On Sundays She Picked Flowers - Hardcover

Scholfield, Yah Yah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668091216 ISBN 13: 9781668091210

Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

“A ferociously talented writer. Scholfield writes with insight, beauty, and the wildness of real art.” —Victor LaValle

In this sinister and surreal Southern Gothic debut, a woman escapes into the uncanny woods of southern Georgia and must contend with ghosts, haints, and most dangerous of all, the truth about herself.

When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.

Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.

But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.

Haunting and thought-provoking, On Sunday She Picked Flowers explores retribution, family trauma, and the power of building oneself back up after breaking down.

“One of the most visceral, intense, brutal, and yet honest, works of horror I have read in a long time.” —P. Djèlí Clark

“Scholfield tells a story that’s as haunting as it is cathartic, as beautiful as it is devastating.” —Arts Atlanta

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yah Yah Scholfield’s work has been featured in a number of horror and speculative fiction magazines and anthologies, including Fiyah Lit Mag and Death in the Mouth Vol. 1. They have also published a short story collection, Just a Little Snack. When they’re not terrifying innocents, Yah Yah is a professional stay-at-home daughter in Atlanta with their cats, Sophie and Chihiro.

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Chapter 1 1
Autumn

1965

Ma’am cracked Jude’s skull against the wall for talking back, and the realization that no one was going to save her struck Jude like a revelation from God.

Smack of bone against plaster, brick. Sudden darkness, sudden flash of white light—was it the act itself that schooled her, or was the pain her teacher? Or maybe it was the apathy of her audience, her mother’s quilting circle (religious women, saints in knee-length skirts and compression socks) glancing briefly at Jude’s crumpled body before returning to their sewing. Ma’am stepped over her, sat among her friends as Jude stumbled to her feet. Her face was wet—blood, thank God, rather than humiliating tears—and she knew she could no longer live in her mother’s house.

That it took Judith Rice forty-one years to come to the conclusion was proof of only a hopeful nature. Or was it naivete? Jude certainly felt naive when she bowed to pray to her mother’s god, as silly as a little girl wishing on shooting stars, dandelions. What could he give her that hadn’t already been denied? Strength? Resilience? Mercy, maybe, if such a thing existed.

No paintings of God were hung in the Westmoor house, so Jude imagined her grandfather, stern and humorless as he glared from his position on the living room wall. It was to him that she directed her prayers for freedom, pious and patient, and then her curses, though these she quickly corrected with apologies. If ever once Jude pleaded with the Lord to strike Ma’am dead, strike her dead, strike the bitch dead, only Jesus knew it, and he knew her heart, didn’t he, knew she didn’t mean it, not really. He alone knew that Jude wasn’t as spiteful as her prayers, that she’d rather there be peace. On her knees, she asked for patience, time—if only she and Ma’am had time away from each other, time to think and let the bitter sentiments settle, then things could be sweet between them. Normal, familial; friendly, even, like the mothers and daughters on TV.

Jude couldn’t say which blow it was that knocked the prayers from her mouth like teeth. Only remembered chasing after them, running her hands through the carpet to find this or that plea, all the while knowing it was useless. Of course, God wasn’t listening to her. Of course, Jesus wasn’t her friend. They were her mother’s men, and all the time she was on her knees, begging, crying out for her freedom, they were at work with Ma’am, whispering in her ear, colluding on crueler and viler punishments.

Up in her bedroom with the lights off and the curtains pulled, a wad of gauze pressed to her gashed head, Jude nursed thoughts of escape alongside her concussion. She could get a bus out of town, but wait—how would she get the ticket, never mind leave the house? And if she did, somehow, manage to leave her mother’s house, where could she go? So cagey were the Negroes of Vine City, so protective of themselves and nervous of outside influence. Nothing entered and nothing left. Jude recalled her past attempts to escape, each of them thwarted by neighbors, nosy folk from church—once Jude had gotten as far as Ashby Street before a minister her mother knew had corralled her, protesting, into his car and returned her home. Ma’am had wept and bought locks for the doors that could only be opened by keys she kept on her person.

Her mind was a tangle, bus routes and city names and paths of egress muddling, twisting, knotting. Pressure on her chest, weighing on her belly; she panted, fought for breath. The corners of her bedroom, childish and pink, folded in and in, squashing her, and a voice like wasp’s wings beat against the glass of her brain. The only way out is through, and aren’t there spiders who eat their mothers, and can’t you just— Wouldn’t it be easier to just—

Jude flattened the thought. She waited until her mind felt clear to slowly lift the hand, peeking underneath to see the idea, oozing and twitching, a cockroach near death.

She was not a violent person, Jude. When she felt the need to be ugly, when the meanness was too much for the frangible cage of her body and her hands itched to break something, someone, she broke only herself. Tailoring pins in the palm of her hand, needles jammed into her thighs—she alone took the brunt of her ire, the copper of her blood, as she lapped at an injury, as comforting as the cut itself. But to turn the blade outward…

Well, said the wasp-wing voice, it isn’t like you’d be hurting anything real. Hadn’t Ma’am long ago severed their ties? Hadn’t she made it so clear to Jude that the blood that bonded them meant nothing to her? Jude’s rage would touch only what little of the bond that remained—the terrific physical form, the birthing body that resisted and resented. It was only the afterbirth, and like the placenta, it needed to be expelled lest it poison the body. It was up to Jude to decide what to do with it afterward, whether she’d discard it or burn it, bury it in the garden.

It was near dark when Ma’am brought her a bowl of greens and two aspirin. Jude took small bites of the cabbage, swallowed the pills, and half listened as Ma’am talked her way around a non-apology. When her plate was clear, Ma’am set it on the nightstand and put a warm, wrinkled paw to Jude’s forehead.

“How’s your head?”

Splitting, aching. “It’s alright, Ma’ammy.”

“That aspirin gon’ take the pain out.” She hummed, picked lint off Jude’s comforter, did anything but look Jude in the face. “Want anything special-like for dinner tomorrow?”

This was her way—cruelty and then candy. No more able to parse the kindness than she was able to stomach the meanness, Jude learned to take each act, sweet and bitter, as they came, never once growing accustomed to the shifting ground on which she stood.

A verbal apology, a real apology, was out of the question. One did not apologize to a child, especially not if that child was one’s own. Instead, there were invitations to run errands, permission to pick out any fruit she liked at the market. Flash of light, ages of pitch darkness; hands roughly shaking her awake, icy water shocking her back to consciousness. Scars were salved over with baby dolls, broken skin and bones by good food, collards or cornbread, the stickiest pig’s foot set aside for her.

Now that they were older, Ma’am was less likely to play at making nice and Jude was less likely to be appeased. Still, Jude did not turn down the trips to Rich’s or Davison’s, did not turn down her mother’s offers to buy any bright, shiny thing she saw. She knocked the teeth out of Jude’s mouth once, sent blood and adult molars flying across the hardwood; in return, Jude got the closest thing to an admission of fault—a slice of warm pound cake drizzled with lemon glaze, permission to use the car, permission to be alone.

They meant nothing, Ma’am’s apologies, and nothing changed. Sweets and treats were nice, but they wouldn’t make her a woman in her mother’s house, wouldn’t make her anything more than a whipping girl. There was no future, only Jude and Ma’am graying and decaying, Ma’am’s cane cracking her back and Jude standing there and taking it, smiling like an idiot even as she was mashed into a pulp.

Jude blinked slowly, froggily, and said, “Can we have beef stew?”

Ma’am left her then—pat on the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: S&S/Saga Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668091216
• ISBN 13: 9781668091210
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; AA Utrecht; 3584; Niederlande