Flowers
Liss was sitting next to her Mum. They both had white masks over their faces to stop them breathing in the dust. Dad was taking a large hammer to one of the counter walls which separated the kitchen area from the sitting room. Liss had tried picking it up and found that she could, but her parents had rushed at her, telling her to put it down immediately and that she’d break her toes if she dropped it.
Liss felt thrilled at the destruction of the wall. Not because she cared about “the flow” from the sitting room to the kitchen as her parents did, but because it seemed almost magical that a wall could be unmade. This morning it had been a solid barrier, a half-sized one admittedly, but something solid that Liss could climb up onto and sit. Now it had all but vanished into a pile of white dust and grey, broken slabs.
Liss had assumed there was some sort of rule against this – she was told off if she pushed things over or threw them down the stairs – but it turned out adults could knock down entire walls if they wished.
Once it was done there was a lot of clearing up to do. Liss lied that the dust was making her throat itchy and escaped outside.
As she ate, Liss looked out over the roof, to the hills. Clouds were rolling slowly through the blue sky, their shadows passing like vast beasts in the fields below. Liss had a tummy ache. She felt weird, like her blood was itchy. Even though she tried not to, she looked at the eye of her bedroom window and knew something was in there. Liss had never believed in monsters under the bed, even though all children in movies seemed to. As soon as she had learned of this, Liss had got on her belly and crawled under to check. But there was something about the new bedroom. A presence. She could feel it waiting. It was coiled in there, in the walls, tight as a spring just waiting for – what? She didn’t know.
*
The walls were whispering.
Liss rolled over and listened. If she tried, she could pretend the sound was the wind outside. The wind was indeed blowing, pouring down the hills around their house like a flood. The ivy ladder which climbed from the ground floor to her bedroom window skittered and tapped its dark, shiny leaves against the glass.
But the noise in the walls was different. It rose and fell the way voices do when heard from the next room. Liss had gone into the hallway to see if her parents were awake downstairs, only to find that the house was as dark and still as a cave. Everyone was asleep.
Liss lay as still as she could, breathing as softly as possible, straining to hear.
There it was. A crooning, humming sound; almost imperceptible. It was teasing her. Each time she convinced herself she was imagining it, it would return. Right now it ran from the left corner of her room and rippled around the space, ending in a hiss above her head. Sometimes there was a pulse to it, a throbbing which made her heart race.
Liss cringed down into her duvet and looked down, towards the foot of the bed.
Pigbunny had been banished to a bag which hung at the end of her bedframe. For several weeks Liss had asserted that the bag, which also contained five dolls, a once-pink silk scarf – now skeletal as an autumn leaf – and two fairy dresses, could be given to the charity shop. Her mother had agreed and promised to take it, but somehow the act of carrying the bag downstairs and actually handing it over to her mother had never quite taken place.
Liss wriggled down so that her whole body was under the covers. Her breath made her face feel hot. She continued inching down the bed, passing the duvet up and over her, so that she arrived at the foot of the bed quite unseen by the room. Her hand alone emerged and, seeing by touch, fumbled to the bag. The disembodied hand of Liss reached into the bag and retrieved Pigbunny. She pulled the threadbare, one-eared pink rabbit in with her and hugged it tight.
Around her, the low humming continued.
*
At breakfast, Liss said nothing. She had decided that she would, finally, but once she was downstairs – her parents talking over her head about the house – the words wilted in her mouth. Her mother put a rack of toast down and passed Liss a plate and the butter dish. It was white with blue patterns on it. It had belonged to Liss’s grandma.
Liss took a piece of brown toast and buttered it carefully. Her mother watched. Liss ate her toast, careful to make sure the crumbs landed on the plate and not the table. Her dad was complaining about someone in his office. Her mum was nodding and agreeing. Liss looked longingly at the toast stack. She glanced at her mum and started to draw another piece onto her plate. Liss lifted her knife. It clinked against her plate. Her mum looked at her.
“You’re hungry this morning.” she smiled.
Something inside Liss pricked up its ears. There were the words people say and then there were the words people don’t say, and these are the ones you have to listen extra hard for.
Liss pushed the toast back into the stack and stretched.
“Ah,” said her Mother with a chuckle. “Thought as much. You’ve always had an appetite like a little bird.”
Liss relaxed. She’d heard correctly.
*
There was a small hillock which rose behind their house, which Liss could reach by crossing the path next to their home. It looked like a little echo of its bigger brothers and sisters, which the path bravely ventured between on its way out, into the distance. Liss could see the hillock from her bedroom window. When she sat at its peak, as she did now, she could look over the roof of their house, out towards the rolling hills beyond. The house looked like a small thing from here, like a fat, squatting toad leaning against the bank into which it had been built. The back door was a level higher than the front one, which opened onto a flagstone floor. It meant that, once inside, walking downstairs gave the impression of going underground. Her parents said this was cosy, like a mole's home from a story book. It put Liss in mind of a different sort of fairytale. One with caves and kidnap and graves.
The grass on the hillock was tall enough to almost conceal her, though the path she’d tracked walking to the top somewhat gave her away.
Liss’s mum had opened the French doors at the back of the house. Liss could see her shadowy shape moving about, obscured by the netted curtains which sucked in and out of the opening, tugged by the invisible hands of the breeze. Her mum was stripping the wallpaper from the downstairs room. Liss liked the wallpaper – it was embossed and shiny. She could scratch her fingers over the surface and it made a sound. It made her think of pearls and underwater palaces. Her mother had declared it hideous. She had taken Liss on a long drive to a shop to pick up paint samples which were now stacked on the side. Mum had promised Liss could help choose, but in the end there was a reason against all the colours Liss had liked. The paints her mum had chosen had names like ‘Stone Breath’, ‘Ivory Calm’ and ‘Storm at Sea’.
Mum promised that after the sitting room they would take down the old wallpaper in Liss’s room. It was faded pink, busy with a pattern of large roses. There was a small border of strawberry plants which ran around the whole room like a paper ribbon. Liss imagined how she would paint it if she could decide. She imagined making each wall a different colour, maybe the pastel colours of sweets, maybe green like leaves. Today she pictured dark, dark reds.
Liss turned her head and peered through the grasses. Her father was on the phone, pacing back and forth at the end of the drive. He was too far away for Liss to hear what he was saying, but she guessed that he was on the phone to his office. He’d stopped pacing now. He looked, unseeing, in Liss’s direction, one hand on his hip.
The day was hot again. The skin on her shoulders prickled slightly in the heat.
She sank down slowly, into her den of grass, leaning back on her elbows. A beetle with twitching, seeking antenna alighted on her knee. She closed her eyes for a moment and allowed her mind to go wide, wider than her body, extending outwards, carried by the sound of birds piping, the murmur of her parents now talking inside, the wind combing the hills in the distance. It was all so different from their home before, where there had always been car sounds and voices, laughter and people playing loud music.
Liss thought she could hear, or rather, not hear but feel, the humming in the walls.
She strained to catch it, turning her head this way and that. She risked a peek at the house. Her window stared out, black as a cave. It was like a great singular eye on the back of their new house. Inside, she knew, the room was whispering. It was as if the night time whispers had jumped from the walls and into her. Her body felt itchy. She ached. There was a strange sharpness in her mind and all the time she felt she could cry at any moment.
Liss closed her eyes tight again not wanting to see the house anymore. She considered getting up and running up the lane which eventually led to a little stream. It would be good to put her feet in the cold water but her parents had said she wasn’t allowed to go further than the gate.
She peeked again.
The toad-house, the dark window-eye watching. The not-sound humming in her ears. Liss clenched her fists into the grass and found a stone waiting for her. She wanted to go home. Her real home. She wanted to never step foot in that bedroom again. She gripped the stone. That room in the dark, with the singing, hissing walls which teased her, spinning around her bed, scaring her, polluting her dreams.
Liss got up too fast and her eyes went bright, the blood rushing to her head. She was still holding the stone. She was drawing back her arm as an alien yell escaped her mouth. Liss loosed the stone just as her mother stepped out of the back door, wiping her hands on a dishcloth, calling her daughter in for lunch.
The stone arced through the air as if drawn by an invisible thread.
Time played a mean game; slowing down so that Liss could see exactly what was about to happen, but had absolutely no way to stop it.
The stone crashed through her bedroom window.
*
“It’s just so unlike her.”
Liss was crouched in the hallway outside her bedroom. The night was sticky with heat. Her dad had joked, as he tidied up the glass on her carpet that at least they didn’t need to worry about her room overheating now. He had rubbed her on the head reassuringly, but his voice was pulled tight like a string. She could hear the low rumble of him now, replying to her mum.
“I expect it’s just the move, love. It’s been stressful for us – maybe we just didn’t think how stressful it could be for Lissy too.”
Liss could hear her mum walking up and down.
“I know but…I don’t know. She’s been so quiet these last few weeks. She seems tired all the time. She gives me these dark looks. I feel like I haven’t seen her smile in forever.”
There was a rustling sound of Dad standing up from the sofa and the noise of a beer being set on the wooden table.
“Well, she’s that age now I guess.”
“Oh, come on! She’s only 12!”
Her dad chuckled.
“She’ll be a teenager come spring. We were warned about this.”
It’s not that,” her mum said quietly, a hardness in her voice. “It’s since we got here. There’s something about this place.”
They were talking about her. Laughing at her. Liss felt a spasm of anger rise up in her. It started in her belly almost like hunger and rushed upwards, into her head. She stood up as quietly as she could and crept back into her room.
She closed the door behind her with a click.
Despite jests about the window, a wooden board had been secured over the hole in the lower part of the window frame. The room was hotter than ever. The curtains were still undrawn and moonlight spilt like milk across the carpet.
Liss sat down on the edge of the bed.
She felt betrayed. What had they been warned about? She knew teenagers could be stupid and loud. Her cousins were; loud and stupid and grumpy. But her babysitter was 15 and she was fun and kind – she chatted and read story books and did drawings with Liss.
She saw a pink ear poking out from under the pillow. Liss pulled Pigbunny out from his hiding place and stuffed him back into the banishment bag.
Around her, the whispering began.
Tonight Liss thought it sounded angry too. Like it was with her, understanding her. It knew how she was all alone, bored all the time, waiting for a new term in a new school she hadn’t even asked to go to. It sounded like a hiss, a muttering. It made Liss think of the Pigeon Woman back home, with her tangle of grey hair. How she walked between the birds, scattering crumbs, all the while muttering words which were like bits of a jigsaw jammed together wrongly, nonsensical.
Liss shut her eyes and listened.
The sound swirled around the walls. It seemed to spiral inwards, getting closer and closer to her. She wasn’t sure if she was still scared; her anger seemed to be acting like a barrier. Liss wondered if maybe you can’t be scared and angry at the same time. Maybe anger is stronger. This anger felt like a dark cloak. It was made of all the bad things which had ever happened to Liss. Things which she had been too small to complain about. The cloak was heavy around her and, strangely, made her feel colder instead of warm.
The whispering became a scratching now. A scratching in the walls.
Let us out, it seemed to say.
*
They ate dinners in the garden now. The kitchen was still too full of dust and brick. Liss’s mother seemed stressed out by it, even though she had been the one asking for it to be done. Liss wondered why her mum hadn’t had a go. Sometimes her mum seemed to ask her dad to do things which Liss knew she didn’t need help with – opening jars, reversing the car into the parking space.
They were eating nachos and chilli as a treat. It was one of Liss’s favourites – having crisps for dinner was never allowed except in the case of these triangular corn crisps. Her parents were talking over what to do next in the kitchen. The conversation was interspersed with the sound of crunching. Up in the hills sheep called to each other in their staccato way.
Liss wasn’t talking. She was eating. Her tummy still hurt. It was a deep, low down ache. With it had come a burning hunger. She ate and ate as her parents talked, tortilla dipped into beans, shovelled into her mouth, repeat. She felt like a deep cavern into which the food was vanishing without trace. She leaned across the table and spooned a fifth helping of chilli onto her plate. She grabbed a handful of crisps from the second bag her dad had fetched.
“Slow down there pumpkin.” Her dad smiled.
Her mum frowned. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”
Liss stopped. The new anger in her twitched. There was never enough for dinner. She was always hungry.
“I’m hungry,” she said quietly.
“Well, get an apple from the fruit bowl,” her mother replied. As she spoke, she set down her own fork and pushed her half-full plate away from her slightly.
“I don’t want an apple,” Liss whispered. “I want this.”
Her mother pursed her lips and looked pointedly across at Liss’s dad. Liss was looking into her own lap, but she felt her mother’s appeal to her father all the same. It seemed to have a sound of its own.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you since we moved here Liss,” her mother began, “but I’m not appreciating your tone these days. Not at all.”
The anger uncoiled like a snake. She felt it in her stomach, rising up like a cobra, mixing with the pain, with the hunger, with the whispering in the walls.
Liss shot her father a glance. He cleared his throat.
“Listen to your mother please, Lissy.”
He looked away from her, towards the hills. Her mother pushed her plate further away. The air felt cold suddenly, despite the evening heat.
Liss grabbed a handful of tortillas and stuffed them into her mouth. She scooped the bean chilli up with her other hand and pushed that into her mouth too, chewing and swallowing. Food fell from her mouth onto the table cloth; her stomach screamed with hunger; her anger seemed to be eating as well, doubling the hunger she felt.
“Liss, for God's sake!”
Her wrist was seized on the way to her mouth. She tried to pull free but she was so much smaller. She made a grab for more food with her other hand. Her father banged his fist onto the table.
Liss bit the hand holding her.
There was a shriek of shock and Liss was released. She took hold of the edges of the trestle table and lifted with all her strength. The pot, plates, cloth, everything tilted. For a moment Liss faltered and thought she might set it all back again, apologise, go and get the apple. But gravity had already seen her plan and agreed.
Everything crashed onto the ground.
Liss was running before anyone could get a hold of her again. She dashed into the house. She stooped and grabbed something heavy, she wasn’t sure what it was, she only felt that she must arm herself. She heaved it upstairs, her mind a pounding confusion of rage and terror at what she had done. There was something else too. Ecstasy.
Liss slammed her door shut and pulled her desk across it. Her mouth was dry and her heart was racing. Outside she could hear her parents yelling. They seemed to be yelling at each other. Her mother was crying. There was silence for a moment and then the sound of pounding feet up the stairs.
In the room, the humming began.
“Open this door at once!”
His shouting seemed far away. Liss picked up the hammer she had collected downstairs. The door handle rattled. It opened a centimetre but the desk had jammed under the handle. It would take a moment for her father to realise and force it.
The humming had become a roaring. It was shot through with what sounded like tiny electrical lightning strikes. Liss felt like the sound was on her skin and inside her.
She lifted the hammer and swung it.
The door flew open just as the hammer struck the wall. Liss’s body expected the sound of metal on brick, but the impact was a wet thud. She drew back and swung again. This time she made it through the plaster. The hammer was stuck in the wall. Liss kept her hands on the handle and tugged. But something was wrong. From the wall thick, liquid flowed. It oozed over her hands. A golden sweetness filled the air. Liss pulled and released the hammer, swinging for another blow. The darkness inside the wall was alive. The humming was all around them now as bees flew from the wound. In the shadows of the cavity Liss could make out the perfect, patterned hexagons of the bees' vast home. She craned her neck. It filled the whole wall. Bees were pouring into the room now. Somewhere behind her there was a shout of pain, then:
“Melissa!”
Liss could feel them running over her head, down her back. They alighted in her hair and explored her ears. She put her fingers to her lips and hesitated. She didn’t want to steal. But the bees hummed and fanned her with their wings. She put the honey into her mouth and tasted the bees' hard labours. All the blooms of the hills transformed, like magic, into riches, into edible amber. It was the colour of the river which flowed through the woods where Liss dipped her feet and gasped at the bone aching cold. But this was warm, warm like her body, like their tiny bodies. It tasted of meadows. Liss felt like she was eating the world. She was drinking in summer and sunlight and something else; something to come which was promised to her, but which was not ready, an entirely new season yet to be experienced.
Her parents had vanished, fled. Liss’s tummy ached and she felt a strange sensation, like a pull and tear, like she was leaking too. Liss reached into the wall again and again, spooning the dark, rich honey into her mouth as the bees covered her, whispering secrets to her. She expected stings which never came. She ate and ate, even the bits of the bees’ waxy walls which came away in her hands. She chewed these thickly.
Liss drank down the honey as for the first time, unnoticed for the moment, a deep, red stain spread across her skirt like a many-petalled flower.
The bees danced.
By Nomi McLeod
Nomi McLeod is a writer and artist. Both her visual and written work often engage with stories from the boundary between the real world and the imaginal. In the past she has worked as a circus artist, a theatre dresser and an artist’s model.
Nomi’s short story ‘Cage’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Bridport Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as The Selkie, York Literary Review, Weird Lit Magazine, Gramarye Journal, The Ecological Citizen and Fairlight Books.
She lives in Devon with her partner, daughter, twin sons and a black cat.
Instagram: @nomivailamcleodart