A Flood of Posies
Tiffany Meuret
Publication date: February 9th 2021
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction
*2020 Cygnus Book Award for Science Fiction Long List*
It’s 2025.
Sisters, Doris and Thea, exist worlds apart, despite living within a few miles of one another. Doris with her regular home and regular husband and regular job, and Thea slinking along the edges of society, solitary and invisible. When a storm of biblical proportions strikes, the wayward sisters are begrudgingly forced together as the rain waters rise, each attempting to survive both the flood and each other.
One year later, Thea—now calling herself Sestra—floats throughout a ravaged, flood soaked world. Her former life drowned beneath metric tons of water, she and her only companion, Robert, battle starvation, heatstroke, and the monstrous creatures called Posies that appeared alongside the flood. When they run across what they assume to be an abandoned tugboat, their journey takes a new turn, and the truth about the flood and the monsters seems more intricately linked to Thea’s past then she may realize.
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EXCERPT:
Nobody tells you about the boredom. There isn’t much to do after the terror and shock subsides. Just floating and sitting and getting dizzy from the hamster-wheel laps of the brain thinking about an entire lifetime of floating and sitting. It’d been a year of sitting around waiting to die. Rob swore it was only nine months, as if he fucking knew the difference. He spent all his time lost somewhere in his head, and Sestra couldn’t be sure of his grip on reality, let alone his basic math skills. She wasn’t so sure about herself either. It’s not like it mattered much.
Rob, however despondent, was never short of criticisms of her performance. “Get your hands out of the water if you ain’t even gonna try.”
Sestra draped her right arm over the boat platform. She said she was catching fish, but her arm had fallen asleep ages ago. All she’d done to pass the time was flip-flop between numbness and a painful pins-and-needles sensation. Since she passed most of her days in similar fashion, her arms from the elbows down were the only parts of her not turned to jerky from the sun and an overabundance of sea salt.
“That water’s not safe,” Rob said.
“Jesus, is it noon already?”
“Ain’t nothing saving you when a shark grabs those fingers.”
“What a pity,” she said, keeping her arm exactly where it was.
Her stomach lurched. By now she thought she’d have gotten used to being starved all the time, but it never got easier. Rob seemed to handle it better than her. He’d close his eyes and lean back as if to nap, looking so damn peaceful while Sestra’s organs tore her apart from the inside out. Before the flood, she’d heard stories of people who’d slipped into euphoric comas, their brains leaching sedating hormones as their bodies ate themselves alive. Sestra counted the hours until that moment came, but it hadn’t yet. She was miserable every second that passed, angry at everything, feeling herself ripped apart as her cells died bit by bit.
She couldn’t understand how Rob just closed his eyes. The times she tried to copy him, the agony of her insides just roared louder, as if silencing one of her senses just made the rest of them more aggressive. She’d chuck water at Rob’s face sometimes, just to shock him out of it, afraid he might never open his eyes again. Sometimes she’d just start talking and talking so that she had something to do, forming coherent sentences being its own sort of chore nowadays.
Author Bio:
Tiffany Meuret is a writer of monsters and twisted fairy tales. Her publications include Shoreline of Infinity, Luna Station Quarterly, Ellipsis Zine, and others. When not reading or writing, she is usually binge watching comfortable sitcoms from her childhood or telling her kids to put on their shoes for the tenth time. She lives in sunny Arizona with her husband, two kids, two chihuahuas, gecko, and tortoise.
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