Orphan Lilies

What it looks like, and what it does

An old overgrown cemetery in dusk light. A dense white drift of lilies over a few stones while the graves around them are bare. A single stalk leaning toward the path.

Blooms in August. Opens at dusk. Closes if a person stands at the stone.

What is known

Sextons have noted that plots left untended for years bloom in late summer with heavy white lilies, up to twenty to a plot.

When a relative returns, the lilies fade within a day. Cemetery trusts now monitor the blooms as a register of neglect.

What it can do

• Blooms on graves that are not visited
• Fades when a living relative stands at the stone

Where it stops

• Does not bloom for the recently buried
• Cannot grow on a grave with fresh flowers

An encounter

Wasik counted forty-one lilies on the grave of a man named Arthur Teague. A week later the woman who had been paying for the plot arrived from abroad. The lilies were closed by dusk and, the following day, gone. “It's like a letter,” Wasik says. “It stops arriving when you've read it.”

Piotr Wasik, sexton, Lower cemetery, Wakeham, August

What is established, and what is only said

• established: A sexton's register for thirty years links bloom counts to visit counts at a correlation of -0.78.
• rumor: That the lilies grow on the living, too.
• interpretation: They may not mark the dead who are alone. They may mark who is owed a visit.

Still unresolved

A lily has been found on a plot with no one beneath it. The stone bears a name. A visitor came the following week and the lily faded.

Where it has been recorded

• Wakeham (confirmed) — Recorded by Piotr Wasik, sexton.

Connected entities

• Impression Fungus — Both grow from absence. One raises the shape of what was left. The other flowers for who was.