MicroHorror

I don’t remember the vines being there when I signed the lease, but I noticed them one morning as I ate breakfast.

“They’re trumpet vines,” my roommate told me when she caught me staring. She walked over eating a bagel covered in pimento cheese. She majors in Botany over at State. I met her the day after I moved in. I had needed a new roommate. And this one didn’t seem to smoke or steal. So far that was good enough.

I peered out through the weathered glass at our one lone tree and stared at the banana-like lumps dangling from the branches.

“The pod things are seeds,” she continued. “It grows up from the ground, you see, and attaches itself to nearby plants.”

“Does it kill them?” I asked.

She shrugged, and a bit of cheese that had been dangling from her mouth fell to the floor. “Maybe. They’re probably not good for the tree. I’ll have to weed them out.”

Friday I came home to find her outside, panting and drenched in sweat as she hunched over a surprisingly large pile of pulled up-brown weeds.

“It grows under the ground. It spreads under there.” She wiped her pink forehead with her arm. “I don’t remember learning that in class,” she said.

She was back in the yard the next day. She woke me up when she clanged the ladder against the side of the house and clambered up its rungs. I opened my blinds to the sight of her trying to balance her weight on the ladder while fighting with heavy metal clippers.

“It’s in the gutters,” she yelled from her perch when I went out to see what was so important she had to address it before nine on a Saturday. “It’s ripping apart the gutters. We’ll have to tell the landlady.”

When I came back later that day from buying groceries, she scared me to the brink of dropping my eggs all over the place when she popped out of the crawl space beneath the house.

“It’s under the house now, tangled around the pipes and stuff.”

“Oh?” I said.

“It’s very good at adapting, I guess. It can grow deep into the dirt, and it doesn’t need much light.”

She followed me into the house and watched as I unloaded my groceries and began doing the dishes, banging the utensils down with a little more force than was necessary. “You know,” she said. “It might not be a trumpet vine after all.”

I slept in the next day. When I woke up, it was past noon. As I stumbled my way towards the bathroom, I tripped over one of the wooden floor panels. Bending down, I saw that the vine had pushed it up from underneath. When I entered the bathroom I noticed dry yellow leaves growing out the toilet, and a banana pod popping out of the opened tub drain.

In the living room, the walls crinkled from the pressure of thin vine segments growing behind the paint.

I moved carefully towards the kitchen. After examining the sink, I used a fork to pry the junk out of it so I could get a glass of water. I looked around at my silent house, at the plant life that pressed in at me from all angles.

I wondered if I could think of it as a new roommate. I needed one. And this one didn’t seem to steal or smoke. Or talk.

So far that was good enough.