Flowers For Edie.

We know you're looking, Dorothy.

I: FLOWERS FOR EDIE

The only reason Dorothy Burnham doesn't hate her life is because there's not much left to hate.

Alarm. Shower. Coffee. Eggs. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Drive. Dinner. Bed. Cry¹.

That's all there really is. Over and over. At least broken records make neat sounds. She can't remember the last time she hung out with friends. Well, non-work friends at least. Does she have non-work friends? It takes her a disturbing amount of time to remember who they are.

She really is stuck in a rut. More than she's ever been before.

Her office walls at Site-47 are the exact same beige as her bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.

Fuck.

She wasn't always like this, though it's hard for her to remember. She once had a bright future, a family, and a home.

Her wife, Edie², was six months pregnant when she died. IVF wasn't cheap, but it was worth it. The baby was healthy and strong, a boy. And then Edie died.

Dorothy still doesn't know how. One night, Edie fell asleep; She didn't wake up. To the bafflement of every pathologist she could find, there was no cause of death. No drugs, no injuries, no underlying conditions. Her heart just stopped beating like a light on a switch.

Dorothy lived in denial for about a week. Did anger for 2 and bargaining for a few days short of 3. Then her vacation days ran out, and she went back to work. She's never really been able to cross the border from depression into acceptance.

She sold the house, bought the shittiest beige hovel she could find, and has been plucking along ever since.

She remembers going out for brunch with her friends. Now, every Sunday, she makes eggs.

She was a field agent once. Now she does paperwork. Reports and reports reporting on reports. Her official job title is "Junior RAISA Liaison at Site-47". Which, despite having all the paperwork of a RAISA employee, does not come with the pay.

It's Monday, though telling days apart isn't a strong suit of hers nowadays. She scans her keycard. Walks past security, nods to the camera, goes through the metal detector, scans her keycard again, takes two lefts, then a right past a withering potted plant, and comes upon her office.

She opens the door, ready to see a beautiful drought of color, and is surprised. There is color. Something is wrong. Someone has left a bouquet of flowers on her desk.

She takes a moment to look at her smart watch. Today is the anniversary of Edie's death. She had not remembered. She has never told anyone.

Why are there flowers here? Who put them there? How did they know?

The flowers are poppies. Edie's favorite. How did they know?

Something is wrong.

It shouldn't bother her, right?

Someone sent her flowers. That's a normal thing that normal people do. They send each other flowers. She will not allow herself to be neurotic about this.

But then, it is a secure facility, isn't it? The only people who could have accessed it are her coworkers, and she's quite certain she never told them.

She will not allow herself to be neurotic about this.

She stumbles out into the break room, almost slamming the door. A few coworkers look at her in confusion. She can feel her coffee breath stumbling out into the room, wafting down the unlucky nostrils of the people in her life she sadly enough most trusts.

She barely remembers their names. The man with the blurry face (she realizes at this moment she left her glasses by the vase) is probably Michael? The woman who can't keep focused (in multiple ways) is Gaby, maybe. Both recoil as she speaks.

"Who gave me the flowers?"

The sentence has a tad more venom than she intends.

There is a stark and hungry silence. No one here has any idea what she is talking about.

She lowers her eyes and her head with them. "Never mind." She says, too rushed and shamed for the words to be discerned by the untrained ear.

She retreats slowly into her office.

She, really, shouldn't be here. She's good enough at her job to know that compromising security footage is a violation of precisely 14 regs.

Unfortunately, she cannot stop thinking about the flowers. She must determine the prompting for this unprompted act of kindness. It is this compulsion that has dragged her into the security room during her lunch break. It is mercifully unattended; it's the guard's lunch break, too.

She flips through cameras until she stumbles on her office. She plugs in the date range, starting from last Friday when she left and ending this morning. The scrub starts.

She is instantly greeted by her own visage and takes a moment to marvel at just how unflattering the camera in her office is. She breaths and accelerates the footage, watching herself leave.

Nothing happens for a very long time. Enough time that she has the space to ponder her own situation. Should she have submitted a ticket? Gotten permission? On what grounds? Flowers?

No, that would make her a joke. This is the way it has to be.

Her musing is interrupted as she notices it. The vase is there. She pauses and rewinds. It takes her mere moments to isolate the incident.

Sunday, 9:21 PM, nothing. One minute later, exactly on the minute, the flowers sitting right where she found them.

No one enters, not even a shadow is present. They are absent one moment and there the next.

She bites her lip, chewing and staring and pondering. She cannot help but speak aloud.

"What the fuck?"

Burnham is sitting in her office, staring at an old, washed-out, blurry Polaroid of Edie. She has a cigarette in her mouth (that's 2 more regs broken) and smoke wafting up her nostrils.

She used to feel alone when she stared up at the sky, gazing at the fathomless number of stars. That's why she took this job, to study them all. Now, she just feels alone when she spots them.

The smoke is not acrid, not to her; it is the smell of rib rub, Italian seasoning, and a copious amount of Himalayan salt in the shower, the kind that made the house smell like the Dead Sea. The smell of the past and god-willing the future.

Her mind floods with the same seven questions that she's been asking herself for far too long now. The thoughts break the surface tension of her brain and spill over the edge in the form of tears.

It turns out, one does not always have to progress through the stages of grief, and so she slips back into anger. She locks eyes with the dastardly flower pot and has a staring contest, which she somehow loses. She gazes at the soft blue curls of the fine china, hefts it into her hands, and breaks it against the wooden corner of her desk.

Two things catch her eye: first, that she is bleeding, quite profusely, actually. The ceramic shards have done quite a number on her finger, cutting both wide and deep. The second is a small, golden placard printed on the inside of the ceramic. She picks up the chunk, careful not to get cut again. She reads the now partially reddened gold. The words are simple and yet utterly nonsensical.

AWAKENING INSTITUTE.

1963 Pen Road, LG City, CO, USA

Dorothy Burnham has an eidetic memory; she has never forgotten a face or a name, and so she is quite certain that she has never heard of an 'Awakening Institute'. Neither has she heard of an 'LG City'.

The first answer is, of course, a search engine. She boots up her laptop and begins to type in every combination of relevant search terms, desperately ignoring the blood pouring down onto the keyboard.

0 fucking results.

0 results is astounding, baffling. Random strings of characters get two dozen results on the modern internet. A relatively normal name: 0? The fucking Foundation, the most secret organization on the face of the planet, doesn't have 0.

Something smells off to her. This might be real, more than just paranoia. Something is wrong.

She is sitting in medbay, staring down at her bandaged and oh so aching hands, when her boss, Seymore, enters.

He sits down on the medical bed, just close enough for the primate part of her brain to find strength in numbers, just far enough so as to avoid inducing proximal discomfort.

"You fucked up," he says. It is not a question.

Her head falls just a little, "Yeah."

"Not just the vase but… breaking into the security room? You have any idea how many regs that breaks?"

She nods, avoiding eye contact³. "Fourteen."

His eyes widen, surprised, "Shit, good for you. I didn't actually know," he laughs, shrugging burdened shoulders.

She is silent in her glowering.

"You know you're the smartest person in this building, right?"

His statement is unexpected and provisionally unwelcome.

She scoffs performatively (as though any other such scoffing exists). "Really?"

He glares. "Don't feign modesty. Half these chumps could barely split a fuckin' atom if pressed. You're good, really good, closest thing I've ever found to myself."

She pushes her tongue against her upper lip⁴. "Thank you, sir."

She enforces a regime of neutrality upon her face.

"You fucked up," it is still not a question. "Punishment is demotion by two ranks, at least. Amnesticisation and furloughed pay."

The regime holds. "I know."

He stares at a poster on the wall advertising the benefits of a balanced diet. He is almost certainly not reading the poster.

"I'd ask why you did it, but I don't want to know, and I trust you wouldn't have done it without good reason."

He turns his eyes to stare at her while keeping his head forward. "There was a reason for you to be screaming in your office, right? Something strange. Something you're starting to think about wanting to find."

She nods, as slightly as possible.

"Then go find it. Your punishment is suspension for the rest of the week, paid. Find this thing, and bring it back here."

She attempts to do a salute, but only manages to press the injured parts of her fingers together. Her wince slurs her words as she sputters out the phrase "Yes, sir."

She moves to stand, but is interrupted by Seymore's voice.

"One more thing. Try not to break any more regs, okay? You're gonna be under increased scrutiny while suspended."

She doesn't quite remember how she came to be going 40 miles per hour over the speed limit. She was just driving for a long while, and thinking for a long while⁵, and here she is, committing a borderline felony.

She only smiles to herself. There aren't any cops out here. Here is dust and used needles and tumbleweeds and wind-torn plastic bags from markets no one's ever heard of. Here is peeling paint and rotting wood fences and vibrantly chromatic toys rendered ownerless by faulty CO⁶ detectors. Here is the nightmare within the American dream.

And she is so so happy to be here.

This place is dead enough to kill the flowers, dead enough to be her wife. Deep enough in the nightmare to render it lucid⁷. So barren that the answers should be plain as the too-blue sky. Here she will find them, and she will learn what they know about her wife⁸.

She only presses on the gas when the building of her focus comes into view. Somehow, her GPS found this place when she plugged in '1963 Pen Road'. The building is not what she expects: a black oak staircase draped against darkened brick, leading to a second floor. A door rests on the top of the stairs, its frame enveloped by cyan in neon. Atop the frame, in the same sharp font as the one on the placard, beaming the same burning cold neon, are the words 'LaFleur's Séance Solutions'.

Not what she expected.

A bell rigged to the door rings softly. As soon as Dorothy enters, she is blasted by a wave of AC-sponsored coolness, in stark contrast to the loathsome sun outside.

The interior is covered in posters of many varieties, all old advertisements for Madam LaFleur. It takes mere moments for the woman herself to appear, approaching through two purple velvet curtains. She is tall, with broad shoulders and skin so ivory as to almost be translucent, as though under a x-ray. Especially in the technicolor neon lights blanketing the room.

"May I help you?" LaFleur asks, in a voice that sounds triple-filtered and distilled.

Burnham puts on her best imitation of a fake smile, which is quite poor, and comes dangerously close to a real one. "I hope so. I'm looking for information."

"Information about yourself?" LaFleur begins hesitantly, trying to keep that selling tone in her voice, "The secrets of the soul? Or the other kind?" She finishes, cocking her head.

"The other kind."

LaFleur grimaces. "I don't sell that kind."

Dorothy walks up to the desk, leaning onto mahogany, elbow rubbing against the wood's grain. "I'm looking for the people who sent me flowers."

LaFleur's brow furrows in confusion. "I don't know how to respond to that."

"They call themselves the Awakening Institute; their listed address brought me here."

It's subtle when LaFleur cracks, lips sliding down her face like so much sand, pupils popping for just a second before she can smooth it all over, but Burnham was trained by the best, and the metallic smell of fear is palpable. "I don't know anything about the Institute. I have to ask you to leave now." LaFleur speaks, desperation just barely pushed out of the frame that is her voice.

Burnham is silent for a second, letting the tension grow. "I think you do know some things."

Finally, the dam bursts. "I don't know who sent flowers to your wife, so stop asking!" Red-hot shame melts onto LaFleur's freckled skin.

Burnham smiles, this time real. "I didn't mention my wife."

LaFleur, in panic, flees into the back room. The door slams closed like a wave onto the Cliffs of Dover.

The sun is setting behind the Rockies. The last dapples of light are being strangled by the dark. The sky is cast in a sickly and brilliant orange hue. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, it's hard to be certain that the sun will ever rise again.

It's been hours since LaFleur retreated into the back room. Now, Burnham waits in her car⁹ for LaFleur to exit. There's still another car in the lot, so she's pretty sure LaFleur's home is a separate place.

It is hard to entertain herself as the hours grow old. All this strangeness has dragged up many old memories that she'd rather have forgotten. Memories of joy and warmth. Memories of Edie¹⁰. She's fallen through rock bottom, and there's nothing else to catch her at the end of her spiraling.

But there is something to distract her. A message popping up on her car's battery run display. A text. The sender field does not contain a phone number, but instead the words 'THE INSTITUTE'. Two emboldened buttons rest beneath the text, gray and drab; they read 'read' and 'decline'.

She presses a sweat-soaked finger to the screen¹¹, she can feel each heartbeat like an atom bomb.

To: DOROTHY EUGENE BURNHAM
From: INTERN #32, THE INSTITUTE
Subject: We know you're looking, Dorothy.

Why do you pursue us, Dorothy? Let bygones be bygones. What was so wrong with the random act of kindness? It's time to move on.
Stop looking.

She can't help but laugh to herself. "Fuck you…" Mumbled so deeply under her breath.

Threats? Really? These people think they can threaten the Foundation? She chuckles as she looks back towards LaFleur's door.

Finally, her patience is rewarded. LaFleur moves sheepishly out from behind the door, sneaking out towards her car. Dorothy unrolls her window in anticipation. She will not allow herself to be anxious about this. All she has to do is ambush this woman and get a confession out of her; it's nothing she hasn't done before.

She sticks a hand out the window and is just about to call out at LaFleur when a hand wraps a rag around her mouth. She instantly recognizes the oh-so-sweet scent of chloroform. She knows she doesn't have very long to do something, but there's not very much she can do. The car is off, she can't turn it on and try to jostle herself free in the time she has, and not much else will do. Her head is pinned to the head-cushion. Physical effort is worthless with her damaged hands. It's an incredibly disadvantageous position.

She has time enough to think 'how?'. How did someone sneak into her back seat? She checked it many times out of boredom. The trunk, maybe. But if so, how could they have gotten out so quietly?

She feels the chemicals enter her mind, dulling it in pastel acidity. Colors and shapes never before seen flood her vision and scar her dreams.

She doesn't know how long it takes for her to lose consciousness, but she does know the last thing she sees. Through the haze and the smog of the city, through the technicolor rain and desaturated dust, there is another message on her screen. She was always a good reader— she read 8 grades ahead by 10. And so, despite the circumstances of her anemic consciousness, she can read the message. The words bleed into her stilted eyes.

To: DOROTHY EUGENE BURNHAM
From: INTERN #32, THE INSTITUTE
Subject: Strike one.

We warned you, Dorothy.

Stop looking, or the next flowers will be for you.

ONISM ODYSSEY

TBA

‡ Licensing / Citation