Deadheading

Description

The city’s most beautiful flowerbeds are tended by a man who buries people beneath them — alive, with a breathing tube — and waters the blooms above their slowing breath.

Parks groundskeeper Theo keeps the public gardens immaculate, and the public loves him for it. What the public doesn’t know is what feeds the roses. Beneath the prettiest plots in the district lie his guests, given just enough air to last while he kneels above them, pruning, planting, listening.

Investigative reporter Wren Castellano starts with a puff piece about the award-winning gardens and an anonymous tip about turned earth in odd places. The deeper she reports, the more the cheerful groundskeeper seems to be tending a particular empty bed — measured, edged, and waiting for the right size of root.

Lush and suffocating, this is horror grown in soil, equal parts beauty and burial. Walton pairs the smell of cut stems with the worst kind of patience. You’ll never admire a flowerbed again without wondering what’s underneath.

Stop and smell them. Lean down. Listen.