No driver would allow the injured woman into his taxi after midnight, so I drove her to safety after her boyfriend had thrown her against her antique bathtub, knocking her head repeatedly on the cast iron walls. Because she didn’t know how long she had been out or where her boyfriend had gone, I stayed with her. 

 

That’s how I got this blood in my car, picking up customers no taxi service would—murdered women who hadn’t died yet. 

 

At the precinct, the police did everything right, took the bleeding woman to the hospital, put out a warrant for the boyfriend, and invited a battered women’s advocate. In the hospital waiting room, the bleeding woman asked me to go inside the recovery room. 

 

“She had been unconscious for how long?” The nurses kept saying. 

 

I didn’t know because she didn’t know. There was no way of knowing unless the boyfriend knew, and he probably would never tell. The woman was shaking, couldn’t hold a cup of water, spilling it over the table. I held the cup to her lips. She gulped, coughing water in my eyes. 

 

When she asked for more water, I fetched it. 

 

Filling the cup at the water fountain in the hall, I overheard the woman telling the advocate that she had changed her mind. She no longer wanted to press charges because she loved her boyfriend, who was often kind to her. 

 

“You’re dead,” the advocate said, suggesting the woman should hire a florist to 

arrange the flowers for her funeral. 

  

#

  

In florist school, I had arranged flowers for hypothetical funerals. 

 

Sharon Tate was my first real teacher. I have studied photographs of the rope looped around her neck. I’m stronger for it now, though I’ve only seen the photographs in black and white. Covered in blood, she was eight months pregnant, stabbed to death. Her face stayed with me. 

 

For Sharon and her child, I chose a delicate whisper of double white orchids, a wordless message to distract from the truth: Murder demands a floral response. Petals soften the blow. 

 

I’ve seen a lot of ghosts since then, including my own, but nothing prepared me for encountering the woman who emerged from the Never Taxi. She was still alive and deeply in love with her murderer when she hired me to arrange the gardenias for her funeral. Since her death hadn’t happened yet, I couldn’t erase it with flowers, though I’ve prepared myself for the worst by studying crime scene photos, so I could never be shocked by her passing. 

  

#

  

I parked the Never Taxi in my driveway and entered my house after a long night. I was startled awake when a woman with broken arms used her head to knock on the door of my home. When I opened the door, she said to me, “This is my dream house. I’ll be safe here.”  

​

I asked her to repeat what she had said, and she said, “You’re living in my dream house. Is this your dream house, too?” 

“No,” I told her.  “It’s just my house.”  

​

“Not anymore,” she said.  “This is my dream house, and you’re in my dream. Get out. Now. Understand?”  

​

I understood all too well. There was no arguing with a woman with broken arms.  I knew it was pointless. I was homeless in her dream where my house and everything in it was no longer mine. I left. She moved in. 

​

I would have to start dreaming about a house that wasn’t mine and then find that house in my dream to evict the person living inside.  It took me a while, quite a long time, to dream my dream house and then to find it in my dream. When I knocked on the door, a woman with broken legs answered, struggling on crutches. Her family was living inside my dream house, including her sister with the broken jaw, her daughter with broken ribs, and her aunt with a broken neck. I didn’t want to do to them what had been done to me, so I walked away from my dream house and pretended it wasn’t mine. 

​

Soon after, while sleeping in the Never Taxi, I was attacked by my murderer. To evade him, I moved into an apartment on Linn Street.  

  

#

  

Messages are slipped under the door. My roommates and I have installed a Segal lock and chain locks. We change the locks and keep the doors and windows barred because my murderer walks the roof next door to look down into our windows. 

​

The landlord says the bars over the windows are a fire hazard and we have to have them removed, so my roommates and I boobytrap the windows with bells and bottles. We use razor blades, tacks, nails, and knives. 

​

I’ve already called a florist to arrange the flowers for my funeral: blue irises and blood roses, their dark red-black stems coated with thin, sharp prickles, their strong metallic scent akin to the scent of blood.