short fiction · 2026-10-30

Open Veins Sprouting Weeds

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The surgeons opened both their arms at once. Seneca's veins, shrunk with age, gave grudgingly; Paulina's ran free. Blood pooled on the marble, dark and arterial, and where it touched the cracks between the stones, something stirred.

Not rot. Not bloom either, exactly. Green filaments, hair-fine, unspooling from the red — tendrils that knew the geometry of mortar, that found the iron stains of older deaths and followed them like maps. By morning the floor was a web of pale green, pulsing faintly with each footfall.

The centurions refused to sweep it. They knelt instead, pressing fingers to the veins in their own wrists, testing whether the same green would rise in them. It did not. The weeds grew only where choice had been made — where death was not taken but given, shaped, curated.

Seneca had written that the wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. The weeds seemed to agree. They climbed the legs of the table where his last scrolls lay unfinished, spelling nothing in any language the scholars knew. But the centurions, watching, swore they heard a rhythm in the growth — a meter, almost. As if the plants were reciting the lines he never finished.

Paulina survived, as history records. The weeds did not take her. They took only the blood that had been offered, leaving the blood that had been spared — a distinction no botanist could explain, but every soldier understood.