The Blossoming (Fiction)

***

This year, the valley’s come early into bloom. Not just early, wrong.

The village consists of a fistful of houses that cling to the hillside, trying their best to keep from sliding down into the river that slices the valley’s gut. The paths between houses aren’t really paths—just places where feet have worn the grass down to stubborn dirt. The kind of dirt that cakes your boots and dries into a crust you have to chip off with a blade. Some walls lean like drunks. Some look sharp enough to cut the sky. The wind hisses through the cracks.

All over, the shosha blooms red as blood. Each spring, when the funerary season ends, the Himalayan valley bleeds with petals the color of fresh wounds. They say the dead feed them. They say each flower is a soul laid to rest. The villagers nod when they say it, as if this is a comfort. The shosha spills down terraces and threads through crumbled fences. There’s no birdsong. Only the sounds of the river chewing at the stones below, and the wind hissing, and the goats rattling their neck bells. You can hear the prayer flags flapping if you bother to listen. Or in Meena’s case, if you feel them.

She feels it all.

She’s sixteen, small, and sharper than most give her credit for. Deaf since birth. The village doesn’t talk to her much, not because they dislike her—there’s no malice—but because what’s the point? They think she lives in a vacuum. But Meena senses everything that matters. The wind’s hum against her skin. The dry path’s low rumble of hooves. The thin, cold air that cuts the nose, freezes the lungs. She sits at the edge where the stones are jagged, and the drop is severe, where if anyone tumbled, they would not stop until the river, and the river would carry them away.

The ledge is where she first sees it. The bloom, far too soon. And not just in the grave fields where it belongs. It creeps into the rice paddies. Coils around the trunks of the orchard trees. Even spills down the trails like spilled ink. And in patterns, no less—spirals, loops, strange tangles. Like the valley is doodling with its own blood.

Her grandmother, old as the stones themselves, keeps the funerary rites. She’s got a face like cracked leather and hands that know every chant, every step of the last dance they do for the dead. She doesn’t like the look of the blooms this year. No one does. The elders gather in the shrine and mutter over bowls of oil, over the cracked jawbone relic they keep wrapped in cloth. Bad omen, the elders say. The dead are restless. We must give them peace.

Meena’s father doesn’t go. He never does. The man can’t even bring himself to look at the family shrine anymore. Maybe he’s afraid the dead will look back. Or maybe he’s just tired. Grief’s got him bent double since Meena’s little brother was taken by the mountain last winter. Fell into a crevasse while herding the goats. No one even found the body. Meena’s mother hasn’t spoken a word about it. She just sits, weaving too-tight baskets, fingers raw.

The animals know something’s off. The goats won’t graze where the flowers grow. Even the dogs refuse to piss on them. The offerings on the graves—rice, oil lamps, worn beads—wither faster than they should, as if the earth’s rejecting the gifts. As if the dead have had enough of being placated.

The villagers do what villagers do best when afraid: they double down. More rites. More chants. More smoke, more oil, more prayer flags strung like desperate laundry across the valley’s throat. Meena watches, feeling the ground under her bare feet, the faint tremor of something moving deep down. Like a heartbeat, but unnatural.

One evening, as the sun burns itself out behind the peaks, Meena traces a spiral of blooms near the house. The petals feel soft and prone to crumbling, like ash. The spiral leads to the fields, where there should be crops, not shosha. She stands there staring and thinks, this isn’t how flowers grow. This is how someone writes.

No one else wants to see it that way. The elders say the valley is testing them, or that the gods have turned away, or that this is all because the young people don’t respect the old ways.

The nights stretch longer now, and like embers smoldering in the hearth, the blossoms shine dimly under the moon. Meena cannot take her eyes off them; the patterns are more visible in the dark. She starts dreaming of them, red spirals, endless and swallowing. Her mouth feels like the dry earth when she wakes.

The villagers are uneasy. Arguments break out over how many lamps to light, over whether to call for help from the next valley, over whether to burn the blooms outright. No one dares. The old stories warn of what happens to those who anger the dead’s garden. They say you don’t just die—you get scraped out of memory, your name erased like you were never even born.

The flowers spread. The valley is writing. Trying to speak. Whatever’s beneath the soil has something to say.

***

Meena starts drawing: flat stones and charcoal. Fingers black with it. She traces the spirals, the loops, the crooked lines of red. At first, it looks like the work of wind or goats trampling the petals. But night after night, the patterns connect: the spirals are points on a map, marking old burial sites. Some are marked, and the areas that aren’t are the worst. The blooms over those are thicker. Hungrier.

Meena tells no one. Not her father or her grandmother. The old woman would spit beetle juice and say she’s possessed. Her father wouldn’t even hear—he’d be halfway through a jug of millet beer, face turned toward nothing.

The moon cuts through the night like a knife. Meena chases the flowers like a kid pulling loose threads. The air tastes like pennies. Maybe she’s imagining it. The trail ends where the mountain gave up years ago: a landslide. People died here, but nobody talks about it. It’s not the kind of story the villagers pass down at firesides. She scrambles over loose stone, boots slipping. The blooms shine faintly in the dark, like they’re lighting the way. Like they want her to find something, and she does.

The shrine, or what’s left of it, is half buried under rocks. The stones are smeared red—from the blooms, probably, but for a second, she’s not sure. She crouches and crawls inside, where she finds a broken effigy. It’s human shaped, or was, once. The face is gone.

Beneath it is a pile of bones. Animal? No. Not all of them. A jar sits in the middle of them, sealed tight with wax so old it threatens to crumble at Meena’s touch. She lifts the jar and feels the weight of it in her marrow.

Later, curled on her mat, she can’t sleep properly. The valley hums under her skin. She imagines voices—or does she feel them through the floor, the stone, the very air? They don’t speak in a tongue she knows. They don’t speak in words. It’s a half cry—choked, sour like milk left out. Thick and rotten. When Meena wakes, her mat is covered in petals, and her mouth tastes of blood.

The bloom has thickened overnight. They spread past the fields, pushed through the stone walls, crevices, or wherever there was an opening. They wove around lintels with the vigor of a conquering clan. They crawled straight up to the entrances of huts, granaries, temples, and cattle pens.

“Burn them,” says a man whose rice fields have been choked by red.

“You want to burn the dead’s gift?” snaps an old woman.

“Gift. Right. A curse wrapped in petals.”

Meena keeps drawing. The map’s clearer now: the spirals aren’t just graves, but messages. The valley isn’t just blooming, it’s remembering.

Her grandmother catches Meena one night, fingers black with charcoal, eyes wide and sleepless. “Stop it, girl,” the old woman signs to her. “You’re calling them here.”

Meena looks at her and thinks of signing back: maybe they need to be called. But she doesn’t bother. She knows her grandmother won’t listen.

The petals wind tighter around the village. Like the valley’s drawing the net closed. Meena’s not sure she wants to be inside it when it pulls tight.

Meena waits until the house is dead still and slips out. Back to the shrine, back to the jar. This time, she opens it. Wax flakes off like dead skin.

Inside are bits of cloth, hair tangled with ash, threads that smell like smoke even after all these years. Binding tokens. To tie the dead down. To silence them. Meena knows this like she knows her own name. And she knows, like the certainty of the cold jar in her palms, that the founding story of their village is all wrong: it wasn’t peaceful. There’d been another clan here, and the takeover wasn’t clean, wasn’t washed away with prayers and shrines.

The shosha blooms pour up the steps of the temple, into granaries, coiling around roof-beams like the valley wants to pull the houses down. The village frays quickly.

“They did it—the Rana family—their blood called this curse!” shouts a man in the square, his face redder than the flowers.

“Liar! Your grandfather led the slaughter!” someone else yells back.

It goes like that. Fists fly. Old debts surface like dug up bones.

Meena watches their mess. She sits on the shrine’s cracked step, picks a bloom apart, petal by petal. Feels the hum of the valley beneath her, like it’s waiting. Like it’s holding its breath.

By morning, the first roof caves in from the weight of blooms, heavy as shame.

Meena’s grandmother grabs her wrist hard enough to leave marks, eyes accusing and wild. She lets go and signs gruffly, Why couldn’t you let it lie? You think digging this up will save us? It’ll drown us.

Meena pulls free. Says in sign, fast, sharp: Drowning already.

When Meena was little, maybe six, she’d found a dead bird on the path and tried to bury it. Her grandmother had found her and said, “Don’t bury what you didn’t kill. The land remembers what belongs in it. Meena remembers this now, throws it back at her grandmother. The land remembers, Meena signs, making the old woman falter.

The villagers stop leaving their houses. Now they can all hear the dead humming. The jar sits open on Meena’s floor, and the scraps inside feel warm, like breath. Name them. The thought pushes at her.

She knows what she must do.

She starts taking a sharp stone. Scratches names into the shrine’s broken walls—the names from the stories whispered when people thought she wouldn’t understand, the names spat during fights. The names that hung in the air like smoke. She carves till her hands bleed.

The blooms don’t go quietly.

They curl back slowly, like the valley’s slow exhale. The red drains from the petals. Plants rot from the top down. Black tips, then soggy brown, then nothing left. Villagers crawl out of houses like they’d been sleeping too long. Faces blank. They avoid Meena’s gaze, looking through her like a chair they’re done with. Just furniture now, purpose served, use over. Even her grandmother says nothing. Just sits on the steps, eyes on the bare earth, mouth a thin line.

It’s over. Or so it seems.

The night after the blooms die, the ground where the biggest spiral was splits open. There’s no quake, no roar. Just a crack wide enough for a girl to slip through if she’s foolish enough. Or brave enough.

The underworld isn’t fire and brimstone, but colder. Wetter. It smells like stone after rain and old iron. Roots dangle like veins. The path winds down and down, and Meena makes her spiraling way, bare feet on slick rock, fingers on the walls so she can feel the shape of the place.

The dead are not like ghosts in stories. No chains. No moans. Just presence. Shapes in the dark that don’t quite touch the ground. Eyes that aren’t eyes, but still able to see, to take stock of what’s in front of them.

One of the dead “speaks”—Meena knows the words by the vibrations in her chest. Why come here?

To make it right, Meena signs, even though she’s sure it’s not necessary. Even though her hands shake.

There’s a long pause. The dead don’t move. The land will always remember, they say.

Meena thinks about the valley, her people, and the shame hanging over everything like storm clouds that never break. She signs: Take what is owed. Let the rest go.

Another pause, and then the dead reply: Only if you promise. Not to forget. Meena signs her acceptance, and the walls of dirt around her, the roots—the valley’s very heart—pulse. The air warms. Meena climbs back up to the surface. The crack closes beneath her, slow and final.

In the weeks after, the valley remains free of red blooms. People start planting crops again, carefully, quietly.

One night, her grandmother comes to sit beside Meena on the bed. The old woman doesn’t make eye contact. She doesn’t speak. Meena doesn’t press, just feels the gentle, reluctant acceptance radiating off the old woman. There’s no more talk in the village, either, but the people look at Meena differently now. Not through her, but at her. And when someone dies, they ask her how best to lay the body down. She shows them where the ground is softest.

Sabyasachi Roy is an academic writer, poet, artist, and photographer. His poetry has appeared in Viridine Literary, The Broken Spine, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Potomac, and more. He contributes craft essays to Authors Publish and has a cover image in Sanctuary Asia. His oil paintings have been published in The Hooghly Review. You can follow his photography writing on Matador, Substack.