Writing

I wrote this short story especially for our latest Writers Salon podcast – it’s the last one in the episode.

It was on the fourth day that the building stopped humming. It sat in an unregarded street on the edge of an unloved town, squat, grey and utilitarian, resembling a hangar in an industrial park, except for the acres of land that backed onto it, filled with crops that only an expert eye would recognise as not quite like any others.

You might have noticed that the hum had stopped, if you walked by it every day. The sound resembled the humming of bees in a giant hive, but in fact it was the sound of the many fans that kept the seeds at an optimum temperature, stopping them from spoiling in the metal drawers and drums where they slept. Scientists occasionally removed a batch of seeds, propagated them in test tubes or seed trays, pollinated them, grafted them, or peered through microscopes at their intricate whorls and spirals. Sometimes, not always, they would be planted in the regimented fields outside, with their high walls. These were the ‘safe’ plants, the ones whose genetic material was certain not to escape or mix itself with others.

But after the mad king’s decree, the library was forced to shut down. All the scientists, some old, some young, men and women, were escorted out of the building, balancing brown cardboard boxes in their arms, some in tears, some stoic. The door was locked and bolted. A security guard patrolled the empty lot, an Alsatian watchful at his heels. But sometimes there were still glimmers of light on the top floor. Perhaps the building was not as empty, as abandoned as it seemed. In the night-time hush, perhaps there was something moving.

You started to notice it a few weeks later. A shock of bright colour on the motorway verge, where no one ever walked. On the pavement, an unusual, bright green arching root thrust its way through the tarmac and began to climb into the air. In a broken-down street, where men sat in cars with dark windows or furtively passed parcels and cash from hand to hand, a tree sprang up and spread its giant white petals everywhere, dropping like snow, its perfume so rich and strange that even those hardened men stopped to smell the flowers, inhaling each one deeply, as if the flower itself were a drug.

Rubbish piled high on street corners everywhere, rats scuttled in and out of the drains, masked militia roamed with guns at the ready, looters smashed the windows of the few remaining stores, the currency had fallen to a new low, and now this. The roots, the leaves, were encroaching everywhere. They were twining around your window, they crept into the brickwork, they whispered into your dreams. They were tearing up the motorways, buckling the airport landing strips. The authorities realised this too late. They sent out men with huge machines, with vats of chemicals, or with flame throwers – but the flowers were implacable.

They took over the courthouses and the town hall, their sinuous curves as powerful and improbably beautiful as a serpent’s coils. The masonry crumbled. They grew too fast, they were too strong. Sometimes their suckers or feelers reached out for you, as though they yearned for your touch. The flowers were almost like faces, the two dark patches on their velvet petals seemed to stare, they turned to follow you as you walked past, to ask you who you were, where you were going, what did you dream of? Because you did begin to dream.

As their melancholy perfume rose over the town, a strange lassitude descended upon you. At first you fought it. You went to the office as usual, walking under the dim green canopy that now stretched from building to building. But as you sat in front of your computer, hearing it strike its familiar start-up tone, your eyelids began to droop. You held your lost lover in your arms in a sea of white orchids. You didn’t want to leave him, ever. When you finally woke up, your limbs were heavy but your pain was gone. You ate less. You drank less. You wanted less. You needed – less.

No one drove any more – the streets had buckled. The train tracks were a forest of green. The animals began to return. On your windowsill, when you woke briefly, sated with dreams and strangely calm, you found tiny jewel-like birds had built a nest. It was surrounded by plaited green strings, as though the plants were protecting the minuscule eggs within.

Now the mad king is slumped on his golden throne, a glimmering thread of spittle hanging from his mouth. His courtiers lie around him, felled by the flowers. It almost looks as though they are becoming plants themselves – their skin has a green and waxy look, their faces have an ashen pallor, the sockets of their eyes are darker, less human than before. The sound of gunfire, which has filled the streets for months now, has stopped. You smile as you open your window again, to hear the whirr of the wings of the humming-birds as they feed from the flowers. 

All rights reserved © Tabitha Potts