The Last Mayflower

This is for Mikeydred's May Challenge.

Guilt is a flower that never stops blooming. Michelle Liew

🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️

The month of May was significant for Mrs. Callum--the dutiful housewife placed a single Mayflower on her window sill every day of the month. The flower bloomed, resplendent, each year.

But Mrs Callum passed.

The flower always faced the rising sun. But it faced no one that year.

No one in her town dared touch or even pass her window. They said it was tradition they didn't dare defy...but Liddy knew it was Mrs Callum's containment. Hunger. To forget, and to be forgiven.

An envelope. Rose-coloured, with Liddy's name written in smudged ink. It was the perfect puzzle for the bored, curious grade-schooler--it bore a Mayflower and a Cipher only she could solve.

The blue ink bled, profusely, when she touched it. It was almost as if it didn't want to be read. It hadn't been mailed--it sat on the porch too neatly, as if it wanted her to discover it.

Yet, it wanted unravelling. It read: "Do not remember her."

But Liddy didn't know who she was--yet.

Tired from the day's comings and goings, Little Liddy fell fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Her sleep was fitful...one marked by a nightmare of a cellar. A uniform. A little girl, shrieking at the top of her voice. A shovel.

And Mrs. Callum, blood-soaked, digging.

Relentlessly digging.

Liddy shot up in bed, sweat trickling down her brow. She glanced at her trembling hands--hands with dirt at the fingertips.

The young girl knew that the memory wasn't hers...yet it had become hers.

No one knew, much less recalled, Mrs Callum and her little daughter--the voiceless one. Perhaps no one wanted to know. But the Earth remembered every May.

And Liddy had become the Someone Else who had to.

Mrs Callum never wanted to--never meant to. But everyone else was so hungry.

So thin.

There were just...too many of them.

So she grew a flower each May. Then buried it. The only way she could forget.

But the bloom didn't wither. It rooted.

Within a child each year

Liddy was this year's child. She had inherited the flower and Mrs. Callum's grievous nightmare.

She grew a new Mayflower, and placed it on the sill, her eyes eerily vacant.

Concerned, her mother asked her if anything was the matter.

She knew Mrs Callum's daughter's name now. May.

Forgetfulness had a price. And Liddy was paying...for Mrs. Callum.

🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️🌸🌸👧🏻🕯️

Original story by Michelle Liew. AI tags are coincidental.

Copyright Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin 2025