Free Soft Apocalypses by Lucy Snyder

in there, it’s a horrible mess in there!”
    I pushed open the door, not knowing whether I’d see my mother’s workshop or the pink-and-blue nursery –
    – but instead I found myself standing in my own bedroom, staring at my own twelve-year-old self. My young face was bruised, streaked with tears. A rage that was far too big for my small body to hold contorted my features. Twelve-me had smashed apart all the furniture, and gripped a broken chair leg like a club.
    “I HATE YOU!” She swung the chair leg at my head with both hands.
    The wood connected solidly with my temple. My vision exploded in white, and my legs collapsed under me. I’d barely gotten my sight back before Twelve-me started beating the shit out of me with the improvised club.
    “You’re worthless!” she shouted down at me. “You could have done something, but you didn’t do anything! You just covered your ears and pretended it was all fine!”
    She screamed all the terrible things I’d secretly believed about myself on my worst nights. Hearing them out loud was like hearing holy judgment on my soul. I balled up on the floor, covering my head with my arms. Twelve-me continued to pound away, striking a numbing, agonizing blow on the nerve bundle behind my elbow. The next blow sent sparks of pain across my whole body.
    She would kill me if I didn’t defend myself. I grabbed the club on the next downswing and tried to wrestle it away from her. But the chair leg sprouted tiny itchy vines like kudzu. They sprawled over my hands and arms, snaring me.
    I bucked and fought to get myself free while Twelve-me hit me with her narrow fists. Then father-thing stepped into the room. Twelve-me ceased her attack and stood up, waiting.
    Father-thing stared down at me with a look of profound disappointment and contempt. “You should have done as you were told, girl.”
    Mother-thing came in behind him, wiping her hands on her apron, blankly gazing off into space. “‘Obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord’.”
    Their expressions didn’t change as their bodies spasmed, dark green tendrils bursting through their pale skins. They collapsed, their flesh disintegrating and reweaving into writhing kudzu, vines joining vines that slithered over my limbs and held me down on the floor.
    Twelve-me fell on top of me, suddenly serene as a graveyard angel. Her face and arms had grown impossibly long. Black kudzu leaves slit through her skin like necrotic tongues.
    “Stop struggling and we can go eat mother’s supper. Stop struggling and it’ll all be just like it should have been.” Her voice was the hiss of rain on pine needles and dry bones, gentle and mesmerizing. “You’ll stay here where you belong. It’ll all be fine; be a good girl and do what you’re told ....”
    The room went dark. It would have been so easy to give in. It would have been so easy to agree to the death the creature offered me: peace, at last, and forgiveness for my sin of surviving.
    But instead I screamed and fought. The floor beneath me had disappeared into rough dirt and the viny monster was trying to drag me under. I struggled as hard as I could and got my good arm free, reaching for something, anything, that I could grab to get myself out of there.
    A flashlight beam cut the gloom.
    “Maybelle!” Alonzo shouted.
    “Here!” I waved my free hand frantically.
    “I can’t get to you!” he hollered back.
    I pushed up with all my strength and reached out to him. Vines popped loose from the dirt. He grabbed my hand in his strong wiry grip and pulled. The vines held fast to my trapped limbs. I thought they would pull my shoulder right out of its socket again. But green wood gave before my flesh did, and I lurched to my feet in a cloud of dust and ash.
    Alonzo and I ran like hell for his taxi. The black kudzu seemed to be exploding out of the ground all around us, vines writhing and flailing, hissing through the pine needles and leaves as they tried