In the heart of a quaint, shadowy hamlet known as Sanguine Notch, where every whisper and rumor felt as though it belonged to a bygone era, there resided an old woman named Mabel. Her home was the last at the end of Twilight Lane, a street so ancient that it seemed almost to be a part of the fog itself. But Mabel’s yard—oh, her yard—was something entirely different from the other neglected patches of the town.
You see, Mabel wasn’t known for a garden filled with ordinary flora. Instead, she cultivated something far more peculiar: lilies of a most unsettling nature. These lilies were not the gaudy, commercialized kind one might expect. No, they were of a unique, eerie charm. Their petals bore the delicate pallor of human skin, soft as the fragile fabric of forgotten dreams. By day, they moved with a languid grace in the wind, as though whispering secrets to one another. By night, well, they did something different…
Mabel’s lilies were the talk of Sanguine Notch, a tight-knit Italian community nestled in the foothills. No one knew where these curious blooms came from, though every new resident had their own theory. Some said Mabel had discovered a forgotten magic, others suggested a dark pact. But Mabel, with her enigmatic silence, was not one to indulge in explanations. She had a ritual, a peculiar method for growing these disturbing beauties.
Every week, Mabel made her way to the local hospital—Sanguine Notch Medical Center, a relic from a bygone era, where the walls were as tired as its staff. The hospital’s basement, filled with discarded medical supplies and biohazardous waste, seemed an odd place for an old woman to frequent, but Mabel was known for her inscrutable habits. The staff paid her little mind, too preoccupied with their own lives to notice her peculiar collection: discarded foreskins of the Notch’s recently circumcised newborn baby boys.
Mabel would gather these fresh foreskins in her basket, carefully transporting them back to her garden. There, in the rich, dark soil, she buried them with a tenderness that seemed almost reverential. From these macabre plantings sprang the skin lilies, their beauty both enchanting and unnerving.
The garden flourished with each new male child born in Sanguine Notch. It was a curious phenomenon—every male birth in the community seemed to be met with an explosion of these eerie flowers. To the Notchonians it was as if by some supernatural trade each child’s arrival was somehow linked to the garden’s proliferation. Little did they know…
The lilies grew with a zeal that matched the town’s collective excitement over each new arrival. The petals unfurled with a strange, otherworldly elegance, capturing the fascination of visitors who came from near and far, eager to witness the spectacle. Despite the commotion and the wonders of Mabel’s garden, the town remained blissfully ignorant of its true origins.
One crisp autumn evening, as frost began to lace the town in a delicate shimmer, a skeptical young reporter named Charlie arrived in Sanguine Notch. Charlie, whose obsession with debunking the inexplicable had led him to many strange places, was determined to uncover the secret behind Mabel’s remarkable lilies. He shadowed the old woman discreetly, though her movements were as fluid and elusive as a wisp of fog.
One fateful night, Charlie crept into Mabel’s garden, his flashlight casting eerie shadows on the rows of skin lilies. The garden seemed to pulse with a quiet, living rhythm, and the petals glowed faintly under the pale moonlight. Charlie approached a particularly large lily, its petals stretched wide as if in a grotesque display.
As he reached out to touch it, a strange sensation overwhelmed him—a warmth that felt disturbingly alive. Suddenly, its anthers began twisting around its pistil somehow forming into what appeared to be — No! How could it be? — a human face! Its eyes opened wide as it cried out in anger, awakening all the other lilies that followed suit. Angry cries quickly filled the air, an anguished chorus of eerily childlike cries, that is, rising from the very soil. The garden, it seemed, was alive, awakened, disturbed — hungry, perhaps — with a collective consciousness.
Charlie stumbled backward, his heart racing as the garden seemed to shift and twist around him, turning into an ever-tightening labyrinth of living skin. He caught a glimpse of Mabel standing at the garden’s edge, her face illuminated by the cold light of the moon. She smiled—a smile that carried an infinite depth of understanding.
As Charlie fled the garden, he looked back to see Mabel tending to her lilies with the care of a devoted keeper. The flowers swayed as if reaching out toward him, their cries growing louder, more insistent, not quieter, as he quickly made distance.
Days later, Charlie was nowhere to be found. The town buzzed with rumors of his mysterious disappearance, while the lilies continued their extraordinary bloom. The legend of Mabel’s garden grew, and with each new male child born in Sanguine Notch, the garden flourished more vividly, as if the lilies themselves were feeding on the life and joy of the community. Or, perhaps it was something else.
Whatever the case, Sanguine Notch became known for its remarkable Skin Garden, an enchanting, unsettling phenomenon that captivated visitors and left them in awe. And as for Mabel? She remained as she always had been—a silent custodian of secrets, her garden a living testament to the mysterious symbiosis between the town’s births and the eerie beauty of her lilies.
And so, as the years rolled on and the garden continued to thrive, the lilies continued to captivate the eyes by day and cry their cries by night, all along awaiting the next curious soul drawn into the labyrinth of The Skin Garden of Sanguine Notch.
—PP
Contributor
Not Phil Italiano.
