The Roses Are Growing Toward the Noise

How it begins

Every rose in the street was growing toward number eighteen.

Esme Solano noticed it while trimming the hedge opposite. The white climber, the red standards, even the neglected yellow bush beside the bus stop had bent their new stems toward the same dark windows.

Number eighteen had been empty for six years.

At least, that was what everyone said.

Esme cut a damaged bloom.

A woman's voice came out of the stem.

Don't close the window.

She dropped the shears.

Across the road, Owen Hale stopped loading his car. He had retired from touring after a hand injury and now spent mornings teaching music to people who apologized before playing a note.

"Did you hear that?" Esme asked.

He looked at the severed rose on the pavement.

"What did it say?"

Not what do you mean. Not are you all right.

What did it say.

Esme stepped away from the bush.

The street carried on around them. A delivery van reversed. Somewhere a radio announced roadworks. Number eighteen's upstairs curtain moved, though the window was shut and the house had no power connection anybody admitted paying for.

Owen set his keys on the car roof.

"Don't cut another one yet."

"You know that voice."

He looked toward the house.

Esme remembered the summer before it became empty: a disagreement nobody heard clearly, a moving van, a neighborhood meeting about parking that somehow occupied everyone for the rest of the week.

She had prided herself on staying out of other people's business.

At the bus stop, the yellow rose opened in the cold air.

This time the voice was a man's.

Everyone can hear you.

Owen shut his eyes.

Esme picked up the shears by the handles and put them in her bag, as carefully as though they had become evidence.