His Little Flower

Posy

Monday, 14 September

My eyes flew open, and for one disorienting moment I could still feel the cold tiles against my cheek. I dragged in a breath that stopped halfway into my lungs, I sat upright too quickly and became tangled in the sheet around my legs. The sudden movement pulled the fitted corner from the mattress, and the fabric snapped against my ankle while I fought to free myself. Sweat had soaked through the back of my T-shirt and gathered beneath my breasts, leaving the cotton clinging to my skin. My hair, which I had twisted into a loose knot before bed, had come almost entirely free and stuck in damp strands across my neck and mouth.

I lifted both hands to my face, half expecting to find blood in the lines of my palms. There was nothing there. Only skin, warm and slightly clammy, and a faint crescent pressed into one finger from where I had slept against the edge of my ring.

I lowered my hands and looked around the room, forcing my eyes to settle on familiar shapes. The low bookcase beneath the window. The cream linen curtains stirring faintly where I had left the glass open a few centimetres. The dark green cardigan folded across the back of the reading chair because I had been too tired to put it away properly. My bedside lamp stood crooked on the small timber table, its base surrounded by a half-empty glass of water, a tube of hand cream and three paperclips I must have brought home in my pocket.

The city pressed quietly against the other side of the window. Somewhere along the street below, a tram moved through the darkness with a low metallic groan, followed by the soft bell warning an unseen car away from the tracks. A delivery truck reversed into the laneway behind my building, its warning beeps softened by brick and distance. The air drifting through the gap in the window carried the damp mineral smell that settled over Melbourne before rain, mixed with coffee from the bakery downstairs beginning its morning preparations far earlier than any reasonable person should have been awake.

My digital alarm clock read 4:31 am. I reached towards it and silenced the alarm that had woken me, pressing the button twice because my fingers were trembling badly enough that I did not trust the first attempt. The plastic felt cool beneath my thumb. I left my hand there for a moment, leaning my weight onto my forearm while I waited for my breathing to slow.

It never slowed quickly after that dream. Twenty years should have dulled it. That was what people seemed to believe, even when they were too polite to say it directly. Time softened grief, healed wounds, and made memories less vivid. The phrases had been repeated to me by relatives I barely knew, foster carers who meant well, counsellors with calm voices and boxes of tissues arranged within easy reach. Even the police liaison officer assigned to my case had once told me, when I was ten and still waking the other children in the house with my screaming, that one day I might remember my parents without remembering the worst thing that had happened to them.

She had been wrong.

The dream always began with the cupboard. Not the actual cupboard from my childhood; that one had been ordinary, painted cream with a broken latch. The one from my dreams was some archetypal version my mind had constructed over two decades of repetition. In this version, the wood smelled of lemons and something else, something metallic that I only recognised now as the scent of spilled wine. Sometimes I crawl out into the kitchen immediately, my mother's body splayed across the tiles in impossible choreography. Other nights, and these were worse, I was trapped in the dark for hours, listening to footsteps that never arrived, to silence that pressed against my eardrums like water pressure. A therapist in my twenties had told me time healed wounds. I had stopped seeing him three sessions later. What I hadn't said, what I'd never said to anyone, was that time didn't heal anything. Time simply added distance, and distance made the memories stranger, less real, easier to doubt.

I remembered Mum’s rose hand cream and the red mark along her jaw. I remembered the cold metal beneath my fingers when I tried to turn off the tap. I remembered exactly how the blood had looked inside the small lines of my hands, brighter near the light and almost black where it pooled beneath the kitchen bench. Most of all, I remembered her eyes, not because they appeared monstrous in the dream, but because they were still my mother’s eyes and yet contained nothing of her.

The dream returned two or three times a month when I was doing well, more often when I was tired, under pressure or preparing for a case that involved a child. It never changed significantly, although some nights it kept me inside the cupboard longer, forcing me to listen to the search moving through the house until my legs burned and my lungs refused to draw a full breath. On other nights I reached Mum almost immediately. The worst dreams were the ones in which she blinked just as I touched her face, because for one unbearable second I believed I had been wrong and she was still alive.

I swung my legs over the edge of the mattress and planted both feet on the floor. The timber was cool beneath my soles, grounding me more effectively than any of the techniques I had been taught over the years. I curled my toes against the grain and leaned forwards, resting my elbows on my knees while the room steadied around me. My throat felt raw, which meant I had probably made some sound in my sleep, though there was no one in the apartment to hear it except the elderly woman on the other side of the wall, and she kept her television loud enough to drown out most signs of life.

I reached for the glass of water. The rim bumped against my teeth on the first attempt, and I tightened my grip before taking a slower mouthful. The water had gone warm and tasted faintly of dust, but it eased the dryness in my throat. I drank half the glass, then placed it back on the table and wiped the condensation from my fingers onto my shirt. What is it about traumatic nightmares that makes you thirsty?

There would be no point trying to sleep again.

I knew that before I checked the clock a second time, just as I knew I would spend the next hour lying rigidly beneath the covers if I tried, listening for footsteps in the hallway outside my apartment and mistaking every change in the building’s pipes for the drip of that kitchen tap. By five, I would be frustrated with myself. By six, I would have a headache. By the time I reached the office, Ethan would take one look at the shadows beneath my eyes and tell me I looked tired, not out of concern, but because he regarded any sign of human limitation as a personal inconvenience.