Weeding

by Haein

Nina put on her grubbiest clothes, and hoped no one from her school would be in the neighborhood to recognize her. Not that it was likely anyone even knew her as anything other than “that loner girl with the coke-bottle-thick glasses”… For the hundredth time, Nina cursed her father’s weak-eye genetics. Why couldn’t she have 20/20 vision, like her mother? Instead, she had the weak trait, making her astigmatic, almost legally blind. Not that she could blame that for her social problems. She just didn’t fit in with the rest of the species.

“Survival of the fittest?” she mentally told her Biology teacher. “If I were a mouse, or any other reasonable animal, I’d have been eaten by now. Clearly Darwin was mistaken.”

Nina picked up the dusty garden spade, and trudged out to the back lawn. She would yank those weeds out, then go back in the house. Maybe she’d even spray it all with Weed-b-gone, for good measure. Her parents didn’t care much about keeping the yard nice, but Nina couldn’t stand it looking disorderly…

“Whoa!”

Had the plants grown overnight? What had been long, but fairly normal-looking grass, now came up to her hips. Bristled, spiky stems choked off a section of yard, their prickly-looking seeds the size of grapes. An unfamiliar-looking vine climbed thickly over the remains of the old cherry-tree, choking it from the sun. Nina saw that the branch supporting her childish, red plastic swing had nearly been snapped in two.

This was insane. Maybe her parents were a little laidback when it came to yard work, but they’d never let the lawn get this bad before. This looked like… the witch’s forest. A wilderness, a wasteland, haunted by bad spirits.

Stop imagining things! It’s your own backyard, she told herself.

Nina started to walk over to the cherry tree to get rid of the smothering vine, but the ground seemed full of harsh roots, willfully tripping and twisting her feet. It was as if they were full of some kind of malice, or knew that she intended to pull them up.

“Ah!” she cried, pain shooting through her. She looked down at her sandal, disbelievingly. A long, slender thorn had pierced all the way through the black rubber sole and sliced hungrily, deep into her foot’s flesh. Nina sat down slowly, nursing her injury. She winced as she pulled the thorn out.

It looked the size of a tiger’s fang, or a shark’s, and was wickedly sharp. Her foot began to bleed a little sluggishly.

“Right. I’ll just put a Band-Aid on, in the house.” Nina said shakily to herself. She hated seeing her own blood. She always had. There was just something about that obscene, vivid red that made her feel very sick. She swallowed down the nausea and breathed deeply for a while. Hopping awkwardly upright on one foot and discarding the ruined sandal, she turned around, to go back inside.

And froze.

The little wooden house was covered by some dark green vine, with cup-shaped flowers growing from it like open, red mouths. It had not been so before. She knew her house was just a plain, somewhat boring-looking box. No vines, no jungle in the yard, no flowers-

You must be irrational, a part of her mind argued. Plants don’t grow in two minutes. You’re delirious, or having a sun-stroke. Going mad. Or perhaps you’ve always been that way? Mad.  

The vines were growing before her very eyes. They coiled, stretched, enveloping the front door with a low screech of rending wood. There was no way in anymore, Nina realized dimly. But her family was in that house.

“Mom? Mom? MOM!” Nina shouted. She began to breathe fast, in short, jerky gasps, almost losing her balance. She set her injured foot down, by a relatively normal pansy. It was smaller than the others, nearly the right size for a flower. It was reassuring-looking.

Then, with a hideously wet sound, it split in half, revealing a long, tube-like tongue and rows of lethal teeth. Almost delicately, it unfolded to sip at her bleeding skin.

Nina jerked away in terrified disgust. The flower hissed at her, and she fled.

Through the damned grass- ohgod – ohgod - no good trying the house, she had to get to the road. If she could only get to the road, get away…

Brambles tore at her skin, but Nina did not stop. She vaulted over the front stone wall, landing in a hard tumble of adrenaline and fear. Her head hit hard, dizzying her for a moment, but she blinked hard, looking up.

And she moaned, terribly, desolately, in despair. There was no road left anymore. If she looked hard, she could see the last traces of sidewalk disappearing, eaten by poisonous, viciously healthy bramble-weed. All the other houses on the block were already gone.

Nina watched as a tall  tree spat out the remains of the family next door. It belched happily, as the bones steamed gently on the pavement.

She looked blankly up, at the perfect blue sky. No airplanes flew there. Long vines crawled along the power lines, but met no warning crackle of electricity. In the distance she could hear someone screaming… it sounded like a dog. 

Nina wept, the tears smearing on her glasses. She took them off. One lens had been cracked already, in the jump over the wall. Slowly, Nina put them down on the ground. The world was an unfamiliar blur now, just dark green light and movement.

Nina sat down. It was survival of the fittest, she thought. But she didn’t want to fight. The world had changed. Everyone was dead, her family was dead, the whole world seemed to have died, in that short space of minutes. She had not been ready for murderous plants today, no one had been.

Perhaps it was all some kind of nightmare, her mind whispered soothingly. Nina closed her eyes, letting the strangling vines embrace her.

And all over the world, the plants grew.