Her Sunflower Eyes

The first thing Maggie Shanning ever dreamed about was a field.

Not the grey, rain-soaked field behind their house on Elmore Street but a place she had no name for, a place that smelled of something sweeter than anything she had encountered in her five years of living. The grass was soft, impossibly green, catching the light the way water catches it, holding it and letting it go in equal measure. Flowers crowded every inch of the ground: daisies with their white petals spread wide open, deep red roses that had not yet lost a single petal, lotus blooms resting in shallow pools she had not noticed until she was standing in the middle of them, tulips in colours she could not name, clusters of wildflowers so small they were barely there at all.

She was not afraid. That was the first thing worth noting about Margaret Anne Shanning , even at five, even inside a dream she did not know was a dream, she was not afraid.

She walked through the field in bare feet, the ground warm beneath her toes. And then she saw it.

A sunflower.

It stood in the very centre of the field, tall and solitary, its face turned toward a sun she could not find in the sky. It was glowing --not the way flowers glow when the light falls right, but from within, golden and steady, like something with a heartbeat. She stopped. She stared. And then, the way children do, she decided she wanted it.

She walked toward it. The flowers around her seemed to part as she moved, as though the field had been waiting for exactly this — her, and her small reaching hands, and the sunflower that was almost certainly waiting to be taken. She stretched out her arm. The warmth of it touched her fingers first, a heat that was not painful but absolute, like being found.

She was nearly there. Nearly —

Maggie woke up screaming.

The sound tore through the house on Elmore Street with the authority of something much older than a five-year-old child. It bounced off the narrow walls of the upstairs hallway, rattled the framed photographs on the landing, and reached Mason Shanning in the kitchen below before he had time to set down his coffee. He was up the stairs in twelve seconds. He counted, because he always counted, because counting was the only thing to do when the world moved faster than thinking.

He found her sitting up in bed, both hands pressed to the sides of her head, her dark hair tangled across her face. She was not crying the way children cry when they are frightened of something ordinary — a shadow on the wall, a sound outside the window. She was crying as though the pain were a thing with edges.

“Daddy,” she said, when she saw him. Just that. Daddy.

Mason Shanning had known this moment was coming. He had known it the way a man knows a storm is coming before the clouds have gathered — by the quality of the air, the particular stillness of things, the instinct that lives in the blood and not in the mind. He crossed the room in two strides and sat on the edge of her bed and gathered her into his arms, and over the top of her head his face held an expression that had nothing to do with surprise.

“It hurts,” Maggie said, into his chest. “It hurts here.” She pressed both palms flat against her temples.

“I know,” he said. “I know, sweetheart.”

He did know. That was the terrible and specific weight of the moment.

Anne Shanning found them there when she came in from Charlie’s room, where her son had been restless with the particular restlessness of a twelve-year-old boy whose body had spent the day fighting itself. Charlie had haemophilia — a word Anne had learned to say without flinching, though she remembered a time when she could not. She was a woman who had become very good at managing two separate kinds of fear simultaneously, the kind that showed and the kind that did not.

She stood in the doorway and looked at Mason, and something passed between them — the silent, compressed language of people who have shared a bed and a life and the raising of children in the dark.

“Is she —” Anne began.

“She needs to see my mother,” Mason said. He said it quietly, carefully, the way he would have said something he had rehearsed. “Tonight, Anne. She needs to see Jane tonight.”

Anne looked at her daughter ,at Maggie, who was five years old and small for it, who had Mason’s dark eyes and Anne’s stubborn jaw, and who had, until this night, been the easier of Anne’s worries. Her heart did something involuntary and unpleasant.

“Mason.” Her voice was careful too, now. “You said it wouldn’t start until she was twenty. You said —”

“I know what I said.”

“You said Jane was twenty. You said your grandmother Jannette was twenty. You said the women in your family —”

“Anne.” He looked at her then, fully. “She was just now in that field. I know the field. I’ve heard about it my whole life. It starts with the field.”

Anne stood very still in the doorway. She was, at her core, a practical woman. She had married a man whose mother made herbal teas from dried flowers she kept in labelled jars, who occasionally said things she could not explain, and who had, on the evening before their wedding, sat her down at his kitchen table and told her — gently, carefully, watching her face — that the women on his side carried something. A gift, he called it, though she could see he chose the word with hesitation. A sight. Visions. It had skipped him, he said. It skipped the men. But any daughter they had —

She had said she understood. She had believed she understood. She had not, she now realised, understood at all.

She crossed the room and sat on the other side of Maggie’s bed. She smoothed the dark hair back from her daughter’s damp forehead. Maggie looked up at her with Mason’s eyes, wide and still hurting, and said, “Mumma. It hurts.”

“I know, my love.” Anne’s voice did not shake. She was proud of that, later. “I know.”

“Drink this,” Mason said softly, holding out a small glass of water he had brought up without Anne noticing. “We’re going to see Grandma Jane in the morning, and she’s going to help you. She knows exactly what to do. But for now — just drink this and lie back down.”

Maggie drank. She lay back. Anne tucked the blanket up to her chin and sat with her hand resting over her daughter’s heart.

When Maggie had gone quiet, Mason stood and moved to the doorway. Anne followed. They stood in the narrow hallway, the house dark and breathing around them, and Anne kept her voice very low.

“What does this mean? That it started this early — what does that mean for her?”

Mason looked at his hands. He was a man who chose his words as carefully as a man choosing where to step across uncertain ground.

“It means she’s stronger than any of them were,” he said. “Jane, Jannette — all of them. It means the gift in her is louder, somehow. Earlier.” He paused. “It means we need to be careful.”

“And the promise?” Anne said. “Are we still asking her to make the promise?”

“Yes.” His voice was quiet and certain. “No one can know. Not her teachers, not the other children, not Charlie. Not yet. We tell her it’s a secret. Our secret. The family’s secret. She has to understand that.”

Anne nodded. She thought of Charlie, asleep down the hall with his careful, cautious blood, and she thought of Maggie, five years old and dreaming of fields that glowed. Two children to take care of. She had never once thought of that as a burden — she was their mother, and that was the shape of her.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll talk to her tomorrow. After Jane.”

In the morning, Jane Shanning made tea from a jar with a hand-written label. The tea tasted like grass and honey and something faintly bitter at the end, and the headache that had sat behind Maggie’s eyes since she woke loosened its grip almost immediately. Jane was seventy-one years old, with hands that were always warm and eyes that looked at you slightly sideways, as though they were also looking at something just behind you.

“Good girl,” Jane said, watching her. “Drink it all.”

“What is it?” Maggie asked.

“Things that help. I’ll teach you which ones. It won’t hurt like this every time — not once you know how to carry it properly. Like carrying a full glass of water. You spill it because you don’t know yet how to walk with it. I’ll teach you to walk.”

Maggie considered this. She was five, but she was also, in certain respects, very old. “I saw a sunflower,” she said. “A glowing one. I almost touched it.”

Jane was quiet for a moment. She looked at Mason, across the kitchen. Something moved between them, fast and wordless.

“I know,” Jane said, and turned back to Maggie. “We’ll talk about the sunflower. In time. But first —” she folded her warm hands over Maggie’s small ones — “I need you to listen to me. What you see, what you dream, what you feel before things happen — that is yours, Maggie. It belongs to you, and to this family, and to no one else. Do you understand?”

Maggie looked at her grandmother. She nodded.

“It has to be our secret. Yours and mine and your mum’s and dad’s. Not at school. Not to your friends.” Jane paused. “Not to Charlie.”

“Not to Charlie?” Maggie’s voice was small.

“Not yet.”

Maggie thought about her brother — about Charlie, who was twelve and who let her sit beside him while he read, who never told her to go away, who called her Mags and not Margaret. She thought about secrets, and what they cost.

Then she nodded again. “Okay,” she said. “I promise.”

She was asleep by eight o’clock that night, in the clean particular way of a child who has spent a day being taken care of. Anne sat beside the bed until Maggie’s breathing had gone long and slow, then pressed a kiss to her temple and left the door open a crack behind her.

At eleven, the house was fully dark.

At eleven-fifteen, Maggie Shanning went back to sleep.

And the field came again.

But this time the flowers were wrong. The daisies had closed their faces. The roses had gone the colour of rust. The lotus blooms had sunk beneath shallow pools that had turned dark and still as mirrors. The tulips stood bare-stemmed, their petals gone.

The sunflower was still there, in the centre of it all.

But it was not glowing.

It was watching.

And behind it — barely visible, the way a face is barely visible through frosted glass — there was a figure. A silhouette. Standing absolutely still in the ruined field, with the dead sunflower between them like a door that had not yet been opened.

Maggie took one step forward.

She tries to reach it , but the dream ended. But when she woke up.

She did not scream this time.

She was not sure that was better.