Photo by Belle Hunt on Unsplash
The branch pierced through my window under the veil of a thunderclap one night, and I let it remain there like it was a new addition on the house. Vines grew out of it, inched across the floors, and climbed the walls at a rapid rate. I sat following its trajectory for so long, I wasn’t sure if I had been staring at it for five minutes or five hours. My perception of time blurred. As the days passed, it split itself off and multiplied, giving birth to new pathways across my bedroom. Although its presence wasn’t necessarily welcomed, I found it fascinating how it didn’t stick to one path but sputtered out in different directions like that, that suffocating yet flourishing green stem.
The night it busted through our secluded house in the woods, after picking up the fallen shards of glass, I tried to grab one of the small stems to push the greenery back through the hole in the window. It refused my touch, remained stiff and immobile. After a while of trying and failing, I quit trying and restored my depleting energy. I avoided stepping within an inch of it after that. That was before it encompassed my entire room.
The vine was indifferent to anything that sat in its path. Like a white-water current, it plowed through any barriers. It knocked over a box of memories on my shelf and sent scatterings of family photographs across the floor. I tracked lightly around the giant stems and gathered up the photos within reach.
I glided the tip of my finger along the edges of a family photograph. This particular one was taken when I was a little younger. Dinner was in the oven when I had slipped in some candids of Mom sitting cross-legged on the couch. I took some of Dad as he had stood with his back toward her. The phone cord had dangled from his ear. Mom had held a frown and a tense demeanor, likely afraid that her suspicion of who might’ve been on the other line was correct. She had forgiven Dad for an affair he had a couple years back, but the trust between them never seemed to be rekindled.
In another photo, my brother Jimmy was pictured hovering above the open oven door sneaking bites from the pot roast minutes before it was done. I remember warning him of what happens when you eat uncooked meat, that someone from school had told me a legend of how zombies were made. He had held a look of fear and disgust, then lunged toward me with his hands outstretched like he was auditioning for the Michael Jackson thriller music video, and I took off running down the hallway.
As I got older, I discovered that I always wanted to be the one holding the camera. As often as I could, I would retrieve hold of mom’s camera and keep the frame directed outward. I never wanted to be the one in focus, as I grew tired of looking at the masked version of myself reflected in any picture of me. I’d rather be the one blurred in the background or excluded from the frame completely.
I had snuck off with the camera to the creek one day, and my leg had gotten stuck between two rocks and sent the camera flying out of my hands, knocking against a couple rocks before it sunk into the water. I avoided telling anyone about it. I clung to the hope that maybe they wouldn’t discover the loss. No one else in my family asked for photos anymore, anyway. Still, I missed shooting with that camera.
~
The following morning after the vine broke through, I woke to see its length had nearly doubled in size. Jimmy came in my room to borrow clean socks for school. He suppressed a downward smile as his head tilted at me in curiosity.
“Charlie, you see this, right?”
“Oh, no? When did that get there?” I said with a straight face. Sighing, I went on, “Yeah, it came in during the storm last night.”
He walked to the dresser and pulled out the first pair he could reach despite the limited space between the vine and furniture. “Well, you need any help getting it out?”
“No, thanks. I’m not worried about it,” I said.
“You’re not worried about a giant hole in your window or the giant branch nearly blocking all of your dresser drawers?”
“It’s fine.”
Jimmy shrugged, flung the socks over his shoulder, and left.
I kept my door shut and locked so it wouldn’t slip out into the hallway and crawl into my brother or parent’s rooms. The only time I left was for meals and school. Whenever I was out, I panicked that it would be discovered the minute I left. I kept an eye on its direction as it grew, which luckily veered right past the doorway.
For all I knew, my parents didn’t even know it was there. My window was facing the backyard and a tree next to the window hid most of the damage. Mom would stay in the basement almost all day when she got home from work, and Dad tucked away in his study. In an unspoken agreement, they avoided each other’s claimed spaces.
That night I knew I had to try again to get rid of it. I took the end of the vine and picked it up from the floor. This time it actually moved. I held my breath, clenched my teeth, and gripped the vine as I threw it out the window. I bent down toward a bigger section of remaining strands to continue threading it out of the room. I felt a wave of relief at the thought of getting this thing out. I glanced back at the window only to see the end I had thrown out sliding back in through the window. It didn’t want to leave. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought.
~
At school, I didn’t tell anyone about the vine, thinking no one would believe it’s incredible growth rate. Or they would resort to questioning why I haven’t heaved it back out the window and patched up the hole. Truthfully, I was weary of its presence. I suddenly felt out of place in my own room. Maybe some bugs or snakes would slip inside and slither off the vine and into my bed when I was sleeping. I would wake every night in a panic, expecting something to be crawling on my skin or to be strangled by the vines. And I couldn’t admit to anyone at school that I feared a piece of nature. It wasn’t the vine I feared, anyways. It was the uncertainty of what it would bring to me.
In the cafeteria, I overheard my friends talking plans for their futures-- colleges and majors. Another thing I avoided at all costs. They caught sight of me at the table behind them and told me to join them. The hard chair made me scooch around in a pointless attempt to find comfort and cushion as I fiddled with my brown paper bag. They extended the dreadful question to me. I gnawed on my fingernails.
“Botany,” I said. “Might be fun to study.”
“What’s got ya interested in plants all the sudden?” asked Brendan.
“I don’t know, it just came to me one day” I answered.
Brendan wanted to study political science. Lane wanted to be on Broadway one day, and always knew she’d go for musical theater.
Lane sensed my off behavior and leaned closer to ask if everything was all right. I assured her that everything was fine. She gave me a soft nudge with her shoulder and told me I should go to the movies with the group later that night.
“Can’t. I’ve got a mound to attend to at my desk.” I responded.
“Did you age 20 years since the last time we saw you?” Lane asked.
“I just have a lot of homework to catch up on.”
“Homework on a weekend?”
“I’m a little behind. It’s just getting kind of hard to stay on top of things.”
“Well, if you need help with anything, we’ll be around. We could help you catch up.”
I lay tucked away in my bed that night. I scrunched my toes when I realized they were untucked from the edge of the blanket, sitting inches away from the vine. I brought my feet up close enough to hug my knees. I sat motionless for a while.
I looked at the vine and considered its resemblance to a map. I imagined each one was a road or river I could explore, follow to a new place far away from here. I closed my eyes, envisioned the desert. I thought of going to the ocean, although the breeze and salty blue water wouldn’t supersede the fear of the unknown in the deep dark vastness of the sea. I considered moving to the city, but knew I’d be overwhelmed by the swarms of people there.
Where could I go?
~
I missed school for a couple days. It got to the point where I could no longer ignore the vine’s presence. It swirled around my vase of flowers. It coiled around the chair legs, coated my room in blanket of green, and swallowed my walls in its shadows. It even made its way to the ceiling. it covered my collection of books, CDs, and movies, posters, and photos. Almost all my belongings were obstructed from my view, hidden layers beneath these vines.
I marked the vine’s growth with pencil lines along my walls and tape on the floors in case it decided to shrivel up and disappear out the window. I wanted to be able to remember that it was real if it left.
Lane checked on me after a couple days of silence on my end. I opened the front door to see her standing on my front porch. She tilted her head as she greeted me with a soft smile, yet she held a look of consternation.
“Charlie, I was worried about you when you didn’t answer any of my texts. Have u gotten the flu?”
“No, I’m okay. I think it’s just a cold most likely. I’m hoping it’ll pass soon.”
She handed me the schoolwork I missed. “I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t fall behind. If you’d like, I can stay till dinner and help you get caught up.”
“Oh, thank you. I, um, I think I should be okay though. I’ll let you know if I have any questions.”
She looked down at her feet, “Okay, sure.” She looked up with a soft smile and turned to head down the steps.
“Lane?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks… for bringing this.”
“Feel better, Charlie.” The smile returned, brighter this time, and left.
I felt the urge to cry and call back out to her. But I didn’t. I shut the door and went back upstairs.
~
That night, I laid on the side of the bed not taken over by the unwanted guest. I lay awake for hours. I wanted to call Lane back and apologize. I wanted to want to be around them, out of this house, away from the vine. But I couldn’t leave.
Somewhere through the night I dozed off but woke to the sound of slithering. I jolted up, expecting a snake to be curling around my best post or hanging from the ceiling fan. It wasn’t a snake. The vine was moving, faster than it ever had, curling itself up toward me.
It wrapped itself around my feet in a tight grasp. It twisted and coiled up and around me. I felt my body being slid down, across the floor, slowly over the windowsill, until I caught a glimpse of the grass beneath me. The sun was too tired now and relinquished its warm cast upon the blades. The moon crept up to watch over the night. I felt cold, like I was crawling deeper into myself with each breath.
I wanted to be pulled away from these walls, slide into the night like a worm into its hole. With an insistent pounding, I felt a grip at my chest and an ache in my head. My breath quickened to an uncontrollable pace.
It brought me down along the bricks aligning the outside of the house. I was cushioned by its persistent grip as I fell to the ground. It released me on the lawn. I was free.
I felt the urge to run back inside, but I stood transfixed by the sight of its slithery decent away from me. It slipped through the sticks and mossy ground down the hill before the line of trees. Catching my breath back, I watched closely as it disappeared.
I stayed there for a while before I went back upstairs and was met with emptiness. I stepped into a void where the life had been stripped like the aftermath of a forest fire. I looked at my markings covering the room like a chalk outline mourning what once was.
I had drawn these lines, witnessed it consuming the room and consuming me and I let it stay. I saw the damaged window of my parent’s house. My friends would be miles away asleep after their night out. Why had I pushed them away when I needed them most? In a wave of guilt, I pulled loose the tape from the floors and erased the clusters of lines on the walls. I knew there was a chance that it would return one day. Maybe it would come back and drag me further next time, but all I could do was try to be prepared for it. I secured black tape to the edges of pulled-tight cellophane over the empty hole in my window.
Jessica Flanigan is an undergraduate at Missouri State University pursuing a BA in English - Creative Writing with a minor in Photography. She writes primarily literary fiction short stories, at times veering towards magical realism and science fiction.