The Heart of a Tomato

When I was five years old, my brother used to tell me that plants have souls and feelings just like people do. I didn't believe him at first, because how can you? A plant doesn't talk.

“Does too,” he would say. “When you hear the wind whistle through the trees, that's not the wind, it's the trees.”

Plants can't move.

“Have you ever seen grass sway? Trees rocking back and forth?”

Plants can't cry. How can they be sad if they can't cry?

“You've seen sap, haven't you?”

How do you argue against that when you're five? He had an answer for everything. He even told me about plants that grab flies and plants that will move to face the sun. When I asked mom about it, she patted my head and reassured me he was only teasing me, and that grass was not sad when I walked on it because it did not, in fact, have any feelings at all. I asked her about the fly eating plants and she said they were real. I asked her about the sun chasers and she said they were real too. I asked her about how the trees howled during storms and rocked back and forth, reminding her that I howled and rocked back and forth during bad storms too.

“That's just the wind,” she said dismissively as she added beans to a simmering pot.

I asked her about tree sap, and she confessed she didn't know what purpose it served. That was how I knew my brother was right. He had answers to all of my questions, which meant he knew more than my mom.

“He's making stuff up,” she told me. “That's what brothers do. If he doesn't know the real answer, he lies so you'll think he's smart.”

I almost believed her, too, until I saw her cut a tomato in two to add to the pot. I had seen the heart of the tomato and knew my brother was right after all.

- Originally mailed to P. and D. Goff in Madison, Mississippi

The Angry Vine

The Tomicraw people had a myth about the end of the world. They believed that the gods made the world for all mankind to enjoy save for one plant, a leafy vine that kept to one tiny patch of dirt in the forest.

“Do not touch this vine, for it is a plant of anger,” warned the gods.

But people did not know what anger was, for the world was still peaceful in those days, and they did not understand the danger. Thus, when two young lovers strolled through the forest one day, mindful only of each other, they thought little when they accidentally stepped on the plant, crushing the vine to the dirt.

Though the plant brimmed with anger, it had never had an opportunity to grow until then. When it was brought low to the earth, it reached into the dirt and took hold, and this was its first runner. As the lovers returned to their village, and one tripped on the runner, and was angry at the other for not warning her, and the plant grew. And families quarreled over who was at fault, her for not looking or him for not telling, and the plant grew, and soon it had reached the fields where crops grew and overtook them, and the farmers were angry, and they looked at the fields of other farmers whose land was not blighted, and from their anger grew envy, and in the night, as their babies cried for hunger, desperation grew, and from that grew theft, and the vine grew. In the morning the other farmers rose and saw what had happened, and they too became angry at the first for bringing the vines to the edge of their lands, and from their anger grew hate, and from their hate grew violence, and violence grew to war, and all the while, the vine spread, covering everything in its path.

The world, the Tomicraw said, would end when the vine finally covered the world completely. Scientists laughed until the vine spread and began choking out native plant species, which disrupted entire ecosystems leaving only vines in their wake. And they were angry at the Tomicraw for not warning them sooner. And the vine grew.

- Originally mailed to P. Mathis in Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Plant Invasion

Aliens had invaded Earth. Our industrialization attracted them, and they needed the resources of our planet. They were strange and terrifying. Their bodies were green and lumpy and grotesque. They spawned offspring left and right, leaving their softball sized spores all over the countryside to grow into the next generation. We fought against them as best we could, but their bodies, more vegetable than animal, resisted all of our traditional attacks. Their diffused internal organs were hard to mortally injure as they were spread out so much. Most chemical attacks did nothing to them, but still we fought. We tried pesticides, which were effective, but they harmed our own food supplies. Still, we warred on against them. Not until they left our world, exhausted by the endless struggle. Not until we finally purged the last of them could we analyze what they had done, what lasting impact they had on our world. Earth was overflowing with resources they craved, resources we had in abundance since industrialization. We thought they came for our technology, our oil. We were wrong. They came for our greenhouse gasses and toxins. Food in abundance, which would allow them to thrive, which would allow our environment to stabilize. Their excretions and later upon their deaths, their bodies, created a super fertilizer that could improve food production by over three hundred percent. We could have lived in perfect equilibrium to one another, but each side responded with fear, our fear they would destroy us and their fear they would they would starve to death, we never sat down to speak.

- Originally mailed to Leoni Caljouw from Oud-Beijerland, the Netherlands

Plants vs Humans

Scientists often spoke about how long it would take the Earth to destroy everything man made if he were to sudden vanish. Most presumed this was simply a thought experiment. Quite the contrary, it was a warning. The Earth, they said, actively, consciously sought to destroy mankind. Vines, the conjectured, did not seek out cracks in walls because it was convenient. Instead, it deliberately sought cracks to further destroy walls and buildings. Root systems do not attempt to penetrate leaky pipes because they desire its water but because they know the pipes are ours.

Early man knew this. It is why he first domesticated plants, to show them who was boss. It is why he eats so many fruits and grains, to hurt plants' ability to reproduce. Our first campfires were not for warmth or cooking. They were warnings. “Forests,” they said, “we defy the trees you drop on us and your thorns that cut us. We hack them up and burn their bodies! We carve their corpses and make homes of their bones!”

The historical record is inconsistent as to who started this quiet war, but it will no doubt continue for as long as man and plant exist in the same space.

- Originally mailed to J. Hall of Jackson, Mississippi