Days are seconds to her. Her stomata blink as she breathes. She comes inside through a broken window, where she is welcomed by the musty smell of unmoving air and the old rug fluffy with mould — a home to dust mites and parasol mushrooms.
There are no words for her springy shoots and resilient roots, not anymore. None of her many tendrils can be named. As she silently explodes in the living room, days and nights flashing like a strobe light, her chloroplasts are full and heavy, her offshoots ready to devour.
If there were a single pair of seeing eyes left in the world, they might find a certain beauty in her indifference, dignity even, watching her move about the room. Tiptoe around the broken wine glasses. Gather the scattered Scrabble pieces. Climb the flat-screen TV. Give the sofa a new, leafy look. Or push a plastic eye out of a doll’s head.
Calmly, she incorporates the warm socks and bottles of expensive perfume and crime novels and kinky underwear and dry spruce needles and self-help books and wooden farm animals and electronic gadgets and bits of decorative paper and jewellery and emptied blister packs into the vibrant tangle of her growing body. As omnipresent as she is, though, she couldn’t tell the dead Christmas tree from the dangling bones.
Slowly but steadily she engulfs the other rooms: the dim and humid bathroom, the spacious kitchen overlooking the green motorway, the two quiet bedrooms. It seems inevitable that her turgor pressure will hold the furniture in eternal entrapment. That the rooms will be renamed after her vacuoles. If there were a single beating heart left in the world, it might find solace in the thought that the flower pots, the empty aquarium and the tiny ribcage will once again host life.
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'Cellulose' was previously published in Mojave Heart Review in September 2018.
I loved this piece - wonderful soulful writing!
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