A Sister's Choice

Penelope’s fingers closed around the cold, rough heft of the axe. It was tucked away in the woodshed, behind a stack of decaying firewood, its rusted blade glinting dully in the scant light filtering through the grimy windowpane. The wood of its handle was rough beneath her skin, a familiar texture that ached with the memory of a thousand mundane tasks, a thousand ordinary days. But this was no ordinary day. Not anymore.

She found Daniel in the parlor, his back to her. He stood before the largest window, the one that overlooked the tangled, overgrown garden where the first tendrils of green had begun their slow, inexorable crawl toward the house, toward them. The glass, once shattered and weeping, was now smooth, unbroken, and strangely luminous. It seemed to pulse with a faint, internal light, a sickly emerald glow that illuminated Daniel’s silhouette.

“Green fingers in your brain,” he whispered, his voice a soft rustle of leaves, a sigh of wind through ancient branches. He didn’t turn, but Penelope knew he was aware of her, of the axe in her hands, of the last desperate flicker of her resistance. “You’ll never be the same.”