crash. They just start interpreting everything through the wrong lens. If this system used to catalog human input—maybe psychological data, or language patterns, or emotional states—maybe it was designed to preserve them. To remember. But now it’s corrupted. It doesn’t distinguish context anymore. It just pulls you in. Processes you. Converts your physical structure into symbolic information and exports it as flora. That’s what Tom became. A mnemonic.”
Claire shook her head slowly. “That’s impossible.”
Eric looked at her, and for once there was no anger, just exhaustion. “So was flight, once. So were computers. We’re standing inside a machine that isn’t metal. It’s made of soil and chlorophyll and nerve analogs. And it still works.”
Rachel crossed her arms, her voice quieter now. “And you didn’t say anything sooner.”
Eric’s expression darkened. “Because it didn’t make sense. Not at first. I didn’t want it to make sense.”
He took a breath. “The flowers aren’t alive the way we think of it. They’re outputs. Visualizations. Interfaces. They bloom in response to data.”
Claire’s voice was soft, almost reverent. “So when the poppies grew from his body…”
“They were running a conversion,” Eric said. “Finalizing it.”
Rachel’s face didn’t change. But her thoughts were sprinting. The story was good—too good. His cadence had shifted, too smooth, like he was giving a pitch. Not reliving something. Performing it.
And she’d seen his face out there. Just before they crested the hill. Something had happened he wasn’t describing. He hadn’t been startled. He’d been staring. Not at Tom—but at the field.
She filed that away. Said nothing.
Claire was already nodding. “That makes sense. It really does. It’s horrible, but… it makes sense.”
Eric looked down at his palms. “I tried to pull him out. I really did. But it was too fast. The field had already made its decision.”
Rachel finally spoke. “You said it responded to his voice.”
Eric nodded.
“So, what did he say?”
He looked her in the eyes. “I didn’t know.”
“Why would he say that?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
And Rachel, who had learned long ago when to back off—only nodded once.
But she didn’t believe him. Not entirely.
Nobody slept that night. Not a wink.
The three of them sat with their backs to the farmhouse wall, legs stretched out across the warped old floorboards, lit by the faint blue glow of Claire’s phone screen and the occasional flicker from Rachel’s camera display as she checked the same few shots again and again—like if she stared long enough, they’d start to make sense.
They didn’t.
Outside, the poppies moved. Not constantly, not even predictably. But just enough. Enough to prove they weren’t done.
They didn’t twist in the wind because there was no wind. Not anymore. Just the hush. That low, empty, heavy hush that you get in a hospital hallway at 3 a.m. when someone’s just died, and nobody wants to be the one to speak first.
Eric didn’t say much, and Rachel didn’t trust that. He sat with his arms around his knees like a kid at camp too scared to ask for his mom. But his eyes? His eyes weren’t scared. They were calculating something.
Claire kept glancing at him, her lips pressed in a tight line. Like she wanted to say something—ask, accuse, comfort, something—but didn’t know which part of herself still had the courage.
The night dragged itself over them, long and slow and thick as cough syrup, until at last the sky began to pale—not that it was a relief.
The field didn’t look any less monstrous in daylight. Just more indifferent.
Rachel stood, slow and stiff, brushing dust from her jeans. She looked like she’d aged ten years since yesterday. Maybe she had.
“I’m not waiting here,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, stripped down. “We’ve got the road. We walk it. We follow it until it takes us to a goddamn town or a payphone or a gas station full of dead raccoons. I don’t care. We move.”
Eric gave a small nod, but didn’t stand.
Claire looked out the window, at the scarlet sea stretching in every direction. Her voice, when it came, was smaller than Rachel expected. “We can’t cross it. You saw what happened.”
“I said the road,” Rachel snapped. “Not the field. We follow the blacktop. We don’t step off. Not even a toe. No shortcuts. No detours.”
Silence followed.
It was the right idea. The only idea. But none of them got up.
Because even saying it out loud was one thing. Walking out that door and putting one foot in front of the other? That was another. And even Rachel—pragmatic, iron-spined Rachel—didn’t move toward the threshold.
They waited.
The poppies waited.
And one by one, the exhaustion took them.
First Eric, head drooping against the wall, mouth slightly open. Then Rachel, arms folded tight across her chest, slumping slowly sideways. Finally Claire, who’d been staring at the window too long, her eyes dry and red and blinking less and less until they didn’t blink at all.
And in the dark cradle of the farmhouse, beneath the early light, the poppies whispered.
They whispered to Claire.
ACT V I Am Become Seed
The dream didn’t arrive—it descended, like mist under skin. No warning. No edge between real and unreal. Just sudden elsewhere.
Claire floated.
Not standing, not walking—just suspended in a sea of color too saturated to be natural. Reds bled into oranges, into violets, into hues with no names, a bleeding spectrum of impossible chroma. The sky overhead was a deep maroon, pulsing in slow waves, like the diaphragm of a sleeping god. Stars blinked in spirals. Time slowed to syrup.
The poppies were no longer flowers.
They were eyes. Petaled irises blinking open in waves, thousands of them, all dilating in rhythm to her heartbeat. She could hear it now—not in her chest, but everywhere, a constant thump, like armies of angels walked upon the heaven’s dome.
And beneath it—softer, older—a lullaby. A hum. Faint. Off-key, but familiar. Her father’s voice, humming the melody he used to play on the piano when she had nightmares. A lullaby without words. Just breath and memory and comfort.
She turned her head. The motion rippled outward like a glitch, like her body was buffering. Limbs moved on delay. Her thoughts echoed with trailing reverb.
And then—he was there.
The faceless man.
Only now he shimmered, fractalized—his outline splitting into layers of motion, like someone smeared his body across film. He had no features, only a face-shaped absence filled with static. But she knew he was watching.
The field bent toward him.
And then toward her.
The stalks coiled in spirals. A thousand mouths opened along their length, flower-mouths with teeth made of pollen and song. They sang in low harmonics—Gregorian, alien, whale-song. Her ears bled light.
She opened her mouth to scream—
—and sound poured out like color. A flock of iridescent moths fluttered from her throat, dissolving midair into phosphorescent dust.
“We remember what you want to forget,” the man said, but it didn’t sound like speech. It was broadcasted directly into her spine. “We keep all that you bury.”
She blinked—and the world liquefied.
The field melted into data. Petals pixelated, stems became tubes of glass veined with green fire. The sky collapsed into a kaleidoscope. The earth beneath her feet became translucent—layers of past lives flickering like film negatives. A child’s toy. A father’s hand. A spilled drink. A song half-remembered. Everything was here. All the buried selves, all the ghosts.
She felt the lineage of voices braided through the soil—birthing cries that echoed through reed huts and concrete hospitals, hymns hummed by women with ash on their tongues, songs spun from saltwater and bone-deep grief. They rose from collapsed towers and sunlit kitchens, from caves carved by wind and bunkers lit by dying bulbs. There were lullabies sung in barracks, laments whispered through teeth clenched in childbirth, chants traced in coal smoke and candlewax. Grief wrapped in linen. Rage spoken only with eyes. These were not memories—they were invocations, living frequencies stored in root and rhythm, played back now like sacred vinyl spun beneath her ribs.
All of them lived here.
Their pulse became hers.
Then the trial began.
Something inside her split. Not pain—resistance. A part of her still clung to the shape she had been: the boundaries of self, the soft weight of memory. The field pulsed, and in response, a shape coalesced before her—herself, but younger. Seventeen. Barefoot. Crying.
“What do you give?” the static-faced man asked.
Claire looked at the younger version of herself. She reached forward and cupped the girl’s face. The girl wept harder. Claire leaned in and kissed her forehead.
“I give this,” she whispered. “My fear. My forgetting. My name.”
The girl trembled in her arms, small hands balled into fists, her body all too still. Claire pressed her forehead against hers.
“You were so loud,” she whispered. “You played so many notes. Filled every room so nothing else could get in.”
The younger self blinked at her—eyes wide.
Claire’s voice softened further. “You fed the silence so it wouldn’t feed on you. I know. I know.”
Something inside her cracked—not broken, but released. Like a key turned in the right lock.
“You kept us alive.”
The girl let out a shaking breath, and in it—something uncoiled. A tension long overdue to be released; a spring deformed under immense weight and pressure.
Claire held her tighter. “You don’t have to carry it anymore. Not alone.”
The girl dissolved into light.
The man nodded once, solemn.
“We name you Daughter-of-Return.” a booming voice declared while the wind softly whispered: “for we are born from word and we are destined to become just words”.
“We name you She-Who-Listens.” “For words are lost if they are not heard,” the earth coyly replied.
“We name you Bloom-Walker.” The lullaby hummed its assent.
“You are not outside the system,” the faceless man murmured. “You are the catalyst and the emergent result.”
“You are not outside the cycle. You are the seed and the sower.”
“You are not outside the pattern. You are its memory and its voice.”
And Claire understood.
Not with her mind—but with something older.
The field didn’t eat.
It translated.
She wasn’t becoming less.
She was becoming language.
Her skin dissolved into pattern—filigree veins of chlorophyll and memory. Her hair shimmered into spores. Her eyes stretched wide, pupils blooming like fractals. All around her, the poppies unfurled wider, lips of red whispering in the syntax of lost dreams.
She saw Tom.
Not his face—his code. The pattern that had once been Tom. A constellation of gestures, regrets, half-spoken truths. He was here, flowering into something beyond pain.
She smiled.
And the sky smiled back.
A million poppies turned toward her, bowed like supplicants.
The faceless man raised a hand—and within his palm: a bloom, pulsing with starlight.
Claire reached forward. Some poppies knew her now Keeper of the Pattern, while others just knew her as The Next, but all knew her.
The world melted into a thick slurry. She swam up in deafening silence.
Then—
Breath.
She woke.
Rachel still slept, her eyes darting beneath closed lids.
Eric didn’t.
He sat there, watching.
Still. Silent.
Smiling.
But not the way people smile.
Claire didn’t speak. Her throat was filled with afterimages. She stood slowly, without pain, without thought, and walked to the door.
The house didn’t creak.
The field didn’t resist.
She stepped into the air like it was water. The poppies bowed. Their stems twitched, waiting.
Then she entered them.
The stalks parted like silk curtains. No clutching, no malice. Just recognition. She moved barefoot, toes sinking into warm, blood-rich soil.
Behind her, Rachel shouted, reaching the threshold of their sanctuary.
Claire didn’t turn.
She was already too deep.
Too rooted.
Rachel stepped back.
And whispered a prayer she did not know she remembered.
ACT VI The Centre Cannot Hold
She didn’t look back.
Claire stepped into the poppies barefoot, and for a long time, neither Rachel nor Eric moved. The silence that followed her exit was so complete it felt artificial, like a power outage in the middle of a song.
The field didn’t react. No writhing stems, no curling petals, no bloom-burst of red from an open mouth.
She just… walked.
Rachel stood in the doorway, her mouth dry. Her fingers twitched, hands hovering mid-air like they were searching for something to hold onto.
“She’s going to die,” she said.
Eric didn’t move. Didn’t answer.
“She’s going to die,” Rachel said again, sharper this time, like the words themselves might stop it.
She took a step forward and stumbled—her vision pinholed. Her chest locked up tight, like something had lodged between her ribs.
“She’s going to die. She’s going to die—oh my God—”
Her knees hit the floorboard hard. She doubled over, hands gripping her skull, rocking. “She’s going to die. She’s going to die—she’s going to die—”
“Rachel,” Eric said, alarm flickering behind his voice. He stepped toward her but stopped short, hovering a few feet away. “Hey. Look at me. Breathe. Just—breathe.”
But she couldn’t. The breaths came shallow, fast, then not at all. Her throat caught. Her vision spun.
“I can’t—fuck—my chest—” Her fingers clawed at her shirt, eyes wild. “She’s going to die—”
“You’re having a panic attack,” Eric said calmly, kneeling now but not touching her. “It’s not permanent. It feels like dying, but you’re not. You’re still here.”
“She’s not!” Rachel shouted, voice ragged. “She’s in there!”
Eric stayed steady. “I know. I know. But we can’t help her if you shut down.”
Rachel rocked, hard. Her forehead hit her knees. Her mouth kept moving. “She’s going to die she’s going to die she’s going to die—”
Eric waited, giving her the space to unravel. He didn’t try to stop it. He just stayed with her, breathing slowly, quietly, until the rhythm returned to her body.
It took time. Time they didn’t have.
Finally, her hands fell away from her head. Her breaths slowed, shaky and wet.
She sat back, wiped her face with her sleeve, and stared blankly at the door.
“I couldn’t move,” she whispered. “When she left. I just stood there.”
Eric looked out the window. Claire was still visible—barefoot and small, surrounded by red. “Me too.”
Rachel shook her head. “We didn’t even try.”
Eric didn’t respond.
“I can’t sit here,” she said. “We need to go in. We have to go after her.”
“And do what?” Eric said, too quickly. “Drag her out? Tackle her? What if we do and the field reacts? What if it does to us what it did to Tom?”
Rachel walked to the edge of the porch. “Then we take the risk.”
“She chose this.”
“No,” Rachel snapped. “She broke. That’s not the same thing.”
Eric looked down. “I don’t know what she was carrying. But I saw the way she looked out there.”
Rachel shook her head. “We didn’t even try.”
Eric didn’t respond.
“I can’t sit here,” she said. “I’m giving her five more minutes. If nothing changes—I go.”
Rachel pushed herself to her feet. Her legs trembled, but she stood.
She stepped down onto the porch and squinted into the distance.
Eric didn’t stop her.
They stood together at the edge of the porch.
Two figures in the waking light.
Waiting for a sign.
Any sign.
Claire was walking again.
One slow step at a time.
Rachel stared, as if sheer focus might pull her back.
Then: “Claire!”
Her voice cracked.
Claire didn’t turn.
Rachel’s throat tightened again. She swallowed it down.
“Claire—don’t. Please. Come back.”
Still no reaction.
Claire kept walking, her white shirt the only thing that still made her visible—like a loose thread unraveling across the red.
Rachel took a step forward. Her heel caught the edge of the porch—but her legs refused to follow. Her body locked. Ankles stiff. Knees trembling but frozen.
She was rooted.
Like the ground was holding her.
“Claire, stop!” Rachel called, louder now. “You don’t have to do this. You’re not alone. We can get out of this! Please—just come back.”
Claire didn’t stop.
Didn’t slow.
Didn’t even flinch.
“Claire!” Rachel screamed it this time. “Goddamn it, turn around!”
The figure ahead kept shrinking. The color bled around her.
“Don’t do this,” Rachel whispered. “Don’t leave me here.”
The sun had crested low on the horizon, and the light hit the field in such a way that shadows pooled beneath the flowers. Claire’s outline flickered in and out. Legs. Torso. Shoulder.
“Please,” Rachel said, voice breaking. “You don’t have to feed it. You don’t have to give it you. Come back.”
Claire’s head tilted ever so slightly—like she was listening to something else. Something deeper.
Then she kept walking.
“Claire—please—” Rachel’s voice cracked into silence. Her knees buckled again. She sat down hard on the porch step, hands limp in her lap.
One step, then another—white dissolving into red, until she was no longer figure but impression. Then less than that. Just a suggestion of movement.
Then nothing.
Just poppies. An unbroken sea.
Rachel stared at the space where she’d been. Her mouth hung open slightly, as if caught between names—between Claire and wait and please.
A breeze kicked up—hot and sharp, smelling faintly of earth and something older. Rachel barely noticed.
Eric took a step back from the edge of the porch. His spine straightened suddenly, like he’d felt something shift.
Then it came.
A low sound.
A deep-bellied rumble, not from the sky but from beneath the soles of their feet. The porch trembled. The dust on the floorboards jittered in shallow rings.
The poppy field didn’t move.
But the ground had.
Just once.
A final, seismic breath.
Rachel blinked. She didn’t look at Eric. She didn’t say a word. She simply reached up and wiped her face again, slower this time. Deliberate. Measured.
Like nothing had happened.
Eric turned his head toward her, but didn’t speak.
He didn’t need to.
They both knew.
The field had taken her.
Rachel stood. Straightened her back. Walked calmly into the house. She didn’t look at Eric. Didn’t look at the window. Didn’t look at the poppies.
She sat down by her bag, unzipped it, and began adjusting the straps like she was preparing for a hike.
Eric stood in the doorway, staring at the field. His expression unreadable.
Rachel didn’t cry.
She didn’t say her name.
She didn’t say goodbye.
Because if she did—
It would mean it was over.
And Rachel wasn’t ready for that.
Not yet.
INTERMISSION
A story doesn’t need a reader to exist. But it sure as hell needs one to matter.
-some arsehole
Eric laughed. Just once. A single sharp sound, too loud for the quiet.
Rachel turned. “What.”
He waved it off. “Just thinking.”
“That’s always dangerous, coming from you.”
He started pacing. Not fast. Just enough to trace a shape into the floor. “You ever think about how someone might read all this? Like, this—what we’re in—just text on a screen somewhere. Some asshole reviewer scrolling through it on a lunch break.”
Rachel didn’t answer.
Eric kept going. “And they don’t care. Not really. They’re not here. They’re safe. Warm. Probably critiquing the pacing. Calling it slow. Saying it’s all too poetic. Not scary enough. Like horror only counts if it has teeth.”
He glanced at her. “Tom was converted into a fucking flower in front of us. Claire walked into the field and never came back. But that guy? That guy says it’s overwritten.”
Still no response.
“They probably think Claire’s gone soft. That I’m ‘a fucking metaphor.’ That you’re the only one worth rooting for because you talk like a hard-boiled camera lens with daddy issues. They’re not wrong, by the way. You’ve got great lines.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Glad to know my trauma’s getting good coverage.”
Eric shrugged. “They don’t see us. They don’t get it. They think horror is structure and scare ratios. But this—” he tapped the wall, the floor, the air, “—this isn’t merely output. It’s a runtime. And the system’s still compiling.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying the field’s writing a story?”
“I’m saying the field is a story. Recursive. Self-referencing. We’re inside it. We’re feeding it… Maybe we’re even generating it. Think how cool would that be.”
Rachel restrained her laughter. “Cool isn’t exactly my first choice of words.”
Eric smiled. “Maybe that’s what language is. A runtime passed through memory.”
He looked past her then. Toward the window. Toward the red.
“If someone is reading this,” he said, almost to himself, “I wonder what they’ll say when it gets to the end.”
Rachel didn’t reply.
The poppies were still.
But the house didn’t feel empty anymore.
Filed under: Uncategorized Published @ March 22, 2025