Cold silence pressed against my eardrums.
I turned and realized there was no shore or land in any direction. It was only black water meeting gray sky.
Something pressed against my hip.
I looked down and a white flower began to break the surface. Slowly, petals unfurled against the black like a fist opening.
It was a chrysanthemum.
More of them rose from the water, rippling the surface and blooming white above the black water until they surrounded me in a widening ring.
A sickening sweet scent hit me and coated the back of my throat. Beneath that sweetness came the taste of wet earth. The mineral tang of a fresh grave.
My stomach twisted.
The flowers kept coming. Petals pressed against my stomach. My forearms. The spaces between my fingers.
Pushing the air out of the space around me.
The water began to disappear under the flowers.
White swallowing black.
I tried to move and couldn't. Then, stems began to wind around my wrists and beneath the surface they tightened around my waist and ankles.
I pulled again and the flowers held me.
I was rooted to the center of all this white, black, and gray and I couldn't get free.
And the flowers climbed.
They rose past my stomach.
Past my chest.
Petals brushed the base of my throat and I felt them reaching, stretching toward my jaw like fingers. The sweetness was so thick now I was breathing it.
Swallowing it.
White filled my peripheral vision until I couldn't look down without seeing them pressing against my collarbone, blooming in the hollow of my throat, close enough that if I dropped my chin they would touch my lips.
Then the petals flattened against my skin and didn't stop.
They pressedintome.
It wasn't soft either.
They breached my flesh and pain ripped down my arms in long, hot lines—like being tattooed again except the needle was going deeper.
Past the ink.
Past the muscle.
The tattoos drank them in. Black lines split open like wounds and the white crawled inside, petal by petal, and every one that dissolved into my skin burned.
Stems threaded between my ribs.
I felt the first one punch through the gap and the pain was so sharp my vision cut to white.
