kandacesiobhan
There was nothing familiar about him now; he had been born anew. He looked as he always had but now he smelled different - muskier, dustier, older, somehow. His gait was heavier, as if he carried all the world's woes on his shoulders, and he tilted his head to one side and knitted his brows together when I spoke so that in the moment I felt that he really understood, that he really cared, but he offered no counsel and when I finally paused for breath I saw the full emptiness of his gaze.
The trunk made a sound that neither driver nor passenger noticed. It was not a very loud sound; it was the soft and small and quiet sound of punches against metal. In the wing mirror he caught sight of the thick green stalks trailing from the car, dragging along the weathered road as the car sped well over the speed limit. He pulled over, and approached the vines with caution. Upon identifying their source – the trunk – he lifted the latch and pulled up the lid to be enveloped by a cloud of red and pink and white petals, and sparkling droplets of dew, and the fragrance of five hundred flowers crushed into a very small space. More vines grew out of the trunk and seemed to run off down the road, enormous rosebuds blooming further and further off in the distance. The vines grew in the opposite direction too: into the car, and around the headboards of the front seats and into the radio and around the rear-view mirror and over the bonnet and wrapping themselves around the tyres, with those beautifully impossible roses blooming all the while.