Elizabeth finds the bur in Alex’s bedsheets and somehow manages not to completely lose her shit. It’s just a bur. It could have come in with Georgia, their border collie, or on a sock or pantleg. Epizootic dispersion. Plain and simple. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean the worst thing. Gently, she pinches it loose and holds it to the light.

It’s probably nothing.

And yet…

Elizabeth isn’t in the habit of tidying her twelve-year-old’s bedroom or stripping his linens while he’s off at his father’s for the weekend. Her sprucing up is a ruse, a plot she’s been hatching for weeks because she knows, she knows, in the clenched pit of her stomach that whatever’s wrong with her boy is getting worse.

Because a bur is just a bur until it’s not.

Tamping down her dread, she shakes out the duvet. Bits of leaf and thistle flutter in the dust, speckling the carpet.

She’d hoped for cigarettes. Pot, even. Anything but proliferation.

Elizabeth runs her tongue over the cauterized stem jutting from her lower right gumline, a vestige of her own brush with biological invasion. She’d been sixteen, and as such, a witting host to the strain that stained her teeth and muted her every desire save for sunlight and water. By the time her parents started the prescribed defoliation, the woody roots threading her mandible were too fixed to weed without injury.

A benign disfigurement, the doctors called it.

Stooping, Elizabeth attempts to parse a timeline from the detritus. Seed to seed. The pods already dried to a crisp. It’s a xanthium of sorts. She doesn’t recognize the sub-species. She isn’t a botanist, just a survivor—and a mother.

What’s clear is Alex lied. Not once, but for months on end. She’d asked him back in June if he’d felt something germinating, back when he’d first retreated inward, when he started locking his door at night and taking too long in the bathroom. She’d suspected then.

Alex denied it, and Elizabeth, not knowing what was puberty and what was hostile takeover by an invasive plant, dropped the subject altogether.

She let it go. Chalked it up to hormones.

Elizabeth takes out her phone to text Cal, her ex. “I’m picking Alex up early. He’s sick,” she types and then deletes it.

She’d never told Cal her secret. She’d never let him kiss her deep enough to know the root of her shame. Instead, she was frigid, as Cal liked to say. Untrusting. She accused him of unfaithfulness when really, it was she who’d been living a lie. He called her paranoid.

She is paranoid.

Elizabeth’s phone screen dims to black. He’ll say Alex is fine. He’ll chide her hypervigilance. Her botanic panic. She can’t explain to Cal how she knows what she knows.

And if she’s wrong?

She prays she’s wrong.

Resignedly, Elizabeth gathers up the dirty sheets. She’ll run a load of wash. She’ll vacuum. What’s another day? Another stem? Another seed? He’ll be fine.

She’s fine. Completely fine.

That night, Elizabeth doesn’t sleep. She closes her eyes and sees ripples of green.

Alex tosses his duffel bag in the backseat, kicks his feet up onto the dashboard, and fastens his seatbelt without so much as glancing up from his phone. Elizabeth’s jaw tightens. He’s wearing the same clothes he’d worn when she’d dropped him off Friday after school—black jeans, black hoodie—and he reeks of armpit and freshly turned mulch.

“You have a good weekend?” she asks.

“Yup.”

Elizabeth is bleary-eyed. She does her best not to show it.

“How’s your dad?” she asks.

He shrugs and takes out his headphones. A living, breathing tween cliché.

The sun streams in the passenger window. Alex turns to bask in its glow. The familiar motion, the glint of gold catching his shaggy blonde hair, takes Elizabeth by surprise. She glimpses Alex the toddler. Her little boy.

An ache wells inside her chest.

When the midwife laid him screaming at her breast, wet with afterbirth and gristly with plant matter, she’d recoiled. Symbiotic verdure. That was the medical term they’d used to assuage Elizabeth’s horror. They said it was normal. Healthy, even.

But was it?

Alex wasn’t like other babies. His bright eyes. His cutting gaze. Strangers commented glibly on his alertness. Elizabeth swallowed their quips like thorns. As a babe, Alex never napped—not once. And when she took him outside, he’d twist from her grip, reaching hungrily for the sun.

Elizabeth sang to him. She played with him. She combed his golden locks ever so gently, pinching off the delicate new growths that sprouted from his crown. Lovingly pruning.

Worrying.

These days the bathroom sink is clogged with shoots ripped out in clumps, his scalp pockmarked and crusted with fresh scabs.

Elizabeth reaches to touch his hair, to thread a finger through a sunlit curl.

He flinches like she’s struck him.

“Mom,” he grumbles.

Elizabeth forces a smile, but it’s for her own sake. Alex still stares out the car window, a dull bass seeping from his headphones.

“Alex,” she says loudly enough for him to hear.

She knows he’s heard.

If he tells her the truth, she won’t be angry. She wants his trust more than anything.

“Alex!” She nearly shouts.

He slides the headphones off his ears. “Yeah?”

She clears her throat. “I did laundry—”

“Good for you,” he mumbles.

“Alex—” there’s an edge to her voice, an urgency “—is there anything you want to tell me? Anything you need?”

“I need a bath.” He places his headphones back over his ears.

I love you, she wants to say. You can tell me anything.

Instead, Elizabeth tongues the gum stem so vigorously it bleeds.

That night, she dreams of a root ball growing inside her abdomen. It presses against her ribcage. It squeezes her organs. She wakes just after midnight drenched in sweat, teeth chattering. Her vision swims as she drags herself to the toilet.

Hugging the porcelain, she heaves up dinner…

…and something else.

In the murky vomit, a red, cherry-like drupe bobs. Perfectly formed. Flesh undigested. Elizabeth resists the urge to pluck it out, to examine it more closely. A seed? Crouched before the bowl, she teeters on her heels, transfixed, reaching for the rim of the bathtub.

Her fingers meet slime.

She chokes out a gasp, scrabbling for the towel rack, and pulls herself to standing. She peels back the plastic shower curtain. The inside of the tub is ringed with black and green scum.

Alex.

He’d spent hours soaking—or, rather, secreting.

Elizabeth dry heaves.

He must have known she’d find it.

Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she thinks to confront Alex, to drag him from bed, to demand an explanation. But then, she glimpses the buoyant fruit.

She’s a mother for god’s sake. To be ravaged by flora is a luxury of youth. She’s too old, too tired, to produce such an exotic yield.

It ought to repulse her, this kernel roused from its dormancy, so red and so ripe.

Elizabeth forces her gaze from the bowl. She brushes her teeth. Still, her mouth tastes like wet soil. She flushes the toilet then digs under the sink for a sponge and spray bottle of bleach.

“How’s our little Alex holding up with the divorce?” Elizabeth’s mother probes blithely from behind her trifold menu. Just the crown of the woman’s head is visible, a neatly coiffured dandelion puff of curly, pristine white.

Elizabeth squints at her menu. With that single, pointed question, her mother has struck upon not one, but both of the things Elizabeth would rather not discuss over lunch.

And to think, they haven’t ordered yet.

The restaurant’s lighting is too dim, the ambient small-talk too loud. Elizabeth has no appetite, not since last night, only a deep, abiding thirst.

“He’s fine.” She swallows, her throat parched, tongue thick.

“Oh, I doubt that.” Elizabeth’s mother lowers her menu, a single white eyebrow quirked. “Alex is a sensitive child, the same as you were at his age.”

With a trembling hand, Elizabeth reaches for her water glass and takes a measured sip.

“You don’t say.”

She waits for some rehashed adage about apples and trees.

“He feels things differently. More intensely, I think.” She waves a hand dismissively. “Of course, I don’t mean that other thing.”

That other thing.

Her so-called botanical disorder.

God forbid they speak of it in public. Or at all.

Elizabeth’s cellphone buzzes, tinkling the table’s glassware. Her mother frowns. The too-familiar number of Alex’s middle school illuminates its home screen.

“I’ll just be a moment.” Elizabeth staggers from her chair, nearly toppling it over.

Shouldering awkwardly past patrons and servers, she makes her way to the restaurant’s lobby. “Hello?” she asks, her phone pressed to one ear, her palm to the other.

The principal’s secretary is on the line. She asks Elizabeth to please hold.

“Of course.” Elizabeth licks her lips.

The lobby’s décor is garish, rustic wood paneling hung with plant prints. Wildflowers and medicinal herbs, root vegetables and leaf rubbings—it’s a hodgepodge of mismatched region and season. Elizabeth turns in disgust to stare out the front window. In the parking lot, a young mother paces, bouncing her screaming, red-faced infant, the ominous sky above them laden with black clouds on the brink of bursting.

“Mrs. Rutherford—” an upbeat baritone greets, the principal this time “—I hope you’re well this afternoon.”

Elizabeth almost laughs.

“Well enough.” She touches her tongue to the stem. “And you?”

“I’m alright.” He pauses. “I’m calling about Alex, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.”

Thunder rattles the windowpanes. Elizabeth rubs her jaw.

“Go on.”

“Something—well—troubling was found in his locker by one of our security dogs.” His tone darkens. “An envelope of seeds. Err... Invasives, we suspect.”

“Invasives?”

A steady pat of rain drums the awning. Elizabeth’s heart beats with its rhythm.

“Mrs. Rutherford,” he says. “Hendrix Middle is a safe, nurturing space for all students. It isn’t Alex’s fault he has… has it inside of him. He’s young, mind you. Trainable still. It’s not like what you hear on the news, with folks having to slash and burn their way back from full-scale rhizomatous takeover.” He chuckles nervously. “Understand, Alex isn’t in trouble for his susceptibility to the plant or his fertile mind, so to speak. Rather, it’s his intent…”

“Alex wouldn’t—” she starts to object but then remembers.

An invasive has but one evolutionary imperative.

“There’s a walk-in on East Main. They don’t take insurance—denuding isn’t covered anyway.” He hedges. “It’s not in the nicest part of town. Maybe bring Alex’s father…”

She bristles. “Thank you.”

Sap-thick bile slithers up her throat.

“I suggest you take him there as soon as possible. He’s waiting in the nurse’s office, in a clean room, for you to pick him up.”

“Of course.” Elizabeth glances back at her mother, at her thin lips pressing in a rose painted line. “I can be there in a few minutes. My apologies for—”

“Don’t blame yourself.” His voice is petal soft. “It’s the nature of the beast.”

She can hear his smile through the phone. All teeth.

Alex doesn’t try to explain. He doesn’t put on his headphones either. Instead, he broods, his eyes on his sopping sneakers, his feet planted firmly on the floormat.

“I’m not mad,” Elizabeth says as a flash of lightning cleaves the sky in two. Rain comes in torrents now, sheeting against the windscreen, blurring the asphalt streetscape faster than the wipers can cut it away. “I love you, and I want you to know I understand.”

She expects him to scoff. He doesn’t.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispers.

Alex deserves to know the truth, her truth. “I let it bloom inside me. I was like you,” she wants to say, but when she opens her mouth to speak, only cherry-picked platitudes spill out.

“This isn’t you.” She talks to the rain, to the squiggly lines painted on the highway. She massages her aching jaw. “It’s the plant. It makes you think you want it, that it’s who you are, but it lies. You’re my son…"

She doesn’t get to say the rest. Alex covers his face in his hands and starts to sob.

“You’re wrong.” He shoots her a withering gaze. “You don’t understand.”

They pass the exit for the clinic. Elizabeth drives Alex straight home.

That night, ivy climbs the insides of Elizabeth’s eyelids, creeping like a shadow, dappling her viridescent dreams. She startles awake to the sound of screaming—her screaming—and a thick, wet vine coiling around her neck. It constricts. Her scream shrivels to a gasp.

Panicked, she claws at suckers and leaves, fingernails digging into wet pulp. The vine only squeezes tighter. She grabs it with both fists and pulls.

Woody thorns pierce the meat of her palms.

Tears burst like squeezed fruit.

Crouched at the foot of the bed, Georgia growls, hackles raised, the whites of her eyes glinting in the red clock-radio light. A lone tendril reaches in her direction.

“What do you want?” Elizabeth’s voice is strangled.

A whisper flutters the curling, hirsute fronds. “Come to me.”

An invitation.

With something akin to relief, Elizabeth submits. She lets the plant drag her from bed. Vines trail under the door, out into the hallway. She follows them, arms reaching, blood smearing the wallpaper. Despite her vision dimming with asphyxiation, she sees a light ahead and—Alex.

For a second, she thinks: I must save him!

Then she realizes it is him. The snaking vine unfurls from under his shirt collar. Its source, a bulging red bramble just above his heart.

“Mom.” His voice cracks.

The tautness gives just a little.

“Alex,” she rasps.

He stands frozen, mussed hair a halo in the orange sconce light. Green veins web his skin, fronds spiraling from his pores. A smell like lilacs and spring rain fills her aching lungs.

“I-I’m sorry,” he stammers.

Elizabeth slides her eyes over her precious boy.

Alex holds out his hands. Delicate pink blossoms open from his palms, in the exact same places hers now weep and bleed.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks Alex, asks the plant.

The vine releases, slithering in retreat, smearing oily green-black stains over the carpet.

“I know you killed the thing inside you.” His voice catches on a sob.

A blooming in her chest. A want for light. Thirst.

The memory cuts like a spade.

“How did you know?” Elizabeth trembles as she asks.

“I’ve always known. Just like you’ve always known it’s in me, too. It’s who I am. I’m not afraid of it, not like you are.” He tilts the blossoms to the light fixture, illuminating silken petals and twining yellow filaments.

He is breathtaking. Her bright-eyed boy.

“Forgive me, Alex.”

Elizabeth isn’t afraid. Not anymore.

The vines lift and reach, their tendrils beckoning. The red knot in Alex’s chest pulsates under his t-shirt.

Another whisper. “It’s not too late.”

Elizabeth goes to Alex, wrapping him in her embrace. He, in turn, engulfs them both in vine, slicking them in plant matter. Symbiotic verdure. Instinctively, she tongues the stem embedded in her gum, startled to find the tiniest of buds has sprouted along its burnt edge. She tastes nectar, an unexpected sweetness.

He presses his head to her shoulder.

Tenderly, she kisses his crown.

© 2026 J.A. Bryson