Annie sweltered under an indifferent sun and mourned the languishing. At best, all she could offer was palliative care, her once-beautiful garden now a hospice. It didn’t seem fair, all those reports of strange storms in other cities, when her little patch of the world hadn’t seen rain in months. Water restrictions limited lawn care to once a week. Neighborhood lawns crinkled a struggling brown like the stucco sides of their houses. They were allowed to manually water landscaping and gardens twice a week, but in this unprecedented heatwave, it wasn’t even close to enough.
And now her babies—whom she’d cultivated from seedlings, some for years, or rescued from her parents’ home after their deaths so she could have something living left of them—were dying.
Still, nothing short of the sun swallowing the sky would keep Annie out of her garden, humming to her suffering children in hopes that it lifted their spirits. Sweating through her sundress, fanning herself under her wide-brimmed hat, she sang and kept her eye on the flat horizon, where the first puffs of clouds she’d seen in months had congregated.
She cursed the other cities—despite the kinds of news reports coming from storm-zones, and the reports not coming from some places at all—and prayed to the Good Lord Jesus for sweet, sweet rain. Even a flood would be preferable, a frosty glass of arsenic in a vast desert, mocked by mirages.
But the clouds weren’t mirages. And was that a breeze on her skin? A warm breeze, yes, but better than the pounding hot of a parched summer. The rustling of wilted flowers and yellow leaves and grass sounded like giddy whispers.
All along her street, back doors opened and closed. Families talked among each other and to their neighbors over fences, but all Annie had were her plants, and she was happier listening to them giggle in the breeze as it shifted into wind and the undersides of the clouds darkened gray.
Only when the first drops hit her skin did she finally spare tears to weep. She left her hat on the garden bench as she danced in the rain for the first time in decades. Her pores, her mouth, even her tastebuds seemed to open like the cracked earth to gulp the water in. She stayed out in the rain with her thirsty, drinking plants until she was happily shivering with cold.
***
When she awoke the next morning, the quality of light through the blinds was stark but distorted and filtered as though through derecho clouds. Annie groaned, squinting away from it, but turning to darkness didn’t change how strange she felt. She usually woke just after dawn, but when she peeked through heavy eyelids, her alarm clock read nine in the morning. She dismissed the strangeness of the light as a product of the later hour and the ill-fitting quality of her body to an incipient cold. Perhaps she’d danced for too long in the wet chill of the well-welcomed rain.
She donned her dressing gown, then switched on her bedroom coffee machine. In her opinion, every day should start with hot coffee and grass under bare feet to greet the morning sun—even during a drought, but especially after a good rain.
Annie wrinkled her nose at the first sip. Perhaps the milk in her mini-fridge had spoiled or the grounds had gone bad, although they’d tasted fine the previous morning. She left the coffee mug on the bar. Then she unlocked and opened the French doors leading to her backyard.
She staggered, and her heel caught on the uneven stone tile. Annie collapsed under the new verdant excess of her garden—but it wasn’t her garden anymore, and it wasn’t splendid, this rich, vibrant green stretching to the storm-studded sky.
Her beautiful flowers—old, new, heritage, vintage, cherished—and the soft clusters of grass, the vegetable rows, all had been choked by serpentine vines and stalks climbing up any structure they could find. From mounds of churned soil, lamprey-mouthed earthworms spilled and writhed. White sacs tumbled among and away from them, what was within pressing against the membrane in anticipation of emergence.
Her custom bird-feeder had been overrun, tendrils wrapped around the wrung necks of her favorite visitors as well as the squirrels who scavenged beneath. Plant sprouts had replaced eyes in their sockets, their little claws and talons new places for the tendrils to curl and climb.
As Annie pulled herself back to her feet with the porch chair, her hands were stiffer than usual. She didn’t want to see what she was seeing on her skin, but it peeked out through the dressing gown sleeve, too, as something slipped cold and clammy down her back and something else crawled up her leg.
Whimpering, she wrenched her arms out of the dressing gown, shaking it off in revulsion. Little white grubs with prickly legs and tiny bloody teeth dotted the robe but also her nightgown. On her arms, bare for summer, from once-thirsty pores crept the same green sprouts as from the animals’ eyes. They looked like the alfalfa she put in her sandwiches and salads, but they grew so much faster, especially now that they’d found the sunbeams between the storms. And out other pores wriggled the bloody grubs, chewing their way to the surface and plopping wetly on the stone around her. She felt no pain, only growing things. Annie heaved, expelling a red-speckled, wormy vomit.
Now she screamed. Through the wending weeds in her ears, she thought she heard others, but then a rumble of thunder preceded another gentle fall of rain.
Author bio: A mass of tentacles and rose vines masquerading as a person, Amanda M. Blake is the author of horror titles IN THE DOLLHOUSE WE ALL WAIT, QUESTION NOT MY SALT and DEEP DOWN, dark poetry collection DEAD ENDS, and the Thorns fairy tale mash-up series. Alt-historical plague novel MASQUE has been acquired by Quill & Crow for publication in 2027. For more, visit amandamblake.com.