Blue Roses

"BLUE ROSES" is a contemporary Gothic tale of guilt and transformation set against the ancient backdrop of Puglia, Italy. This atmospheric story weaves together elements of psychological horror and magical realism, exploring themes of atonement, family loyalty, and the price of immortality.

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The Real Estate Commission circled like vultures. I'd drained escrow deposits of over three million dollars—money meant for new homes, for retirements, for my friends' futures, and worst of all, my sister's life savings. The investigators were asking questions about Ponzi schemes I couldn't answer.

"I've hidden it from you and your sister," my mother said from her hospice deathbed, her withered hands holding mine, the smell of talcum powder and antiseptic. "There is a villa in Italy, Matteo, but it's a curse." My mother was from the Italian old school, full of myths and superstitions. For me, the inheritance of the Villa Rossi in Italy was not a curse, but a surprise, and a godsend. I could sell it, replace the escrow, pay off my debts, and no one would be the wiser.

After my mother's funeral, I flew to Bari from New York and jumped on the train to Polignano a Mare, an Italian town on the cliffs of the Adriatic. The Italian countryside streaked by in the train window. Stone walls lined the roadways, white stucco houses in the glaring sun, and always, always, the olive trees.

With my roller bag rattling on cobblestones, I searched the narrow streets to find the address. Ahead of me, a sign for Bar Turismo loomed. After walking by, I returned. "Due grappa," I said, holding up two fingers to the bartender. At a corner table, three old men played cards, the air thick with espresso and stale cigarettes. One of them turned toward me; I felt an uncomfortable recognition.

"Un Rossi," he told his companions. "Il giardino aspetta."

The garden waits. My Italian was rusty, but I understood.

"Rossi, si. Mathew Rossi," I said.

In the man's brown and weathered face, a scar cut from the corner of his mouth to below his ear. A trickle of blood ran down his chin. I glanced away.

The old man said something to the other three. They all laughed.

How did they know me? Why were they laughing?

At last, I found the address, 53 Villa Tritone, and pushed on a wrought-iron gate. The gate squealed as it opened. Anyone could enter, but it was obvious no one did. Once through a vaulted limestone entry, the smell of the sea engulfed me. My heart jumped. My mother had never mentioned how beautiful it was. Before me unfolded a Gothic enclave of clustered buildings hidden by walls, steeped in the smell of the sea, the grounds containing gardens and walkways winding through. Magnificent, the blue Adriatic framed from behind, the entire complex ending at marble terraces overlooking the sea. I leaned over the stone wall. Waves crashed far below against the cliffs. How many centuries had it taken to carve caves beneath me?

The first day I explored the estate. I soon realized I was staying in a caretaker's suite, sheets covering the furniture. There were no furnishings in any of the other buildings, only sunlight slanting through dust raised by my city shoes on discarded plaster. A bat swooped from a vaulted ceiling and veered so close I felt the brush of its wing. In the overgrown gardens, roses—sprawling and tangled—twisted around weathered marble statues, Roman legionnaires. Beneath all of it, was the constant, distant sound of the Adriatic, a slow pulse.

Five million, ten? My real estate calculator whirled in my head like the spinning chimes of a slot machine. What had my mother been hiding? I'd known men who'd done lesser crimes than mine, some greater, but they'd never understood or cared about damage. My eyes teared up, thinking of my mother, and this golden secret she'd kept all these years. This was my second chance. Didn't my caring make a difference? I vowed to make it so.

Day after day, I worked from dawn to well into night, pruning and clearing, my muscles aching. Sweat soaked through my shirt and streaked the dust on my arms. The ache in my back became steady, almost comforting. The labor felt pure and clean after too long dealing with paperwork, after too long with my sleights of hand.

I discovered a boy on the grounds.

He was at first a movement, a shadow at the edge of my eye. Small, barefoot, he stood in an archway watching me. If he was homeless, his clothes were wrong—too old, like a peasant in earth colored homespun from another time. When I turned, he was gone. Days later, he was closer, his face solemn and lost in a sadness. Before I could speak, he always vanished again. I wondered if my solitude was playing tricks on my mind. Thinking him homeless, each night I set out a basket of food, bread I'd picked up in town, bucatini pasta. The food disappeared, but the basket remained.

In the days following, I heard the garden's thoughts. What gardener doesn't? I smiled to myself. But these were not words and not language, but something older, older than the Romans who'd lived here, the monks from the Middle Ages, older than the olive trees.

The whispers were like hearing the hush of conversation in another room, faint words I couldn't decipher. I should have been scared, but I wasn't. They were more of a comfort in their solemnity, a soothing. Not the whispers, but my sister and the investigations, these things are what scared me. This was the sister who'd taken charge of the family after Dad died, who'd worked nights at a diner to put me through college. Last Christmas flashed through my mind. "Look, Matt," she'd said. "I finally did it," her eyes bright with pride. "Maybe now I can finally get my own place." I'd hugged her, already knowing where her money would go. That's what makes you a monster, I thought. As bad as it was losing client's money, it was this. Restless at night, only the grappa would ease the pain, the sea lapping far below in the dark. I found myself taking shot after shot, welcoming the burn down my throat, until I passed out on the cold tile.

The first time I saw Chiara, she was arguing in town. Her hair was tied back, her white chef's coat stained with what looked like tomato sauce.

"These citations are ridiculous," she said to the man with a clipboard. "The building's been here since before your grandfather was born."

The man's eyes dropped. This is a strong woman, I thought, and not for the first time.

The inspector left, and her eyes landed on me. "Ah, the American. Sorry about the buco del culo. Welcome to small-town Italy, where everyone's a jerk." She wiped her hands on the front of her apron. "You must be the one staying at Villa Rossi. I'm Chiara Manzini—my restaurant's right there." She gestured to a weathered storefront. "Come by tonight. First meal's on the house, for anyone brave enough to take on your garden."

There was something endearing about her directness, her ordinary frustrations. When she smiled, she met my eyes.

"I think the garden is winning," I said.

Chiara laughed, and threw back the hair in her eyes, her white teeth were perfect. She was a beautiful Italian woman. "It's just been neglected, that's all. My nonna worked there in the sixties. She used to tell me stories about your grandmother's roses. She said they bloomed in colors that shouldn't exist."

I didn't notice then how her hand trembled when she mentioned the roses, or how her eyes flicked towards the villa, if only for a moment.

Come evening, I found the boy again near a reflecting pool. "Why won't you talk to me?" I called after him. He ran, and this time I followed. That's how I found the obelisk—marble, choked in vines, set in a hidden courtyard. I ran my fingers over the cold stone. How many centuries did it take for these names to appear? Dozens of them, many in Latin. Who were they? I flinched at the last name, my breath caught in my throat. Matteo Rossi, my name, was carefully etched, as if a craftsman had chiseled it out.

"The old town has its ghosts," Chiara said the next day.

"Ghosts? I don't believe in ghosts. The boy is no ghost."

"You don't understand what it asks of us," she said, yanking her arm away.

"What, Chiara?"

Her face tightened, and she stood up. "It's nothing."

She stormed off and was gone.

Now three weeks in, I decided to leave. The whispers, the boy, my name in the stone, and Chiara's anger. Why stay? It would be easy to take the early train to Bari, then anywhere. I could sell the villa from anywhere. Then live anywhere.

But standing in the garden, seeing the blue Adriatic, my legs wouldn't move. The roses caught the morning light in ways that made the petals look like silk. I was entranced by their beauty, the miracle of their delicate form. How could they be anything but designed, not by Darwin, but something else?

By noon, I was pruning again, and felt the thoughts of the garden, not a command, but love: you don't leave the garden. You become part of it.

As I worked, I couldn't stop thinking about the boy. Had he chiseled my name in the stone? In town, I found the library and searched local history books, struggling with the Italian. Most were nothing, but one dusty volume spoke of children vanishing into the caves, of ancient rites and bargains, myths of sacrifice to long-dead gods before the time of Rome.

A yellowed photograph from 1890 tickled up the back of my neck—a boy with blond curls, though otherwise unlike the child I'd seen in my gardens. His eyes, though. They were the same: a curious slant, an age beyond understanding in someone so young.

I mentioned the photograph to Chiara at her restaurant. She went still, her hand shaking as she set down my espresso.

"The old families here," she said carefully, "we have confusing histories. Some things are better left in the past." Her voice was strange, distant.

As the spring weather continued into summer, the audits in New York felt like faraway dreams, but the villa held more than dreams. It contained vivid hallucinations.

I noticed in the courtyards my watch stopped, but would work again when I left the grounds. I'd learned local spikes in magnetism could do this. But why did this not surprise me? Could time have stopped also?

And the strangest thing. A rose thorn caught my finger as I was pruning. A drop of blood fell to the soil, and I swear the dirt moved in the red moisture. The next day, the spot bloomed with roses the blue of my vein. Soon, I began making smaller cuts, feeding drops of myself to particularly stubborn plants. Each sacrifice brought growth, more delicate petals, a more pungent bouquet. If I chose, a rose bush could grow in a day. I knew this was impossible. But despite that, I felt this was a natural thing. I made the cuts larger, messaging the artery to push out more blood, letting it splatter onto the dirt. The blue roses thrived. When I kneeled and looked closely, I could see them moving, taking shape, reaching.

And yet, in the early hours, the time before dawn, my blood rushed. I would rise and and pace, my bare feet on the cold tile of my bedroom, the sea beyond my window a rhythmic wash against the dark cliffs below. The faces of those I'd betrayed in New York, my clients, my sister, never slept, but something had changed. I had made a decision. I reached for the grappa bottle and dropped it into the sea.

Chiara began to return more often.

We'd sit in the garden for hours, drinking wine, talking. She was patient, kind, never pushing. I told her about my mother's death, but not about the stolen money or the investigators, and not about how the garden whispered, and not about the obelisk.

"Do you think you could stay here forever?" she asked one evening, her voice low. The sun was setting, casting long shadows over the stone walls of the grounds. I didn't answer, only stared at the roses trimmed earlier, the petals darkening as if under a spell.

'Forever', what a question. And then I couldn't help myself. "Were you ever married?" I asked her.

"Many years ago, but he died."

"I'm sorry."

"It's been a long time…"

A silence hung between us. A dog barked in the distance.

"Paolo," she said softly, then caught herself. "I knew a Paolo once." She looked toward the garden where the boy often appeared. "Some people are meant to live in the in-between." She pressed her palm against her heart, a gesture I'd seen mothers make when speaking of absent children.

I sensed there was a child she'd lost also, but this was none of my business.

"But you," she said. "You've spent so much of your life running from things, haven't you?" She sat next to me, closer than ever before. "Maybe you don't have to."

Her words tightened my throat.

She leaned closer, her fingers brushed against mine. The contact sent a warmth through me, but I couldn't ignore the sense of foreboding.

There was a pause. Without thinking, I kissed her. It was slow at first, hesitant, but when she kissed back, it was as though something inside me cracked open. For a moment, I forgot about the names on the obelisk, the whispers, the boy.

We broke apart, and though her smile was warm, there was something I recognized—a flicker of guilt in the way she wouldn't quite meet my eyes. But for the first time in what felt forever, since before I'd begun fudging numbers on closing statements, before I'd begun lying about bank transfers, and before the first letter from the auditors, I could breathe.

But later, Catherine's voice sounded close on my voicemail. "I was contacted by an attorney," she said. Her voice was thin and brittle, like when we were kids, and something frightened her. "He says they can seize my bank accounts. Where are you?"

As I listened, her voice faded to silence. I took the chisel in my hand and stabbed a rose, swiping at it, again, and again. A thorn scraped my palm. Blood began oozing. Yes, where was I, my sister? The roses, the olive trees, the villa, silently faded. My previous life—the financial manipulations, the deceit, the stolen money—even the sounds of the Adriatic faded to silence. Was there enough of me left to return? Here, surrounded by roses breathing in their own consciousness, the image of my sister's face silently faded. Here, from the line on my palm where it bled, tiny blue roses began to grow.”

"Where are you?"

Where was I? I closed my eyes and let time pass. This was my sister, and she needed my help. Do people hit bottom, a hole they will finally crawl out of, or not? I didn't know, but I knew I wasn't having it any longer, this prison of the damned.

I called my sister back. It was time to go home to New York.

We talked. "Mom kept every article about you," she said, her voice choking. "Every time you were mentioned in the Times. She was so proud of her brilliant son."

"What would she think now?"

A pause.

"Remember what you told me at her funeral? That we'd always have each other's backs, like when we were kids? That's what big sisters are for, you said. God, Matt, I believed you. I've always believed in you."

"I'll take the 7:20 to Bari. Be in New York by tomorrow."

"You may get arrested."

"I know. See you tomorrow."

"Look," Chiara said from behind me, her voice cold. "The garden."

I dropped the phone. It clattered against the tile.

My forearm tingled, and I massaged it with my fingers. I was changing. Not dramatically at first and I fought it, my adrenaline pushing through my system. Where was my bag? I needed to leave. And yet, my skin's shift to transparency, like thin parchment paper, mesmerized me. I could see the faintest hint of green beneath, a network of lines pulsing with something other than blood.

"What's happening?" I asked. "I need to go home."

The boy stood behind Chiara. His form flickered—now a modern boy, now in Renaissance clothes, now something older still.

The first vine emerged above my wrist, not bursting through skin but growing from within, as if my body remembered an older form. A thin, pale tendril pushed against the flesh, trying to surface. It was painless.

The vines were mapping me now.

One traced my spine, another curled around my left ankle. They didn't puncture. They fused, becoming part of me, as I became part of them.

Chiara was crying. "I'm so very sorry, Matteo."

The boy squeezed her hand. "Madra?"

Chiara's face drew down in her exhaustion. "I had no choice, Paolo. Do you want us to crumble to dust after all this time? The garden demands a sacrifice. It always has. It's the only way we can live."

Paolo looked back at me, his face torn in pain.

Chiara guided him by the shoulders. "We do what we must to survive. Now come."

I felt the garden breathing through me. A vine uncoiled from my throat into the bright sunlight, blue roses blooming. The garden had what it needed. My last thought was of a thorn. The first one. The one I let in.