Sweet Romance17 min read
Walk Among the Blossoms: Beware Who’s Not Quite Human
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I moved into the narrow apartment block because the rent was cheap and the landlord lived two floors below me. Small compromises, I told myself. My name is Logan Holmes, and none of what follows would have happened if I had stayed comfortable and uninterested.
1
The neighbor who put up her own mourning portrait moved in across the hall.
"Hi," I said the first time she answered her door in a figure-hugging dress, a toddler dragging at her skirt. "I live next door. I’m Logan."
"Call me Annalise," she said, with a little tilt of the head that made me forget what "neighborly" was supposed to feel like.
"Ann—Annalise Devine?" I tried for her full name after she asked mine.
She laughed like a bell. "Close enough. You can call me Anny."
She had a daughter—small, doll-faced, hair tied up in ribbons. For days I watched their apartment and noticed there were no men's shoes on the rack, only her heels. I assumed she was divorced. I assumed a dozen normal things.
A piano arrived one week later. Two movers wrestled the case up the stairs and couldn't get it around the corner near her door. I rushed out with the plastic-wrapped tools I kept in my hall. "Need a hand?" I asked.
She smiled. "Thanks. I don't get many offers."
After the men left and the piano settled, I peered at her living room. "Your place is… unique."
"Yunnan style," she said, as if the place itself had a nationality. Masks hung on the wall, a small carved cow skull sat on the mantel among amulets. It should have felt eerie, but when she turned in that tight skirt the whole room blurred.
"What's your name?" I had to ask again, because the light was kind to her face.
"Annalise Devine," she said again, and checked the hem of her skirt. "Do I look that good?"
"You do," I said too fast.
Her daughter called, "Mom!" and Anny shimmied away, closing the door with one hand and tugging the child with the other. I saw, through the half-open door of the child's bedroom, a black-and-white portrait hanging where a family photo would be. I froze.
There was Annalise's face in that portrait.
"I thought you said your sister…?" I managed.
She popped her head back out. "Not my sister." She breathed like she was rehearsing something. "My twin. Lily. She passed years ago. Today is her anniversary."
"Ann, that’s—" I started and stopped. "I didn't mean to be rude."
She laughed it off and left. But my heart hammered like it knew better.
2
Three days later Anny invited me to be the "dad" at the amusement park for her daughter.
"Could you pretend to be my husband?" she asked, like it was the smallest thing in the world.
"For a day? Sure." I didn't tell her why I wanted to be there—because she smelled like pomegranate and cinnamon and looked like someone I'd been warning myself not to look at.
We came back heavy with cotton candy and game prizes. That night she set out a small feast and then left to put the girl to bed. When she came back, she had carried the portrait down to the living room and set it facing the little altar. "It's her anniversary," she said softly. "I burn offerings."
She burned tin-foil money in a small bowl, the smoke stung my nostrils. She mumbled something, folded the picture away, then announced, "I'm going to shower."
Before I could even plan any bravado she was in the bathroom, and I rushed forward because there was a small, stupid part of me that wanted to close the distance between us.
She didn't resist when I hugged her.
"I should not have," I blurted. "I'm sorry."
She put her hand on my chest. "It's okay. You did a good job fixing my bed today."
She smiled and it undid the caution inside me.
A sudden thumping came from the hallway. A man's voice, thick and low, like a man who had been spent on rage a dozen times before.
"Where are you hiding him?" the voice boomed. "If you meet any man—"
The wood door cracked. Anny's face went white. "Hide," she hissed.
I hid in a closet like an idiot, the old boards creaking under me. A heavy ax was tossed into the hallway with a wet clang. I could see, through the slats, the handle slick with something dark. The man's voice threatened to split the walls.
"Is it him? Is he the one?" he roared.
"I don't know!" Anny shot back. "Who—What are you talking about?"
"He looked at you, Annalise. He looked at my woman—take him out."
I realized at that instant that her life was threaded with a violence I hadn't seen. The man—the husband's shadow—went white hot with fury and began beating the apartment door like he meant to chop it off its frame.
The neighbors called the police. Amid screams and shouts, Anny barreled past, holding a few kitchen knives like a shield. The man stood there with the ax, the blade still wet. "I'll kill anyone who touches her," he hissed, then turned away and left, slamming the stairwell door behind him.
Later Anny told me to leave. "He'll come back," she whispered. "He kills. I can't—"
"Run with me," I said. "We'll go now."
She hesitated, looked at me. "I have money. Enough. I can take you anywhere."
So we left. She showed me a bank account like a confession. She drove a car that purred like a thing that belonged to someone powerful. I felt ridiculous and alive. We drove for hours, and when we finally stopped at a lonely county motel I thought, absurdly, that my life had improved.
Then my phone buzzed.
A text from the man I'd heard at the door: "You have twenty-four hours."
It said in bold, bone-deep words: "She is not human. The photo you saw—it's the clue. If you don't run, you will die."
He sent a picture next: a rain-streaked clipping. "Ten years ago — campus beauty fell. A tragedy. The photo is her."
I could feel the room tilt. "What did you tell me?" I demanded.
He answered: "Don't sleep with her. Don't trust that look. If you have already—" another message: "If there are scales on you, you are done."
On my thigh, a new rash itched like a secret being written into my skin. It spread—gray-brown, flaking like old snake-skin. My throat closed up.
"You're kidding," I said. "You're not serious—"
"Do not sleep near her. Go to the old campus and find what she used. Only that may save you."
The man said his name in a word that cut short: "Carmine Martin." He told me he knew the ancient rituals and had been watching for the thing that haunted Anny. He sounded insane, but when I rode the train to the sealed old campus and crawled into the mothballed 407 dorm, the smell of old perfume and mold hit me and I knew I had walked into the exact kind of story people whisper about at midnight.
I found an old makeup bag with a photo inside—ten years older but unmistakable: Annalise, bright and open; next to her a boy whose face stopped my breath. He looked like me, only younger.
I called Carmine. He told me to find and smear an old lipstick on my lips, to call the dead by their names. "Kiss her," he said. "Make her believe. You fool—use the wedding ritual she remembers."
The dorm had that old-world cold. The spirit did not wait. Annalise—no, Lily—appeared, and I saw her as she had been: flesh or no flesh, voice like wind inside a bottle.
"You promised me," she screamed, voice antique and ragged, "where are you?"
"I—" I tried, but the thing wouldn't let me run. It lunged, and in those seconds a stranger with a wet, blood-smeared ax burst in, and everything went raw and surreal. Carmine was there to strike, only his blow seemed to rebound.
The whole place turned into a theater of theft—of fate. Carmine crashed and rolled and then—then he shouted for me to do something reckless. He shoved a dusty black suit at me with the word "GROOM" chalked on the sleeve. I read and did not understand.
They forced me up as if in a dream. I kissed the thing on the mouth because Carmine pushed me into it. The ghost softened. She eased into my arms. She whispered my name—"Hui—"—and then the ghastliness of it all resolved: Annalise was a twin with an old, old obsession; she wanted one face to keep forever.
Afterward everything blurred. Carmine—who, to my infinite surprise, was not a murderer at all but a broken man who had been guarding an ancient method—became the one who calmed the spirit. His small shrine in the old temple, his rituals, his maniacal barking at the wind had purpose. Annalise dissolved into mist and the dorm fell quiet. Carmine explained the folk belief of "pò-jing"—spirits that cling to a body until a face is given.
I returned to a quiet rental, but I could not forget the portrait and the way Annalise's eyes went empty and then pleading like a child. A month later I saw someone open Anny's door—tall and sure. A woman I did not know stepped out, pale as bone.
"Hello," she said. "My name is Lily."
2
I work in an office that thinks the worst of everything is spreadsheets. Diana Moreno sat next to me.
"Look," Diana said one morning, "the ceiling is dripping again."
"There is nothing above us," I said at first, because living in architecture makes me trust architecture. "They used poured concrete when they built the wing. No pipes are routed there."
"It smelled like old meat," she whispered. "It was sticky. I felt it on my arm."
She was neat to the point of neurotic—everything wiped, everything placed. Most people avoided her brand of cleaning mania. She had friends, but her edges were brittle.
Then one day she came back to the office reeking of something like rot. "I need a ride home," she said.
"I can—" I started.
But then she told me about texts she'd received, about black messages that said "SAVE ME." She showed me a string of broken digital cries: "Help me" clipped into suspicious, bridal-colored characters. They came from empty numbers.
"Someone's playing a joke," I said. But when I stepped under the ceiling by our desks and saw new dark lines that crawled like veins across the plaster, my throat closed.
I lifted my phone and started filming.
The sound started: nails, like someone scooped at the cement from the inside.
"We're leaving," I told Diana.
We did not leave at once. Instead we tried to be brave. But the water—if it was water—fell in globs that smelled of iron. Someone had smeared talc and dried animal blood across an office wall, pinned photographs to a shelf like shrine plaques.
The rumor spread that morning: a scandal, allegedly. The company was in a fragile place and had removed a camera feed and then discovered a body—then another. Our colleague, Kennedi Battle, had been whispering about the boss's affairs; she was an accountant who folded everyone's secrets like pieces of paper. She was kind in public. She had a homey laugh. But the cameras picked up a different story.
That afternoon the office fell silent when Information Security replayed footage. The clip showed a party in the boss's office: late-night trysts, a director and a young woman who looked like a siren, all swagger and lipstick. Then the footage cut.
Someone on the maintenance crew found two small paper effigies stuffed into a storage closet beneath the executive offices—little human shapes with our faces pasted on. Later, during a desperate midnight wrenching of a lock, what we found under a tarpaulin was worse than any of us could have guessed: two bodies, bound together, a grotesque collage of flesh that was supposed to honor a kind of revenge.
"Who would do this?" I asked, and the name that fell flat into the fluorescent lights was Kennedi Battle—quiet Kennedi, the office mother, the one who always brought tamales and knew everyone's birthdays.
We found evidence in turns and corners: photographs pierced with red lipstick; ledger entries rewritten to fund trips to exotic masters; ritual paraphernalia in a storage locker with a temple stamp. The day the police came, the building crowded around the lobby like a suburb watching a slow-moving comet. People took pictures with their phones. Someone had already started a thread on social media.
"She did it," someone hissed. "All that talisman business—she had a grudge."
Kennedi was arrested in the office, but not quietly. The arrest itself became the punishment everyone craved, the public unspooling of a grim carnival.
It happened at noon.
"Kennedi! Kennedi!" someone called out, voice thin with accusation. "You can't just—"
"You're making a scene," she said, and for a heartbeat she seemed smaller than her foul deeds.
One police sergeant read the charges while cameras streamed to the company's internal feed. She stood with her hands cuffed, hair disheveled, mascara running like black ink down her cheeks.
"Kennedi Battle, you are charged with multiple counts of murder and conspiracy," the sergeant said. "You have the right to remain silent."
"You're wrong," Kennedi began. "You don't understand. They deserved—"
"Shut up," someone shouted. "Shut up and listen."
The employees gathered in a heavy ring around her. Phones lifted like pewtered lances. A woman started to clap—slowly, then in an ugly ripple. "Don't you dare touch me," Kennedi spat, but her words skimmed the air like the flapping of a trapped bird.
"How?" the office asked aloud, as if assembling the question might heal them. "How did you make these things—these altar pieces? How did you make them into weapons?"
She looked at the rows of faces and realized the whole building had become a mirror of disdain. People pointed and whispered. An older man began to weep—he had once trusted Kennedi with a loan. A junior analyst who had been the first to discover the notes in the storage closet pressed his phone as close to her face as he could and recorded her, the feed live to the world.
The sergeant read aloud the evidence: the ledger, the smuggled bones found, the GPS pings mapping trips to the old industrial area where the ritual site had been sited. The words felt like a ritual themselves. Kennedi's voice started to crack.
"I didn't mean to—" she said. "They laughed at me. They took what was mine. He—"
"He who?" a colleague demanded.
"My husband," she said, and the sound of the word was an animal only she recognized. "He left me for her. He left me with nothing."
"Kennedi," the sergeant said, "do you want a lawyer?"
"Get out!" Kennedi threw herself at the ringing phone a woman had held up to film her. Her face contorted, pity and rage like twin snakes coiled at her throat. She started to confess, but the confession turned into a longer unraveling: names, nights, pieces of ritual practice her grandmother had taught her, the making of paper people and the feeding of human energy into them.
"You used your coworkers," said the chief accountant, who had been blank-faced until now. "You stuck their faces on paper and made them—"
"They were already dead," Kennedi's voice claimed. "They were already dead to me. I made them live—so that they would see what it meant."
Around us the crowd oscillated—some stepped forward, some turned away. A woman in HR screamed and vomited, the smell of bile meeting the odor of old files. Someone's child—left on a parent’s lap—started to cry.
And then the worst of the punishment began, as if the city itself demanded a show of moral correction. It wasn't legal, but it was what the gathered wanted: public humiliation made into spectacle.
A veteran reporter thrust a microphone in front of her. "Did you feel nothing when you—" he asked.
Kennedi's lips trembled. "I felt everything," she said. Her voice had become a small, frayed rope.
"Those families—you ripped them into pieces in the name of what, justice?"
"She smiled," Kennedi said, suddenly bright and furious. "She smiled while he did what he did. They drank. They humiliated me. I took what they took."
"Madness," someone said. The word passed like a verdict.
The crowd started to chant. "Justice! Justice!" Years of small jealousies, the company's petty rivalries—all fed into the chant. Kennedi, shackled and shrinking, tried to make a sound. Tears smudged her face. Cameras recorded every movement. In the days that followed, the tape would be cut and played on the news—rows of people pressing in, the background decor of corporate logos, the flush of anger on ordinary faces.
Later, when the legal system did its slow work, that moment in the lobby remained vivid in everyone's memory. But that wasn't legal punishment; that was the thing people had wanted: an exposure that forced Kennedi to become visible, to be narrow and real and undeniably guilty before the city that had once been indifferent.
3
There was a rental I moved into for a month because a friend was traveling. His name was Cade De Santis. Cade texted me before I took the room: "My girl is home. Be chill," he wrote. He never wrote again.
When I arrived, the apartment door opened on a woman who was too striking to be real. She called herself Emmalynn Kato. "You're Cade's friend? Come in," she said, in a voice that was warm enough to make me melt.
She'd cooked and made the place shine. After supper she asked me to stay the night in "the guest room" because her brother—or the friend—was on a trip. She was so easy to be around I forgot to be suspicious. There were whispers downstairs: old women saying the place had a bad name. A wedding dress hung in a closet—blood-red, embroidered like a phoenix, with a crown ready to put up on a head. I didn't press into detail.
That night I woke in the dark to the dress moving as if someone wore it. There was a head above it—faux and painted, a bridal face with a smile that had dried. The thing lifted scissors, pressed them to its throat and "cut" its own throat in a scene so vivid I flew from the bed.
It was a dream, I told myself.
I left the apartment for a cheap motel and tried to drink the fear down. Emmalynn's messages tumbled in: "Please don't leave me," and "I won't let him take you."
I went back only when my friend Cade's friend from college sent me a photo: Cade's tombstone. Two months ago. Car crash. I held the stone picture like an accusation. How had I been so blind? Who was I staying with?
I was driven by a mix of shame and a strange devotion. When I confronted her, she told me that she had been alone for years, that her two friends had died in an accident and that their ghosts were hungry for company. I still don't know what was true. I stayed. We ran into a violent night, an Uber turning into a coffin, a speeding car we could not beat.
Emmalynn saved me once, and then she died in a way that looked like sacrament—she burned with green fire to drive the demons back while I crawled away. The ambulance took me, and when I woke at the hospital she had left a small notebook with me—pages about love, about an old promise, about grief.
She had loved the idea of being loved. She asked nothing but all.
4
Across from me on the fourth floor there was a woman who kept a cat named Seven. Joelle De Santis—Cade's sister, as it turned out, though not everyone in that building liked her. I watched her from my window like a fool. She would spin in a new dress sometimes, and sometimes she'd sit and plait Seven's fur and the cat would purr like an engine.
One rainy night she stumbled on the road and I ran out with an umbrella.
"Are you all right?" I asked when I saw the blood.
"Just tired," she said. "I'm fine."
Weeks passed and she grew close to a man named King—no, I mean his real name was Yousef Collier—who came and went with silk-suited assurance. They seemed right, like two halves. Then there was the rumor. A friend online said the man had been in a scandal—men who would take a girl and take her apart.
I tried to warn Joelle. "He is trouble," I said.
"You're jealous," she answered.
He died. Stabbed a dozen times, the city paper said, and in the grainy photo at the coffee shop he looked like a smear. The tabloids said his girl had a strange face in a drunken snap. Everyone wanted a story. People used stories like matches.
Joelle and I ate a quiet dinner and she gave me a passport to calm the fear. We slept like two grown children—too close for anyone to judge. She left for a bit and I thought, finally, I had a moment. But the moment turned into one of the nightmares I've learned to expect in this neighborhood—pictures, cameras, a small group of girls who wanted revenge.
They came for me one night—two shadows in the dark. They threw curses like stones and tried to bind me with rituals. I fought. A small cat named Seven fought beside me. The fight turned into a myth—and out of it a little girl appeared. She seemed to be a child and also someone older than the world, and she said, "I am the old one. I will not let the past control mine new blood."
The elders fled. Joelle left a scar on my wild world where a sacrifice had been made. She stayed beside me. Sometimes it seems love walks between bite marks and I think, against every sensible warning, that I would follow her anywhere.
5
The last house in this feverish collection was Camilla Ogawa's—a single mother who hired me to tutor her daughter. Camilla was dangerous in the softest way: she moved like water, and she had a limp that made her steps sound like a misplayed note. She laughed in a voice that wanted to be loved.
"You are a good man," she told me once, after I'd solved a math problem for her daughter.
"Just doing my job," I said.
One storm-night I stayed because the weather wouldn't cease. She invited me to the guest room, prettier than it had any right to be, and sat beside me when I showed her the half-campus card I had found under Anny's bed months ago. She laughed and called me "buddy" and pressed her palm to my face.
We had a few nights like that—too many to be reasonable. The last night she asked me to stay. I did.
After class she promised me "just sleep." Then she seduced me with fedora and wine, with a gentle press of cheek to cheek. When I woke I found a tiny scrap of a student ID worrying my hand like a bone chip. The school's missing-student alert was back on my phone. I left.
That night the news on the radio said that a man had been murdered in an alley not far from my building. I went out into the rain with the thin conviction that something in the city wanted me to pay attention. I broke the rule that always gets people in trouble—"Do not go into the dark." I knocked on Camilla's door.
She opened, but the smell from inside was sour and wrong. She stood there and asked me if I wanted to teach for a while more. Her eyes lingered like a clinched promise.
I walked out of there and never stopped walking until I found a priest who would say a small prayer. When I looked back at my block the lights in Camilla's apartment burned like constellations. She later called to say goodbye. Her voice was honey and pity. I understood two things then: that desire can be a curse, and that I had been very near to being someone else's food.
Punishment and Consequences
I should tell you about punishment, the hard and draining way the world forces its villains to answer. People like Kennedi and those who used other humans as pawns cannot be allowed to hide.
The office case exploded into public. Kennedi's actions had left a trail—funds, bones, witnesses. The police did the job of evidence, but the real punishment was social: the meetings in which small betrayals were read out loud, the colleagues who recovered artifacts from under desks, the five-hour session in the conference room where HR and police officials displayed the items one by one: paper effigies pierced with pins; a ledger bearing purchases for candles and foreign rituals; photos edited with the faces of the living.
We stood there, watching the concrete artifacts of a person's descent—watching the human explain how each little act had made the rest possible. Kennedi held her face with her palms like a child caught in the rain. She tried to rationalize with ritual phrases, with the idea of "restorative justice" and "reclamation." But the world outside is not an ancient forest; it is a web of account numbers and lawyers and grudges. The public reckoning was a procession: victims read victim impact statements, lawyers cross-examined, and the gathered public recorded it all on their devices.
"Why? Why did you make them into those things?" one of the widowers asked. The question was ordinary, but the hurt behind it made the room thunder. Someone had taken what was left of a life and made a grotesque appliance of it. The stench seemed to rise with every explanation.
Kennedi's face crumpled. She had planned rituals in abandoned warehouses, drawn maps to sites where the earth remembered violence. She sang songs to the bodies and smeared pigment until it looked like a shrine. "They laughed at me," she whispered. "They thought I was nothing. They thought I could not take back my life."
"You took their lives," said a mother, and the words were an ax. She pushed forward, clinging to the microphone like a talisman, "You took my child's life and made it into a toy."
The sizzle of anger spread. People who had once complained about petty slights now pressed into the story of a woman who had turned hatred into a system. Kennedi's last, public unraveling was not just legal. It was the slow undoing where truth meets spectacle. She could not find shelter in the little pastoral lie of "I was wrong." Instead, her entire work—the ledger, the paper dolls, the lists of names—was laid upon a table and lifted for us all to see.
When she was taken away, she did not scream. People hissed and some applauded. Cameras clicked. A child held a sign that read "Justice." People who had spent years being careful at work now gossiped openly about what had been hidden from them. The moral theater of it—its fascinative cruelty—left the office changed. The air smelled like coffee and the metallic residue of fury.
There were trials. Evidence was read. Experts explained occult practices on camera while lawyers spoke the languages of fines and minimum sentences. Kennedi's voice, at last, was small and hoarse. She asked for forgiveness that didn’t come easy. The punishment was both physical and social: she endured imprisonment, yes, but also the daily ritual of being recognized for what she had done, by the very people she used.
Afterward we all told ourselves we learned something. But the truth is, we simply had a week weaved into memory where our ordinary lives intersected with the mythic—the moment when a white-collar office became a stage for a crime that looked two centuries old.
Epilogue
Months after the trials, the block began to settle into a new pattern of wary civility. I still glance at Annalise's old door sometimes. I still feel the sting when a neighbor moves in with too-bright curtains. Emmalynn's notebook sits on my shelf like a broken promise. Joelle's cat appears at my window sometimes, as if nothing else matters but the small purr. The thing that happened to Kennedi and the others was the ugliest thing I've ever touched.
"Do you ever wish you had left earlier?" a friend asked once.
"Sometimes," I said. "But we'd be two different people had we each taken the other habit of running."
I keep the little portrait I stole once—the black-and-white that started it all—and I look at it like a talisman of warning.
If you see someone in the flowers who smiles too easy, look closer. Not everything wearing the face of a person is a person. Not every neighbor wants treats or tea—some want a heart and some want a face to be theirs forever.
I close with this: when a portrait hangs where a child should be teaching her about the world, when a paper figure bears your mugshot folded like a trap, and when a dress waits in a closet like a promise, remember the sound of a piano, the smell of tin-foil burning, and the cat that refused to look away.
If you ever find a black-and-white portrait in someone else's house—look twice. Sometimes the dead are the ones who are most alive to their hunger.
The End
— Thank you for reading —