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“In college I took this art history class and, God, I remember nothing. Except—we learned about a painting called Flora and the Zephyrs. I always thought it’d be a cool band name. Don’t you think?” He shrugged. “Sure…” “Well, unless we’re going to start a band in this lifetime, I think we should commandeer the names for the girls. Flora and Zephyr.”
“I think there’s something wrong with the girls,” she said. Michael sat up, concerned. “What do you mean? Are they sick?” “No, I mean…” Her eyes looked faraway, that same emptiness he had seen in the kitchen. “I think there’s something in them. I think they may not be good.”
Jodi’s moans were loud, so impossibly loud. And primal. Michael had never heard anything like it. He was reminded of a video he saw once of a mother elephant standing over her dead baby, her trunk braying to the sky, her cries desperate and fierce. There was something like that in Jodi’s voice now. Something born of instinct. Michael was terrified.
He held both of his girls, one here and the other very far away, and wept. The weeping turned to sobs turned to convulsions turned to dry heaving.
But her time in the hospital proved to be a reset. She had either begun to heal or had learned to construct a lifelike mask that carried her sadness through the world undetected. In any case, she slowly returned.
“You need this,” she said. “For the little flower.” The little flower. Flora. The woman told him about the birth tusk. She told him to wrap a single strand of Jodi’s hair around the tooth to connect it to her. She told him to attach it to the underside of Flora’s crib.
eventually, they believed this narrative, too. It was astonishingly simple, actually, to erase the six short weeks of Zephie’s existence.
she would never fully allow herself to connect with Flora. A fear lived inside her. A fear of herself.
And the sadness crept back in, not so much for him losing a daughter, but for the fact that losing a daughter had meant losing his wife, too. All those years together, but each of them was suffering alone. All those years together, and, by the end, they barely knew each other at all.
“When you told me that, it was the most comforting thing to happen to me since her death. I knew then that she was still with us.”
She spent her life in prison, after all. A prison of her own making.
“Is there anything you want to tell her?” Belinda asks. “Yeah, ‘leave us the fuck alone,’” Flora says.
Lmao
But this thing is clearly not your mother. It is only the worst parts of her. It’s like this broken part of Jodi was awakened when you had a baby, and that broken part of her—that’s the part that wants to hurt Iris.”
Flora thinks of all the times she had to parent her own mother in life. Perhaps she should not be shocked that she will need to parent her mother in death, too.
“But if you walk out that door… then you will know who you really are. And you will struggle to live with that man for the rest of your life.”
Because as long as this tiny human exists in the world, Flora knows it’s a place worth fighting for.
The figure leans in, bringing its face an inch from Flora’s, and Flora finally sees: the Night Hag is her mother. Or a version of her mother.
Flora knows now that the very first time she was here—the first time she was ever suffocated under the weight of her mother—she was a six-week-old baby. She was wrapped tight in her swaddle, unable to move, when her mother approached the crib with a blanket.
Flora no longer thinks of herself as Flora. Nor does she think of herself as Jodi. She is simply: the Mother.
These images are powerful motivations. More powerful, even, than the Mother’s superhuman strength.
But Connor does not protest. There’s a reason he started the fire. He understood there was no other way. Just like Zephie understood when she tried to burn down the house.
“You always hated it when I called you imaginary, right? You always felt like you were real, didn’t you?” Flora asks, and Zephie nods. “Well, that’s because you were real. You were a little girl. You were my twin sister. And your name was Zephyr, or ‘Zephie’ for short.”
it looked like Mom, but… I think that’s just because it knew that’s what would scare me the most.” She fiddles Zephie’s hair between her fingers. “It wasn’t really Mom. It was… something else. And it was there that morning, the morning she hurt us… so maybe—well, maybe the Night Hag haunted her, too.
Flora holds Zephie’s gaze intently. “And I promise you—she will keep you safe.” “But how do you know?” Zephie asks. “Because,” Flora says, a deep peace in her bones, “she has waited a lifetime for that.”
Flora heads back toward the kitchen, wincing slightly at the stiffness in her right leg. For the most part, she has gotten accustomed to the prosthetic,
And this time, when the frosting squeezes between her teeth, the shock of the sugar makes her right eye twitch.
We sure Mother is gone?
