Weekly Writing – February 25 2023

I woke up that morning in what had become the usual sticky haze of dread, five hours of sleep sawn apart by moaning, senseless dreams, to find that the vines had finally started prying their way around the door.
A dozen specifications, schematics, and statistic said that should have been impossible, but the fact had stopped comforting me days before. I had watched through the exterior cameras and an inch-high gap at the bottom of the window shutters, solid steel, while the vines ate everything else they shouldn’t have been able to on their way to me. The jeeps and fences, pavement and floodlights, so the nights were just a black hum, the rustling, maddening, constant sound of them growing closer.
Deeper. Thicker over the skeletons of what they had consumed, skeletons that seemed to deflate day by day, the jeeps and metal poles and slouching fences and everything that had made sense sinking down flatter than debris, flatter than should have been possible, digested somewhere under the rustling green.
I should have tried to run days before that. But I drew the short straw, stay and monitor, keep the systems running. Too dangerous to leave it all to the vines.
Stay and wait. They all pretended to be sure that rescue would come for me. They would send someone back for me.
The fact they haven’t means either they abandoned me, or drawing that short straw was the luckiest thing I ever did. A few more days to live. Anyone dying, strangled and buried and digested out there, would have begged for just that.
The last burst of static blurted from the radio two days ago. I ran to it, desperate to say something, anything, to anything other than what was chewing its way towards me outside. Not even to beg for help – just to be heard, after days of the walls mocking my voice back to me.
But when I snatched up the microphone, recited the station’s call sign mantra-fast, lips cracking with dehydration and the mad hope of it, there was no answer.
Just that second of static, like a cough in an empty room. I babbled at the microphone for half an hour while my lips bled, but only the vines answered.
Just small tendrils, draped around the door like fingers curling for a better grip. I sipped my coffee, instant crystals not doing nearly enough to bitter away the sour taste of recycled water, and stared at the calamity I had been waiting for. The end in slow motion.
Would there still be a door when I woke up the next morning? I didn’t have to stay to find out. Reaching out to touch those vines would be easier than the dreams. Walking out the back door, even if I did have to dismantle a hallway’s worth of my own haphazard barricade first, would be easier.
I sipped my coffee, and watched, and didn’t decide. Not yet. The radio sat silent on the desk, and the curlicue tips of the vines bobbed in no breeze, but, just maybe, in anticipation.