And the Green Grass Grew All Around

AND THE GREEN GRASS GREW ALL AROUND

         This is the last pen I have that has any ink in it and there's no more paper after this but I don't think that's going to matter very much. I haven't been outside in I'm not sure how long. There're bodies out there. Well not exactly bodies but skeletons. The grass eats the bodies along with everything else.

         I just thought that, in case anybody survives and the history of this whole thing ever matters, somebody who really knows what happened should leave some kind of a record. I might be the last human alive but who knows?

         My cousin Kit was a genius. I mean a real 200 IQ genius. I lived with my Uncle Elmer and Aunt Katr since my parents died and Kit was like my little brother. I took care of him when he was little and I discovered how smart he was right away although he was only about four at the time. I can't bear it that he's dead. He was my cousin, my brother, my best friend. I know he would never hurt a fly and he sure didn't intend to bring about the end of the world.

         Kit had the best of intentions. He often talked about how there would be peace on earth if there was enough food for everybody and he thought a lot about how to bring that about. He said if he had a special brain it must have been given to him for a reason.

         It was a bad year for the farmers around where we lived outside of Council Bluffs. Uncle Elmer wasn't a farmer. He worked at the rubber mill but we did have a garden and Aunt Kate and I canned food all summer so we could eat in the winter. This year our garden was doing about as well as the crops in the fields around here. Corn is supposed to be 'knee high by the fourth of July' but it wasn't. What came up at all was looking really poor. After all Uncle Elmer's hard work the garden now consisted of a few dispirited sprouts and weeds Even the weeds seemed to be having a hard time keeping soul and body together, so to speak. The early peas had done nothing at all and the green beans could more accurately be described as brown beans.

         Kit's idea was a plant food that would make things grow. Rice and beans and other nutritious foods for us and for the world. Something to make things grow in a drought things to make food grow in the deserts and feed the world!

         His only problem was something to work with. He didn't have much. He found the chemistry set they had given him for Christmas a couple of years before. It was in the attic where Aunt Kate had put it, afraid he would make something explosive and get hurt. The attic is very hot in summer and very cold in winter so probably some of the chemicals had been changed or damaged as the set had been up there for a long time.

         Kit took it up into the tree house with him and disappeared into the leaves of the gum tree. Nobody knew what he was doing up there except me. I brought him food and whatever else he asked for when he dropped the wooden box which was his container for the notes he sent me.

          One day he asked for a glass jug and specified it must be clean very clean I washed it and washed it and attached it to the rope and sent it up to him.

         It was later that same day that Kit chucked down the rope ladder meaning he wanted me to come up. "There it is," he said and showed me what looked like a jug of brownish cloudy water. "Now I'm going to try it."

         "What are you going to try it on?"

         "I thought I'd put some on the beans,."

         "But you don't know what it will do. What if it kills them?"

         "They're about dead as it is."

         I said try it on some weeds first and see what happens.

         So he put it on the crab grass outside the hedge. He didn't have much of it and he used only a few drops.

         Nothing happened. So he took the jug back up in the tree house and said he would have to work on it some more.

         When Uncle Elmer went out the next morning to get in the truck to go to the rubber mill he looked down at the bottom of the property and said "What the ~~? "
That summer of the drought any vegetation that was doing well stood out like a sore thumb. He was looking at a patch of crab grass that was doing very well indeed!

         Kit was overjoyed. The stuff worked. He sprinkled it on the beans and corn in their garden and sat down to watch the results which I have to say were encouraging. The thing is the nature of plants was not changed by the plant food and the hardiest plants became hardier. Moreover crab grass spread with a subsoil root system, woody and tough. Pretty soon clumps of it were popping up all over the property, And then it began to grow on the neighbors' property.
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         Nobody cared at first and the Grass continued to spread. By August it was getting to be a problem. It was tough stuff and lawn mowers couldn't handle it. It pulled the guts right out of the mowers. Cutting it was cruelly hard work and it did no good because the more you cut the better it grew.

         The bad thing that is one of the bad things was that cattle couldn't eat it, because of the saw tooth structure on the back of the leaves. They stood shoulder high in more grass than they had ever seen before and starved to death. The grass took over the hay fields. Hay would have to be bought and brought in from outside the region.

         But the trouble with that was the grass was spreading with a tremendous speed. It grew on anything organic, going up the trunks of trees and killing them climbing light poles and picket fences. It was voracious and insatiable.

         It came up through the pavement and broke the blacktop. It grew in the swamp and anywhere else it wanted to and it was unstoppable. A green tide was overwhelming the county.

         When winter came we heaved a sigh of relief because the grass died. It died everywhere and the whole area was acres of dead grass. We thought the grass could not grow again and that the invasion was over. We were wrong about that.

         With the first breath of spring the grass came out fighting. Seemingly invigorated by its winter rest, it was everywhere. It was cropping up all over the world. All it took was pollen from the mutated grass to produce grass seeds on ordinary crab grass. All over the world they were experimenting with weed killers. They even tried agent orange and the grass thrived on it.

         Because of the way it devoured the poles it was impossible to keep the power on and we were back to oil lamps before long. Food was scarce and expensive and even worse, water was at a premium and people began dying.

         I'm alone in the house now. When Kit died we buried him outside in the garden he tried to save. Uncle Elmer and I buried Aunt Kate and then when Uncle Elmer knew he was dying he went outside because he knew I wouldn't be able to drag him out once he was dead.

         I can still get a little water out of the well but it has a green taste. There's no more food. but I'm not really hungry any more. I'm sleeping most of the time these days. Sometimes I dream that Aunt Kate is calling me to breakfast and I get up and go downstairs and sit down to eat with Kit and Uncle Elmer. Actually there isn't any upstairs any more because the grass is eating the house too. I look out the windows and see only green. The wind blows through the grass and it seems like the grass is whispering. It's impossible not to think there's some kind of intelligence to it, like is it really talking. The pen is going dry. But there's nothing much more to write anyway. I can't see very well, there's just a green light coming through the window and it will be dark soon.

         It will be dark ~~ soon ~~~~