In the dim light of an abandoned warehouse, Ava Morales, a seasoned ex-cop turned heist planner, crouched over the table of schematics, her phone vibrating incessantly beside her. The operation was supposed to be perfect: a robbery on the precinct where she’d worked for over a decade. A betrayal of her former comrades was just another means to an end—a fat payday and an escape from a city that had chewed her up and spit her out.
But then, the meeting with her old unit had been called.
The cops had assembled in a side room of the precinct, oblivious to Ava’s part in the very heist they were attempting to thwart. It was supposed to be a quick debrief, a nod to her former life. Then, her burner phone rang—shrill and damning.
In a moment of wild desperation, she’d acted on instinct. Hunched in the corner, pretending to adjust her boot, she urinated on the phone, silencing its tone and masking the evidence with a mix of sweat and feigned annoyance at “faulty plumbing.” It worked. No one suspected her.
The heist fell apart spectacularly. One of her partners, desperate and cornered, sold her out. A bag of cash split open, revealing Ava’s handwriting scrawled across hastily made plans. When she fled to the outskirts of town, it wasn’t the cops who found her.
The figure emerged from shadows deep as oil, a spectral wraith Ava had crossed years ago during her time on the force. She’d dismissed her as a harmless con artist, a madwoman with wild, unprovable tales of curses. But now, the woman whispered words that Ava couldn’t understand, her voice more vibration than sound. Before Ava could raise her weapon, she was rooted in place—literally.
Pain seared through her torso as tendrils of green burst from her abdomen, her veins curling into vines. Her lungs collapsed, not into emptiness but into some alien rhythm as jellyfish-like tendrils replaced her organs, pulsating and glowing with colors she didn’t recognize. She tried to scream, but her voice had gone. She tried to move, but her body betrayed her.
Her consciousness didn’t fade as her flesh transformed into bark and sap. Instead, it expanded. Ava felt everything—every memory etched into her soul now played back in vivid color and sound, looping endlessly within her new plant form. She was a living archive, cursed to preserve every lie she’d told, every betrayal she’d committed, every failure she’d tried to bury.
Days later, the cursed plant—her body—was anonymously delivered to the station. It stood in the corner of the memorial service held for her—a bizarre, otherworldly monument to a woman declared “missing in action.”
Her mother was there, grieving openly, flanked by officers who believed Ava had died in some noble act of service.
Then the plant began to hum.
It projected scenes like a ghastly film reel. It showed Ava, laughing with her colleagues during her cop days, then cutting deals with thieves in smoke-filled rooms. It showed the heist in vivid detail—the betrayal of her partners, the money spilling onto the floor, the moment the curse was cast.
Her mother wept, her cries piercing the stunned silence of the room. The officers stared, horrified, as the plant pulsed and twisted, reliving Ava’s memories of guilt, greed, and fear.
When the playback ended, the plant stood still again, eerily serene.
Nobody dared to touch it.
Her mother left, clutching her heart, while the officers debated what to do with the grotesque artifact Ava had become. They didn’t burn it, though.
Somewhere deep in its alien roots, Ava was still there, unable to escape the truth. Her memories now belonged to the world she’d tried to leave behind, etched in the blooming horrors of her cursed existence.
izzy806
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
origamiaround
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
kianamaiart
