From roots to shoots

A seed sprouted between the cracked cement slabs, beginning by growing its taproot before stretching up and up towards the sun, the shallow crack between sidewalk slabs creating just enough room for a determined sprout to begin its photosynthetic journey. It had lain dormant for months, waiting out the frost. But spring was here, and with the lengthening days, the seed sprouted, roots before shoots. Its embryonic leaves began creating sugars as its stem elongated, as did the roots underground, spreading beneath the concrete. The plant was growing, and as it was, it could feel vibrating when feet stepped over its roots but as most who walked on this sidewalk were small children, they avoided stepping on the crack, and therefore avoided crushing the fragile seedling. When adults traveled on the sidewalk, larger footfalls vibrating through the concrete, sheer luck rescued our protagonist from the fate of many of its brethren, stepped upon and only some recovering due to their unlucky circumstances.

The seed continued its upward and downward growth, more little leaves sneaking out of the gravity-defying stem, rootlets expanding out from larger roots. The sidewalk had an ecosystem of its own - ants crawling across the vast expanse of pavement, a hill with a colony's neat beneath it only a sidewalk square away from the plant, but luckily the ants had no interest in consuming a weed. The plant had chemicals in it that made many organisms find it unpalatable, and ants were an example of some such organisms. Birds occasionally swooped down to eat the ants, or after a rainstorm to eat the worms stuck to the pavement. Those worms, in drier times, turned the soil by the plant’s roots, leaving piles of excrement by the stem. The cells within the leaves tracked where the sun was in the sky, and twas late afternoon when a shadow loomed over our sprout. As it had many times before, the seedling readied itself for the possibility of being eaten. The chemicals that protected it migrated to the surface as the plant prepared to fight for its life.

A little girl, many times as tall as the seedling, had a shovel and slowly, methodically, dug the plant out from the crack. This, to our plant, felt far worse than their previous mammalian fears of aboveground consumption. If just the aboveground growth was being taken, the plant could recover, but this? This was wholesale displacement, roots to shoots. The plant had no way of knowing, as it emitted distress pheromones formed from millions of eons of evolution, signaling to all surrounding plants this one's roots were torn, the plant couldn’t know that human beings had sights set on repairing the sidewalk, that the little girl's dad worked for the city, that this little girl was not a killer but instead a savior. But all those statements about the human world around the plant protagonist were nonetheless true, despite the plant’s lack of awareness. The girl wrapped the sprout in a wet napkin, and carried it home with her. She would be keeping this plant on her bedroom windowsill.

The leaves and stem still strained towards the light as the roots tried fruitlessly to escape that very same light. The world had shifted, no longer in three rich dimensions, no longer teeming with beetles and bacteria but instead just the plant in a napkin. The napkin dried overnight. Although the girl watered it as often as she remembered, the plant was in a dry alien world compared to the pavement and soil it had grown up in.

She was patient, the girl who had dug the young plant from its concrete-surrounded home. She watered the plant with the leftover water from her water bottle after school, a welcome relief from the scorching heat through the window that usually had the plant wilting by then. The girl also sang to her plant. "Leafy, oh leafy, perk up please, and grow! Roots please start growing, and I'll bring you back home!" The girl had come up with the song herself, and was proud of it. Her mom had indoor plants that she sang to, which made the daughter feel especially grown up now that she also had a plant to sing to.

The plant was resilient, and eventually, a week after the roots first left soil, they entered it again. The plant had began defying gravity right there on the seven year old's windowsill, which meant it would now have to right itself again, stem perpendicular to the ground rather than parallel like it had been on the windowsill.

"Sorry it took me so long - I made you this pot in art class, and it's supposed to rain tonight. Plants like rain, so you should be able to stand back up in the dirt soon." The girl spoke rather than sang to the plant this time, which had no comprehension whatsoever of what an 'art class' was, but was simply relieved to be in more familiar, nutrient rich territory. She patted the soil she had buried the roots beneath, creating a mound around the stem's base in her effort to protect the seedling from the effects of gravity. The plant tumbled over in spite of the girl's efforts, having been sideways for so long making its perception of gravity altered. The girl pointlessly tried again and again to stabilize it, only for gravity to overpower her efforts. Eventually she grew frustrated and returned back inside, leaving the plant outside in an environment different than the one it had grown up in as well as the one it was slowly dying in.

The plant hadn't realized how different inside was from outside until it was back outside, dealing with temperature fluctuations and caterpillars crawling on their leaves and springtails going to and fro their roots, though the plant noted nothing had nibbled its roots. The roots were growing in the soil, metaphorically slurping up the rain that fell that evening, just as the girl had predicted it would.