The small greenhouse Nicholas never tends to anymore waits in the distance. The gentle green-gold lightpulses through the grime on the window panes, beckoning me forward.
Inside, the vines wait for me with the beautiful glow I have spent the last year studying and have come to love. I run my fingers over it and it seems, impossibly, to reach back—the tendrils drift upward with a responsiveness I have catalogued and re-cataloged a dozen times without ever truly being able to explain to my own satisfaction.
I reach to touch the small luminescent flowers that are always present in the cemetery, wrapped around the vine like two small lovers clinging to one another. They are warm against my fingers, pulsing with a light that is softer and yellower than the Verdant Vespera’s harsh green. I have been studying them separately for months—they seem to moderate the vine’s growth rate and suppress its invasive root, almost as if it soothes it into dormancy.
I open my journal and read through the process.
Flowers may complicate integration and introduce unpredictable variables into the grafting process. Remove before the procedure.
For a moment I stare down at the two specimens, hesitating to separate them.
I untwine them carefully and set the last of the flowers on the bench. I look at them, lined up, their warm glow fading as the seconds tick by.
Then I sweep them into the waste bin.
A strange sadness moves through me, a grief so sourceless and sudden that it stops me, my hand poised over the bin as I frown, puzzled by the emotion.
I straighten, pushing it away as I turn my attention back to the vine, reaching for a scalpel.
The slit along the vine's length goes cleanly, the small blade parting the tissue in a perfect thin line. The sap beads along the cut, luminous and warm and viscous just as I have noted in every extraction—alive in a way that no inorganic compound has any right to be.
I prepare a clean, sanitized scalpel.
I prep the needle and thread.
I stand there with the scalpel in my hand. The greenhouse is very quiet.
I think of Nicholas’s warm kiss.
I think of Hawthorne bringing me roses from the garden.
I think of Agnes’s rosy cheeks and dimpled smile.
I think of decades more with the three of them.
I lift the scalpel to my throat and my hands are perfectly steady, because the decision is already made, because decisions made with determination carry their own strange and terrible calm, because I am a botanist and a researcher and a woman who loves her life and intends to keep it.
I make the incision, slitting my skin from one side of my neck to the other.
The pain is real and immediate, and though I had accounted for it in my calculations, I had not accounted for itsufficiently. Pain experienced is different from pain anticipated, and the body has its own response to being opened that no calculation entirely captures. I breathe through it and reach for the vine with my free hand, knowing that once this is over, all the pain will go away.
The vine threads into the incision with an eagerness that would have alarmed me in any other context. It knows the warmth of living tissue, has been reaching toward it since I first found it in the cemetery—and now, given entry, it advances with the hunger of something that has been waiting for exactly this. I guide it, my hands slipping with blood and sap, the light of the vine painting everything green-gold as it finds its way into the structures I have drawn so many times on paper.
It hurts.
The tendrils leech to every muscle, every artery, pulling and sucking as it slides down my throat and up into my brain.
I press forward. I thread and graft and push and hold, my hands working with a sureness that I am grateful for because I do not know how much longer I will be able to hold them steady.
But now I must close the opening.
This is where the calculation had the widest margin—the window between the vine being sufficiently integrated to hold and the blood loss reaching the point where I can no longer perform the suturing. I had estimated it, and sitting here now with blood running freely into the collar ofmy nightgown and my vision beginning to gray at the edges, I understand that I had estimated it incorrectly.
My hands are covered in blood and sap, slick and sticky.
The thread keeps sliding, the needle difficult to grip, my fingers responding with a delay that tells me something about blood pressure and oxygen that I would find clinically interesting under other circumstances. I manage two sutures. Then three. The wound is holding but I am not, my body doing what bodies do when they have been opened and have lost more blood than they can comfortably spare.
I need help.
