Bloom

Jenny went out to her garden to prune the roses again. She was having difficulty getting them to bloom. She cut away the dead branches, carefully avoiding the thorns. Other years her roses bloomed well, but this year had been challenging. She spent a lot of time working in her garden, but the roses didn't bloom. The truth was that it was probably time to pull them out and put in new ones.

She glanced over at her neighbor's yard. Every corner of the yard contained rose bushes filled with large blooms. Jenny wondered what the neighbor was doing to get those lovely blooms. She tried to catch her a few times so that she could ask her. Whenever she saw her in the yard and she ran outside to meet her, the woman was gone.

Jenny was sitting in bed reading a book that night. She heard the creaks of the house and quiet purr of her cat as he snuggled up against her. She also heard a scraping and pounding sound outside. She slipped out of bed and went to the window. The moonlight illuminated the ground below as she looked for the source of the sound. Her eyes looked for movement below, but all she saw were shrubs and trees blowing in the night breeze. She shrugged and went back to her warm bed.

A week later, Jenny went back out to the garden to work again. She finally saw a few rosebuds in her garden. Her hard work was finally paying off. As she glanced at her neighbor's yard, she noticed that the roses were missing. They must have been cut and brought in. She envied her neighbor as she thought about having fresh roses in her home. She loved the delicate fragrance. It always reminded her of her father, who had brought her a rose every week when she was a girl. He died when she was twelve. The scent of roses always brought back him back to her.

As Jenny went up the stairs of her porch, she noticed something in front of her door. When she got a closer look, it was a large bouquet of roses. Of course, it must have been the neighbor. That was so thoughtful. The neighbor must have noticed Jenny's sad blooms. She would have to give the neighbor a nice thank you note.

Later that evening she grabbed the thank you note she had written earlier off of the table. She walked over the neighbor's house. The porch light was on and Jenny knocked on the door. There was no answer. She knocked again. She saw a shadow in the window move and the locks on the door clicked. Jenny was surprised to see a woman in a dark hood in the doorway. It was her neighbor, but somehoe she seemed different. After a few seconds, Jenny tried to let out a scream, but cloth was placed over her mouth and the doorway grew black in front of her as she collapsed on the porch.

"Do you think we got them all?" the officer asked his young colleague, who was bent over on the ground, moving a woman's body into a body bag.

"I think this was the last one, she is kind of fresh." the skinny guy on the ground answered with distaste.

Mounds of dirt were scattered across the lot. A dozen body bags were scattered around. The rose bushes were no longer there. They all had to be uprooted to dig out the bodies. Nobody knew how long the woman had been doing this. They had gotten an anonymous tip.

"Well, I'll tell ya, that's a hell of way to make fertilizer." the older cop said as he wrote in his notebook and walked back to his car.