A Pothos, Once Freed
In this universe, she kept the window closed. Her pothos plant pressed its leaves against the glass and stretched toward the sky as best it could.
In a parallel universe, she perched her pothos plant on a wide-open windowsill. So, the pothos twined over a hundred feet up the fire escape and spread to cover the roof in a tangle of vines and three-foot long leaves. The building became a refuge for nearby creatures looking for relief from the dry heat of unadorned concrete. Her brother’s pet frog moved out to follow its dream of creating a moss garden in the moisture released by the air conditioning unit. A friend’s iguana became a tour guide for local geckos, who came from far and wide to ask how they could get a pothos jungle started in their neighborhood.
Around the city, people woke to discover window glass was missing—missing from their windows, but also from every store and supplier in the whole region. Attempts to resupply the glass with shipments failed. And in the meantime, vines snuck out, and up, and over. Vines braided themselves above streets and shaded the sidewalks. Soon, the canopy was so thick you had to go to the roof to get any sunlight at all.
In this universe, she kept the window closed. The pothos plant strained against the window, trying to get out. A gecko paused on the other side of the glass. It pulled out a glass cutter.
Sarah Grace Tuttle is an autistic, queer, polygender author and poet. Their speculative writing has been published in Worlds of Possibility, New Myths, The Pink Hydra, and more. You can visit them online at www.sarahgracetuttle.com to keep up with all their writerly joys and chaos.