It took Teddy first. This made sense in a way, because he was always running barefoot in the dirt and never washed his hands, but it was still surprising because he was a little boy and little boys are supposed to be immortal. Try as they like, though, no one could deny the evidence. Vines, thick and dark and twisted, growing from his shoulders and elbows and writhing around him like tentacles. Eventually, they would push up through his throat and nostrils and suffocate him. Mom and Dad would have lost it if they heard us whispering, but we all thought it was kind of funny, that what killed him wasn’t the presence of the vines in his skin and blood and bone, but just plain old suffocation. You could achieve the same effect with a pillow or a plastic bag.
On the third evening, after all the reporters and doctors and classmates who wanted to be on TV had gone home, Wren tried to pull one out of him. She was twelve to Teddy’s nine and thought her seventh-grade science class made her a biologist, so she marched into his room with all the bravado of someone who’d actually been to medical school and yanked at the tendril growing in the crook of his elbow before I could stop her. The vine didn’t give, but Teddy’s skin did, and I doubt any water cycle observation lab could have prepared her for all the blood. I followed her out of Teddy’s room-turned-experiment-center, trying to soothe her as she shrieked.
“What’s wrong?” Mom poked her head out of the bathroom, curling iron in hand. “Oh my God, Wren, what happened?” We hadn’t seen much of her recently—medical procedures made her nauseous—and the pitch of her voice and the wringing of her hands didn’t seem to calm Wren down all that much.
My sister collapsed onto the floor, a mess of tears and snot and blood, and trembled like the bird she was named after did when we found it on the cold winter ground. Dad knew he couldn’t save it, and Mom couldn’t even bear to look at it, so we buried it alive and named the next kid in its honor. I scooped her into my arms then, stroked her blonde hair. The blood had tinged the strands with a pink shade they would never quite lose, even when I buried her by the bird in the yard. By all logic she should have been the second to go, but our beautiful, brave Wren held on almost to the end.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered to her, even as our brother’s blood stained the carpet. She knew I was lying, and I knew I was lying, but I said it because that’s what older sisters do. I’d say the words a million times throughout the next months, and I’d only regret them once.
Teddy kept a good spirit through it all, so much so that we almost forgot it was happening to him and not just us. But one night two weeks into the whole mess, after I had helped Michael with his math homework—because we still did our homework then—I heard Teddy sobbing quietly. I rushed in, terrified, but found him simply sitting in bed, the same as he had been that morning.
“It hurts, Cass,” he mumbled.
“What hurts?” I asked, and he looked at me like I was an idiot. I had forgotten that his upper arms were almost invisible with how many vines curled across them. I had forgotten that he couldn’t bend his legs anymore. “Oh. Right. Sorry.”
“I can feel them stabbing at me. It hurts.”
I closed the door behind me and scooted into bed next to him. “I’m sorry, Ted. Do you want ibuprofen?” I didn’t know what else to offer.
He shook his head and stared up at me with his owlish blue eyes. “It doesn’t help. Nothing helps.”
“Not even ice cream?” It was a bad attempt at humor, a poorly placed wink-and-nudge, but it was all I could think to do. He smiled, although it seemed like he was trying to comfort me more than I had succeeded in comforting him.
“You’re an adult, right, Cass?”
I was prepared to answer ‘no’ before I realized that my eighteenth birthday had come five weeks ago. I was, technically. “Yeah. How come?”
“Am I gonna get better? Are they gonna be able to fix me? Or will I have to live like this forever?”
“The best doctors in the world are working on getting those things out of you, bud. You’ll be back to normal in no time.”
He snuggled into me, and I put my arm over his shoulder carefully, so I wouldn’t put too much pressure on the vines. I felt them squirm under my hand, as light and natural as breathing. I tried to imagine what it would look like if the doctors ever did manage to find a cure or an operation, if they managed to unwrap the tendrils from his bones and unthread them through his sinew and tendons and leave him whole. I couldn’t remember what he looked like before this, and I certainly couldn’t imagine him after .
“Cass?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I actually do want ice cream.”
“Alright. I’ll go get some. Vanilla, chocolate, or cookie dough?”
“Cookie dough.”
“Good choice.”
Teddy died a week and a half later, in the middle of the night. The twins found him—Erin screamed for me while Ethan tried to perform CPR. But he never did finish the training course, and he forgot everything he learned anyway when he saw the vines pushing through Teddy’s lips. We all gathered by the body, even Grace, even though she was only six. I figured the nightmares would find her regardless.
We started planning his funeral immediately. In exchange for the body, the scientists gave us checks big enough for our family to live comfortably for the next five generations, to put all of us through college ten times over, but Dad started planning to go back into the office anyway. He missed the energy, he said. He needed a distraction. Mom started going out with her book club friends nearly every day. We went back to school. Things were mostly normal again, except that no one would meet our eyes in class and Teddy’s room stayed locked. Sometimes, after Mom and Dad went to sleep, I would make brownies from a box mix and we would eat them with our backs pressed to his door; we’d always leave one set aside. Then one morning I woke up to find Michael in my room, coughing up leaves.
“Help,” he whispered, voice so raspy it hurt to hear.
I held his convulsing body and heard the leaves hit the carpet behind me. “It’s going to be alright,” I said. “I promise.”
The doctors took him away for a few days until I called and begged them to bring him back. He couldn’t speak anymore—the leaves were rough and dry and scratched his throat—but when they gave him paper and a pen he would only ever write about how he wanted to go home. I think they would’ve kept him despite our wishes if it weren’t for the cameras and the millions of sympathetic viewers, and the fact that they were worried it would spread to the other patients. They didn’t know if it was a virus. They didn’t know what it was.
Mom and Dad had a big fight the night they came home. They yelled at each other so loud it woke Grace and she started shrieking and I missed the brunt of the argument because I was trying to get her to go back to sleep. But the gist of it, as far as I could figure, was that Dad didn’t want the scientists in our house anymore, and Mom didn’t want Michael in our house anymore. Mom said she didn’t want us to watch him die—which really meant that she didn’t want to watch him die—and Dad said that there was nothing they could do for him. Nothing anyone could do for him. He was right, technically, but I hated watching him give up so soon.
Grace started to sleep in my bed. She used to make Michael sing to her at night, even though he was always a little off-key. I was always a lot off-key, but I didn’t mind the company or the hundreds of colorful hair ties she liked to put in my hair.
The doctors—I didn’t know any of their names, couldn’t identify any of their faces—were telling people it was a virus. They couldn’t think of any other reason why two siblings would both suffer from medically impossible plant-related phenomena. Wren thought it was aliens, but she had been on a Doctor Who kick so she thought everything was aliens. When Mom heard that it might be a plague, she tried to have him sent off to the hospital again, but the doctors wouldn’t let her, not now that they thought it could be transmitted. They told us not to leave home, which was fine with me. I couldn’t stand the thought of not being here if Michael died. I couldn’t stand not thinking of it as an ‘if’.
I caught Mom sneaking in one night. I was in the kitchen making a milkshake to surprise Michael—he couldn’t eat solids anymore—when I heard footsteps from the front hall. I flicked on the light switch and saw her, red hair in a bun on the top of her head, matching lipstick freshly applied. She gasped when she saw me, and the expression on her face seemed nearly guilty until she remembered she was my mother.
“What are you doing up?” she asked me, like I was the one in trouble.
“The doctors said not to leave the house.”
She fidgeted with the clasp of her handbag. “I was just out with the book club girls. They all said they’re not worried. About getting sick, that is. They’re terrified for us.”
“Okay, but the doctors said not to leave the house at all, ever. Especially not to a big meeting.” I said this like it would convince her, but I knew it wouldn’t. She wasn’t even listening. Before all this she and Dad would go on weekend trips, leaving me to watch the kids for days at a time. I guess I thought they’d grow up by themselves when it really mattered.
“Cassidy, you don’t understand. I need to leave the house. I need to get out. I’ll go insane if I don’t. I need this.”
I opened my mouth to tell her it was selfish, that she was being selfish, but I didn’t have the energy to say it. It wouldn’t save Michael. It wouldn’t save any of us.
“Okay,” I said. “Goodnight.”
I walked upstairs and crept into bed, where Grace was sound asleep in a nest of her stuffed animals. Michael loved the milkshake, but he died three days later. Coughed so hard he ruptured his diaphragm. The doctors tried to do surgery on him, turned the basement into a makeshift operating room, but the ever-growing pile of leaves in his lungs caused complications, and he never made it out.
We didn’t go back to school this time. The doctors tested us every morning for every illness or sickness they could think of, but we were perfectly healthy. Mom kept sneaking out at night. Dad bought us all headstones, just in case. I learned to bake. Wren liked the cinnamon rolls. Erin and Ethan liked the cupcakes. Grace liked everything.
Twenty days after Michael died, Grace woke up with flowers growing from her eyes. They were beautiful, pale pinks and purples, and they smelled like spun sugar. Flowers that colorful didn’t grow around here. They didn’t hurt her, thank God, but she couldn’t see anymore, so I had to hold her hand everywhere she went. We knew the drill by this point. So did the doctors. They stopped trying to save her and started trying to record her. They took hair samples, skin cells, blood. Anything they could put in their reports, any research they could sell.
The people watching us on the news all sent flowers. Tactless, if you asked me, but Grace liked the smell so we kept them. For an afternoon our house looked like something out of a fairytale, all colorful and bright and stuff, but by the next morning every single flower had wilted.
“How do we help her?” Wren asked one night. Her hair retained its slight pinkish color, still stained with Teddy’s blood.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we can. Whatever this is, it seems pretty stubborn.”
“But she’s only six,” Wren whispered, as if that made a difference.
“I know.”
“Why is this happening?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched and childlike. I remembered how young she was, how young they all were.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not fair.”
“I know, honey. I know. But it’s going to—it’s going to be okay.”
Unlike Michael, Grace talked the whole time. She couldn’t see, so she relied on the second-best source of information. “What’s going on?” became the refrain of the era, spoken about every five seconds to ensure she never be left out of the loop. We always told her, even if the answer was just “nothing”. She was never satisfied, though, always convinced we were hiding something interesting and beautiful from her out of pity. But the only sights were the house she’d lived in her whole life and the white lab coats of the doctors she never liked.
Grace’s sickness got the most pity from the general public. By now, they all knew what would happen, and it was so sad to see such a young girl go through something so horrible. Mom and Dad still thought it was a good idea to allow the news reporters in our house, so nearly all of the final moments of her life were spent under camera. People sent gifts, though. Food, toys, even books written in Braille. We considered teaching her, for a while, but we realized she might not be around long enough for it to matter.
Mom cooed over Grace like she never did the rest of her dead children. Grace had always been her favorite, simply by virtue of being the youngest. Kids are easier to love before they’re really people. I caught her crying by Grace’s bedside once, mourning the only child who had yet to disappoint her. Dad only visited when I begged him to.
“What’s the point?” he asked. “It won’t save her.”
Grace died a few days later. The flowers were toxic, it turned out. They had been destroying her bloodstream the whole time.
I threw up in her bathroom after the funeral, then examined the puke for twigs or grass or any sign I would be the next to go. But there was nothing in there except the muffin I had scarfed down that morning—strawberry. Grace’s favorite.
Then it was just me, Wren, and the twins. Three doors on our hallway locked tight, three remaining. We all wondered who would be the next to go. We knew the symptoms wouldn’t show until it was too late, but I checked all three of them every day. Mostly it was just an excuse to hold them, to memorize the freckles on the twins’ faces and the birthmark on Wren’s left hand. We all had the same eyes, dark blue and terrified and puffy from crying, but other than that none of us looked much alike. Besides the twins, of course. I didn’t believe in telepathy—still don’t, although I believe in a lot more now than I used to—but there was always something uncanny about how they communicated paragraphs in two-word phrases. They barely spoke at all after Grace died. At fifteen, the oldest after me, I wonder if they could feel something the others never could. I wonder if they knew they were next.
Mom and Dad left in the middle of the night. No fanfare, no goodbyes, just a page-long letter of apologies and excuses. I threw it out with the empty Eggo boxes and wished I was surprised.
“What if they get sick?” the doctors asked, shocked at our abandonment.
“They won’t,” I said. I couldn’t give them proof, but I knew our parents would be fine as clearly as I knew we wouldn’t. There was nothing fertile in them. Nowhere to take root.
Wren wouldn’t stop screaming. At first, I thought it had come for her at last, but they were only screams of grief. I had forgotten that some things could still be explained logically.
“Where are they?” she asked, her voice a high-pitched birdsong.
“I don’t know. Probably in a car, headed somewhere warm. I bet they want to go to Turks and Caicos or Hawaii or something, but they’d never be able to get on a plane without being mobbed.” She didn’t actually want to know, she just wanted them to come back, which I didn’t realize until she started screaming again. I wrapped her in my arms, the same way I had in the hallway when Teddy had first gotten sick.
“Everything will be alright,” I murmured, and my stomach twisted with regret at the lie.
Most people would say that dying of an inexplicable, incurable disease is worse than being abandoned by your parents, but I can now say with certainty that this is a misconception. Teddy, Michael, and Grace were the lucky ones.
I called the scientists.
“No more,” I told them. “Let us die in peace.”
They argued, of course. “We’re trying to help you. We’re trying to save you.”
“Then save us,” I said. “If you can find some way to stop this, you can run all the tests you want. But if anyone else dies, I’m locking our doors.” I had legal jurisdiction, I told them. After all, I was the adult.
I continued doing what I had been doing. Make breakfast, make lunch, make dinner. Clean up after each meal. Everyone alive at that point was old enough to do their own laundry, and none of us cared about making beds or tidying rooms, so that was pretty much it. It was the same as before, mostly, only worse. The gifts didn’t stop. I had to leave most of the food at the doorstep because it wouldn’t fit in the kitchen and I didn’t know how to cook anything from scratch, but we took in the board games with open arms. We played them all, solved every jigsaw puzzle twice. When it came to teams it would always be me and Wren against the twins. No one ever suggested switching things up, so we didn’t. At night, I stared out the window, looked at the forest behind our house. The trees looked so strong and tall and alive, something I could not reconcile with the tiny, overgrown bodies of my dead siblings. I begged them to have mercy, to let us go or kill us quick.
It was no surprise that the twins got sick together. None of us could have imagined anything else. But it was still a punch in the gut to hear their muffled sobs coming from their room, to walk in and see them clutching their bark-covered arms.
“It’s happening to us,” Erin said, as if it wasn’t obvious. They were fifteen, probably too old to be babied, but I tucked them into bed and brought them box-mix cake anyway.
The doctors stormed in, frantic with their needles and tests to make the most of their last chance to change the world of science forever. And as much as I hated their disruption of our already shaken home, I couldn’t help but hope that medicine would be enough of a miracle to save us.
Wren kept bringing the twins gifts. One day it was a bracelet she had made in fifth grade, another her old favorite stuffed animal. She never actually gave any of it to them, just left all the stuff outside their door for me to bring in in the morning. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but I was pretty sure she felt like she should have been the next one to get sick. Survivor’s guilt, or whatever you call it when you know you’re all going to die anyway.
As the days passed, the bark grew, making their limbs too heavy to move. I had to feed them every meal, bring cups to their mouths for them to drink. I could hear the scientists yelling in the living room with each day that passed, with each day the twins got worse. It was almost like our parents were still here. Ethan and Erin barely talked anymore, not to me or Wren, but at night I heard them whispering to each other. I went weeks without leaving their bedside for more than forty minutes, and I would have stayed longer. They felt it coming, this time. Ethan told me during lunch.
“We’re going to die soon,” he said, his mouth one of the only body parts not yet wooden. “We think it’ll be tomorrow.”
I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just asked, “Are you sure?” The twins and I had never really been close—our age gap was too small for them to look up to me and too big for us to be equals—so I wasn’t sure how to comfort them.
“Yeah,” Erin said. “We are.”
“It’s not your fault, though,” Ethan told us. “You did the best you could.”
“Can I bring Wren in to say goodbye?” I asked.
Ethan nodded, as best as he could with the bark up to his neck. “We want to thank her for the gifts.”
I had wanted to give them space to talk alone, but she wouldn’t go in without me. She was sick of the smell of death: damp and earthy, like soil after the rain.
“Just so you know,” Erin told her. “It doesn’t hurt as bad as you think it does.”
Wren started crying, quietly. “I’m scared.”
“So are we,” Ethan said.
They fell asleep around eleven at night. I couldn’t sleep a wink, which meant I heard them stop breathing at four A.M. I switched the lights on, and they were all wood. No heartbeat.
Wren didn’t want to see, so I called the scientists right away. I gave them the bodies and told them not to come back. Their irate mutterings followed them out the door and down the street, but I took no comfort in the house’s new quiet.
I had always had an abundance of siblings—a whole nest of tiny creatures, mouths always open, looking for snacks or wardrobe advice or homework help. First came the twins, born when I was only three and too young to remember. Then Michael, five-year-old me’s little dress-up doll. Wren, our little bird, came only a year after, and I spoiled her with my old toys and clothes and jewelry. At the rebellious age of nine, I wanted nothing to do with baby Teddy, but I realized soon after that my not wanting him wouldn’t stop him from needing me, and he was by far the happiest infant of the bunch. I was thirteen when Grace came along, and my newfound status as a teenager had convinced me I was pretty much a grown-up, pretty much her second mom. My first phone, still stashed in the top drawer of my dresser, is full of pictures and videos of her every life milestone. I brought it out a few weeks ago, but haven’t mustered the courage to go through it.
Seven kids is a lot for two people. That’s what everyone always said. I guess they were right, in a way. So what about two? Just the oldest and the bird, playing a half-assed game of Uno in a silent house, counting down the days until one of them dies.
“What if it’s you?” she asked over breakfast one morning.
“What?” I asked, even though I already knew what she was talking about.
“Cass, what if you get sick instead of me? What do I do then?”
I had considered it extensively. Even wished for it, on nights when I was feeling particularly selfish. But I knew it was a lost cause. I could feel, somehow, that whatever this was wouldn’t let me go until I had seen our family through to the last. It might never let me go at all.
“It won’t be,” I promised. I’d never seen someone so relieved to find out they would die.
It hit her gently. I think it was as tired as we were, at that point. She skinned her knee one morning and moss came out instead of blood. Simple, clean. It never hurt, or at least she never admitted it, and I didn’t really want to know the truth.
She insisted on unlocking all the doors. First Teddy’s, then Michael’s, then Grace, then the twins’. She slept in a different one each night. The only room we left alone was Mom and Dad’s—it wasn’t locked, never had been, but neither of us wanted to touch it. When she got too sick to move, she slept in my room.
“What will you do?” she asked me, three nights before she died. “After.”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. I couldn’t remember life before them, life before hair-braiding and football-throwing and giving advice for situations I didn’t know how to handle. There was no life after them.
In theory, if none of this had happened, I would have gone to college eventually. I would have left them behind. But I think I would have found a way to stay. Community college, maybe, or a gap year that turns into two that turns into three. But I never needed to think of excuses not to leave them, because they left me first.
Wren died mid-morning. I lay with her body for an hour after, stroking her hair and crying. I buried her in the yard, only the ground was so cold it took me days to make a big enough hole. It was the first time I’d truly looked at any of them after they died, and I was shocked by how pretty she was. Moss broke through cracks in her arms, her legs, her face, growing soft and curly and green. It was still growing, I realized, still alive even when she wasn’t. By the time I finally put her in the earth, there was no flesh bare.
I wondered what it would take to bring them back, if I could chop down a forest and build my siblings out of wood, like those big baby dolls they give to women who have miscarriages. I’d take care of them, I begged and bargained with whatever was listening. I’d feed them and clean their rooms and it wouldn’t matter that it was just me. I would be enough.
It’s unfair, really, that the supernatural turned out to exist after all, but only one way. Leaf-lungs and bark-skin and moss-blood can kill you, but they can’t bring you back.
It’s been three weeks now. I’ve spent them pacing the empty halls, ironically ghost-like, and checking myself desperately for any sign of plant growth. I was worried it wouldn’t come, that it would take away my whole family and leave me tending to a too-big, too-empty house until the sun exploded and killed all the flowers. I received a letter from my parents. They had seen the news. They knew I was the last one left. They were sorry. They weren’t coming home. I ripped the letter up and swallowed the pieces with breakfast. I cried in the shower.
But this morning I woke up with a sharp pain in my chest and a cry for help that died on my tongue. When my vision focused in the mirror, I couldn’t bring myself to be surprised. Growing straight out of my heart, through the bloody hole in my shirt: roots. Thick, dark, twisting roots. I breathed in. I breathed out. I went back to bed.
image: page 367 of Anton Joseph Kerner von Marilaun, Adolf Hansen: Pflanzenleben: Erster Band: Der Bau und die Eigenschaften der Pflanzen. (1913), Public Domain, Wikimedia