My eyes kept drifting to the second’s hand on the clock as it tirelessly completed round after round in its systematic clockwork manner. The teacher’s voice was rapt with focus, and my mind wandered in the face of her efficiency, hastened by the boredom of everyone else in the stupid class. My stomach grumbled and suddenly, I bolted upright, because I had just remembered what had happened yesterday.
The seeds had planted themselves firmly into the walls of my stomach, and they were jostling about in that cavity. Their roots grew predominantly in two directions. Upwards, through the tubes of my throat, my voice box so I couldn’t speak, and my windpipe, so I couldn’t breathe either, and then bright leafy shoots were arching out through my mouth. I tried clasping both my hands around my bulging lips, the pressure so immense I thought my poor throat would simply burst open like a large balloon, but it didn’t. My meagre hands were brushed away and the bitter taste of leaves encompassed my mouth in a tidal wave of victory.
Downwards, the roots slinked their little bodies through my legs, the brown and dirty green coiling together to imitate the structure of veins, and then it was like they coursing through my blood, down to my feet.
I was receiving sideway glances now, because I was stamping my shoes and jerking them around in all sorts of directions in an effort to stop their progress. The teacher just kept talking, oblivious to the fact that a student in front of her was transforming into a literal shrub. Or shrubs, in fact, because the number of leaves coming out of my mouth were numerous, and they were branching out in front as well as on the side. I was shocked that no one else seemed to see the branches, they were just looking at me as if they were trying to get me to be quiet.
Plump little watermelons, their rinds hardening, broke the soles of my shoes, and rolled across the smooth marble floor of the classroom, hundreds of them. I was rooted firmly in place now, I couldn’t budge an inch, no matter how much I wanted to. My eyes were glazed over, mouth disabled by the weight of the branches, hands pinned in awkward right angles, legs splayed out beneath my desk; I was still alive.
Thoughts are more dangerous than seeds.