ONE. The plants started to take over twenty years ago. In my Modern History class, I learned that the first signs of takeover were seen in the backgrounds of old photographs people had uploaded to the web: tree trunks with grimey textures creeping up from the ground; brightly colored vines wrapping themselves around plant stalks, their small circumferences accounting for their ability to keep proliferating in the shadows. It was in rural Wisconsin that the first case is said to have arisen. A reclusive old farmer had been feeding his cows when the weeds beneath his feet had supposedly wound themselves around his body, rising until they were choking him. He was found a couple of days later by his grandson, who reported a picture of the scene to the scientific authorities. The snapshot enclosed in our textbooks showed a picture of the man, bluish with asphyxiation, enclosed in the weeds. The plants around his corpse were dying already; evidence to their own fallibility. The case was passed off before even reaching the hands of a phytologist. The grandson’s name was Derek, and he was a postman whose scientific knowledge was restricted to a high school Biology class he’d failed, but it was he who made the key observation that saved us all. Derek, in the midst of auctioning the farm off, was most perplexed by the fact that all the cows on the farms were absolute bonkers. He was sure that they must’ve been healthy, happy cows that had been fed and adored all their lives, but they were now simply refusing to eat anything; from hay to grass to grain. He also noticed that they were astonishingly jumpy all the time, seemingly unable to keep their hooves on the ground. In his later diaries, he described the sight as ‘a few dozen unhinged cattle, behaving as if the ground was on fire and thrashing around in an unseeming manner’. Rumors spread of the farm being possessed by a spirit of the dead farmer, who was said to have been a grumpy old man, and it remained unsold. It lay there like a useless lump of extremely fertile land, with a couple of cows that were dropping off one by one, dying of hunger. Derek found this development rather
despairing.
He
went
into
town
to
buy
a
few
books
on
cattle
management, and tried everything to fix the cows, from dousing them in saltwater to coaxing them into eating some tasty oats. It was while Derek was doing so that the Earth under him attempted to betray him in the same manner that took away his grandfather.
