The Plantlife (flash fiction)

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The Plantlife

“This is probably my final communication. At the moment I am trapped in a cave and my survival prospects seem to be virtually zero at this point.

My team landed on the planet Aldis 4 and found a planet teeming with plant species, but with no other higher forms of life. As far as we could tell there were no mammals, reptiles, or even bird life like we find on Earth. The only other lifeforms we could find were an abundance of insects. It was Perkins, our botanist, that speculated the entire planet seemed to form a single entity and the static we were getting on our instruments was a stream of consciousness that was being emitted beyond our range of hearing by the plant life.

When we decided to take some samples, that’s when things went terribly wrong. In a short space of time my team were either throttled or dismembered by extremely quick and powerful vines that seemed to come out of nowhere. I managed to escape into a nearby small cave which I immediately blocked up with rocks so the creeping vines couldn’t reach me.

I’m now running out of supplies and the air seems to be getting thin. Either I die from hunger and starvation, or I go out there and let the plants quickly end my life. If you receive this message, and you come to this planet, whatever you do: DON’T PICK THE FLOWERS!”

Joanne Fisher

Inspired by a prompt I got wrong, so I expanded it.

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