A cabinet of rare finches. Orange bibs. Carrot-colored beaks. They flit and dart about behind glass. Their chirps are muffled by the sheer security of the cabinet.
Elise is with her grandma. She's watching the birds from her grandma's side. Grandma is chatting with the large redhead behind the counter.
Grandma pretends she doesn't feel Elise tugging at her wrist. Grandma knows what she will see if she answers. The ruffled eyebrows. The confusion in those large hickory eyes.
"Gwamma," Elise pries. The boy watching the buhds."
She's referring to the wheelchair less than two feet away from the bird locker. There's an emaciated thing sitting in it that, were a month of meals and a haircut to take place, you could say there was a boy seated there. The hair is stringy and free like an old nest.
The head rests it's full weight on the knobby left shoulder. The neck little more than a stem.
"Gwamma, he has trees in his chair."
Grandma can't take the badgering anymore. She hisses back from behind her dull teeth.
"Jesus, Elise... the roots are growing out of him into the floor, not the other way around."
As she speaks, three nurses roll dice. A forty-something blonde with pale eyes rolls a failing total of 2. She expected this. Her neck extended like a sea turtle, she ambled over to the anchored wheelchair.
"Martin?" she whispers.
The head lolls, casting the shotgun scatter of unfocused eyes at her.
"The soul flew this coop ages ago," she thinks to herself.
There's a movement in the thick roots webbed into the wheels of the chair, and the nurse stops thinking in an instant as a shoot of soft wood punctures her sagging neck and emerges from her scalp. Fluid as an octopus yet precise as a scalpel. Something dark winds down the wooden tendril and pools around the wheels. The nurse joins three other skeletons staining the carpet around the wheelchair.
"Elise!" Gramma snarls at her small dark-haired charge as she pulls away and darts towards the bird cabinet.
The newly fallen nurse is lying in a dark pool on the left side of the chair. Elise parks herself on the right.
The head lolls at her. The eyes are veiled with a milky film. The jaw hangs open with no strength or motor faculty to hold it shut.
"I'm Elise," she states to the slack mask.
The roots around the right wheel churn.
"Gramma brings me here when she wants to visit her friends..."
A shoot emerges, more pointed than it's neighbors.
"But she never visits anyone that has to live here. It confuses me."
One root rattles with animal intelligence.
"I don't have any friends," Elise moans, casting her eyes to the activity around the right wheel. Shoots are appearing with pointed edges and agile extensions.
Gramma watches, too afraid to snatch her granddaughter away. She's too far away to act quickly.
The withered head breathes at Elise. It smells like a graveyard of milk and animal crackers.
"Do you have any friends?" She says. She reaches out to touch the taut skin of the boy's cheek. Her fingers are a hairbreadth away when a single shoot strikes upward with three times the force of a coiled serpent. Her little frame is jolted, silenced, as the tendril creates a crimson rose that rests in her palm, as light as a feather.
"Thank you," she whispers.
The vacant eyes drift back to the birds like spent rainclouds.