Planting

At first, we barely noticed the itching. It was just a skin allergy, we thought, a bit of irritation that the whole family seemed to have contracted, and we didn’t have time to worry about it. Not even my little sister. All we could do was scratch our skin, slather on some antihistamine cream, and turn our attention to more urgent matters. Like the walls going up in the west or the creeping shortage of food in every town south of the border. Or the anxiety arising from the news of the steadily vanishing marine plants and algae. Most of the trees were long gone, but the disappearance of underwater plants heralded a much more pressing crisis. 

But some nights the itch was just so bad. I’d lie awake writhing under the covers and finally throw them off, the tickling under my skin spreading like its own heat source. That’s how I thought of it: an itching not on the skin but under the skin. 

This went on for about a week, and I’d almost gotten used to it. “Some kind of rash,” my father said, “a fungus.” The idea of a fungus made my sister start wailing. I was putting down my cup of breakfast tea, preparing to comfort her—or maybe to tell her to shut up—and that’s when I saw it. The tiny green shoot poking out right next to my thumbnail. Like a hangnail. But not a hangnail. 

Feeling strangely distant from myself, I plucked it off. There was a tug of pain, just like ripping off a shred of dead skin. 

“What’s this,” I said, my voice flat so it was more of an announcement than a question, holding it up in the dining room. My sister got quiet; they all stared. The room was full of silence like smoke. 

Before our eyes, between my fingers, the shoot lengthened and unfurled itself and blossomed like a time-lapse photo. It erupted into a flower, a wash of colors in pink and red. The petals swayed slowly, as though in an underwater wind. 

Before I could say anything, my father swooped in and snatched it from me. “No,” was all he said, looking not at me as he said it but at the flower. He threw it into the sink, unscrewed a bottle of bleach, drowned it. Behind him my mother stood twisting her hands together like she was trying to wring moisture out of them. 

“What what was that?” I asked, but they didn’t answer. I felt dizzy, as though part of me were lying in the sink with the crushed flower. My sister looked up at me with giant eyes.

×

No more mention was made of the flower, or the itching. But that night at dinner I saw my mother surreptitiously pull a strand of hair away from her scalp. Except it wasn’t a strand of hair, as it was too green, and too thick. She crushed it in her palm under the table; I couldn’t see, but I could feel it somehow, as though the plant were emitting a soft, very high-frequency sound.

×

I took the long way to school the next day, not caring if I was late. The middle of winter was dragging on and on, extending like a long furrow in the earth, filled with frozen water.  The road was dotted with winter-bare plants and trees, but it was too easy to tell that they were manmade. The last real tree in our county had been cut down before I was born. The imitations were 99% accurate, almost as good as the real thing. Enough to fool people into believing they were the real thing if they didn’t think too hard about it, which I guess was what they were going for. 

The itching hadn’t stopped, but had instead migrated from my hands to my back. It began with little bumps on the knobs of my spine, and by recess they were pea-green shoots that I could pluck out myself, twisting to pinch them between my fingers. They sprouted into flowers the moment I pulled them out of my skin, blooming orange and blue and red like tiny handfuls of flame. I spent ten minutes doing this in the bathroom, the shouts of the other students sounding like they were coming from a long way off. 

I didn’t destroy the flowers, like my father had told me to. Instead I took them out behind the schoolyard and covered them in the earth. They had no roots, so it wasn’t like I was planting them. It was more of a burial. 

×

When I came home that evening my parents were still at work and my sister was screaming. A long, elegant flower strand had poked out from behind her ear, like a creature seeking the light. I took hold of it and prised it off as gently as I could. The petals were dark purple but gave off a strange luminosity. They undulated slowly in my hand.

“Get rid of it,” my sister sobbed, her hand clamped to the ear where it had come from. “Mommy said.”

“Okay,” I told her, but instead of throwing it away I buried it, too, out in our yard. I wasn’t sure why, but something told me that crushing or drowning or burning these flowers would be a sin almost, a crime against nature. 

Nature? The very word had pretty much lost its meaning. Had become a nonsense term, edging its way awkwardly into an otherwise meaningful sentence.

×

In the night I pulled three more out from between my toes, silvery flowers that seemed to contain their own moonlight, and the petals gave off a soft rustling, like they were speaking some dead and unknowable language.

×

The next morning, I arrived at school to an atmosphere of hushed wonder. The reason was clear when I looked out a window: in the back of the building, in the otherwise deserted yard, a cluster of plants had grown to incredible heights, towering twenty feet up. At the tops were massive blooms: not the tiny flowers I had pulled out of my skin yesterday, but giants, with petals the length of my arm. They tongued the air, lapping up the breeze. Light refracted off their surfaces in a multitude of colors, many of which I found myself unable to categorize, and I found myself thinking about ultraviolet light, colors only insects could see, shades impossible and without names.

Nobody seemed to know what was happening; we were content to gaze at the plants, which seemed almost familiar, like they were things half-remembered, fragments of old dreams. A story told long before our birth. 

×

At home, the flowers I had planted the previous day had grown tall, too. They towered in the backyard: roof-high, throwing immense shadows. When I came closer I saw two shapes lying in that shadow, tangled up in the vines.

It was my parents, dead, the vines looped around their necks in strangling rings. Axes, which I had never before seen them use—which I hadn’t even known we owned—lay harmlessly beside them. As I watched, the petals undulated gently, although now there was no wind.

In the distance I could see more flowers standing twenty, thirty feet in height. They spread across the backyards of our neighbors, as though they had sprouted in any patch of soil they had been placed in, coiling towards the sky in beautiful, unknowable shades.  

My sister emerged from the house, blinking but calm, and together the two of us regarded the swaying fields that seemed to be emerging from every direction. There was the sensation all around me of words I couldn’t hear but could feel in my bones, words that were at once both entirely strange and as familiar to me as the rush and thump of my own blood.