Under the Velvet Vine

The honeysuckles bloomed in June, as they always did – their amber tongues curling around porch beams and power poles, too restless to stay rooted. There was no warning before their arrival; they came in clusters, flushed and fragrant, trailing their sweetness behind them like a train of silk, filling the air until it dripped gold. They took and took, and they looked lovely doing it. 

That summer, I was ten: freckled, barefoot, painted pink by the sun. My grandmother taught me how to pluck them – pinch the stem, pull the filament, sip the nectar. It wasn’t about the taste; no, the taste was fleeting. It was about the gesture, the ritual. The moment something opened in your hand and offered up its sweetness without a sound.  

I knew they weren’t supposed to be here, that they’d come from elsewhere and overstayed, that they grew too fast and too much and strangled what couldn’t outrun them. But God, they were beautiful. 

My grandmother and I watched the bewitching flowers from the porch swing, the heat glazing our skin like syrup, cicadas buzzing with an electric whir. She didn’t like them, not really. Said they were invasive, said they choked the roots of better things, said they looked too lovely to be trusted. But still, she taught me how to pluck them.  

We sat in silence most evenings, our legs sticking to the plastic lawn chairs, the waves in my hair frizzed into a knotty cloud of mousy brown. Anything but quiet felt too loud in that kind of haze. But we shared the silence gratefully, passing it back and forth between the vines and the gnats and the swelling dusk.  

Once, she let me climb onto her lap while she braided my hair with tiny ribbons we’d found in a drawer, humming a tune she had learned as a girl, and I remember thinking that nothing in the world could be sweeter than that moment, the sunlight catching the strands and her hands moving so carefully. 

By midsummer, the honeysuckles had crept further. They bloomed from the cracks in Grandpa’s shed, curled into gutters, pressed their thin green wrists through the lattice beneath the house. Tools rusted where vines had brushed them. The fence bowed under their weight. Grandma began to mutter when she walked the yard. She slapped blossoms from her ankles, cursed under her breath in ways that made me blush. At supper, she chewed slowly, glancing toward the windows as though expecting to see them peering in. I laughed once, said “they’re just flowers,” and she gave me a look that froze the breath in my lungs. “They’re not,” she snarled. 

Some nights, I swore I saw them stir. Not growing – moving. Blossoms slithering toward the windows, vines reaching across the shutters like fingertips. When the wind died, I still heard them rustling, a whisper too soft to be leaves alone. Sometimes, in the thickest heat, the air itself seemed braided with perfume, so heavy you could choke on it. I woke one night with the taste of nectar on my tongue though I hadn’t plucked a flower in days. 

Grandmother stopped coming to the porch altogether by late July. She sat inside with her fan rattling in the window, her chair angled so she could watch the yard. I joined her sometimes, but the air in the house felt just as thick, swollen with sweetness. The vines had pressed through the cracks in the siding, slipped behind the wallpaper, curled in places where we couldn’t see the roots but heard the boards groan beneath them. 

By August, the cicadas had gone quiet. The yard was too still, too watchful. I thought of the vines as listeners, as patient mouths waiting to be fed. My grandmother’s bible stayed open on the kitchen table, but I never saw her read it. Sometimes, she pressed her palm flat against the gilded pages and then pulled away, leaving them trembling in the draft from the fan. She smelled of honeysuckle now, faint but constant, as though the flowers had pressed themselves into her skin. I felt a strange mix of awe and unease, realizing she was shrinking from the porch, from the sun, from speaking; the stillness of the house, her silence, pressed into me with the same sweetness and weight as the flowers themselves. 

Then came the night the air refused to move. Not a breath of wind, not a sound of wings. I woke to a silence so absolute I could hear my heart pounding in it. The whole house was dark except for the faint silver wash of the moon through my curtains. I crept out of bed, bare feet cold on the boards, and padded toward the porch. 

The honeysuckles were everywhere. They had billowed across the floorboards, flowers glowing pale in the moonlight. They clung to the ceiling, the rails, the doorframe. And there, in my grandmother’s chair, I saw the vines had braided themselves into the arms, blossoms resting where her hands should’ve been. 

I called for her. The flowers answered, their mouths opening soundlessly, dew glinting at their throats. 

I didn’t step closer. I couldn’t. The scent was thick enough to drown in. 

In the morning, the chair was empty. My grandmother’s room was empty too, the fan still running, her bible closed. I asked my grandfather where she had gone, but he only stared at the shed, at the lattice, at the fence bowing lower each day. He did not answer me. He never did. 

The petals browned and fell soon after, littering the porch like flakes of ash. I swept them away myself. The vines, of course, remained, coiled behind the walls, humming against the wood. 

Now, when the sky hums low and the air thickens, I remember that summer. Honeysuckle and hunger. Sugar and rot. When the nights are hot and the air drips gold, I still taste nectar on my tongue – sharp and sweet, as though plucked from a blossom that has already grown under my ribs. 

Editor’s note: Taylor read her first-place awarded short story "Under the Velvet Vine" at the 2025 Charleston Literary Festival.