The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Transformations
by Christina Sng

The plants grew rapidly,
Overnight, across cities.

They engulfed the world
While we were sleeping.

*

We were on a red-eye
When we heard the news.

I looked out our window
And there—a blanket of green

Shrouding our streets,
Suffocating everything

Trapped under its roots,
Vines, and leaves.

Our pilot could not land
So we turned to the desert,

Clasping each other in grief,
Wondering if those we loved

Could have survived,
Safe inside a place with supplies

Or did the green extend
Inside those spaces too,

Leaving them with
No air to breathe?

We tried not to think about it
But focused instead

On the expanse of sand beneath,
The curve of its dunes,

Hypnotizing us
With its smoothness

As if everything would be alright
Even though, deep down I knew,

Without plant life,
We were doomed.

We flew over cities
Completely green,

Tendrils snaking outwards
Across the desert—

Racing like streaks across
Watercolor paper,

Leaving us with only one place
Left to go.

*

We landed on the warship,
Grateful to be on ground again.

They told us all landmasses
Were covered in foliage

And everyone we knew
Was likely dead.

Twenty days later, I stood
With my children on the deck,

Watching the green landmass
Before us as we circled to observe.

The air never felt cooler or fresher,
The sky never as clear or blue.

“What happened?”
I asked one of the officers.

“One of our botanists learned
To communicate with the plants.

She asked them,
‘How can we mend the Earth?’

This was their response.”
She paused.

“Humanity tried but failed.
It was their turn now and they did it,

At a great cost to us.
But they healed the Earth.”

We stood and waited silently
For the world to reset.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Christina Sng:

A Collection of Nightmares

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Available on Amazon!