I sense their presence before I open the door, despite their lack of scent. What’s the point of flowers without a scent? Just as I feared, I enter my kitchen to find it full of them. Asters. I hate the things.
They spill from vases and peer out of pots on the table, the floor, the windowsill. Some appear to be growing directly from the ceiling, strangling the light fittings and creeping down the walls. It’s a floral nightmare. Where have they come from?
When I was six years old, Mum told me that an aster had saved my life when she was pregnant with me. She’d touched a flower and its pink petals had gently grasped her finger like a baby’s hand.
“And that’s when I decided to keep you,” she smiled wistfully, as though this was a heart-warming story.
My breath caught in my throat and I dropped the paintbrush I was holding, splattering red paint all over the happy picture of our family.
Her words have echoed in my ears my whole life. It didn’t help that she planted asters everywhere. She probably thought it was a cute symbol of her maternal love, but it meant the exact opposite to me. The part of the story that I’d tuned into was the fact that she had been considering not keeping me. That it was only because of some flower that she’d changed her mind. And what if she’d read the aster’s signal all wrong? What if it’d been trying to tell her to get rid of me?
Asters weren’t the only things Mum was obsessed with. She also had a morbid fascination with death. More specifically, recent deaths of people we knew. It was her favourite topic of conversation.
“Old Mrs Wainwright” or “Doris from number 25” or “Moira James’s husband” had “dropped dead in the post office” or “in their sleep” or “in a tragic accident, God rest their soul,” she’d say, before pointing out the ways in which it’d been inevitable. She’d always had a “dodgy heart.” Or it was “that stressful job he had, so it was,” or, “What did he expect, smoking thirty Superkings a day?”
Death and asters and my mother’s love were inextricably intertwined in ways I could never quite understand. My life felt like a Final Destination movie. I had cheated Death, and now it was chasing me down, seeking reparation. Except Death took the physical form of tiny, beady-eyed flowers that glared at me wherever I went, and hissed under their breath in my Mum’s voice, “You shouldn’t be here!”
As soon as I had my own house, I banished asters. So why are they all over my kitchen?
Then behind me, a voice. That unmistakeable Irish lilt. Mum.
“You’ll never guess who’s dead,” she says, and my blood runs cold. Mum died ten years ago.
“Who?” I say, my body trembling.
I can barely hear her over the wailing of the Banshee.
“You.”
The asters dance for joy.
