Lily-Ponter

• Emma Winship, Grade 9, John Wollaston Anglican Community School
• Short Story
• 2015

Excellence Award in the 'The Write Track 2015' competition

I enter the bio-lab to find Anjela, my best friend and lab partner, already poring over my notes from the night before with a critical eye, once again oblivious to the chemicals on her desk.
We exchange quiet greetings and I take a long look at the single plant lying innocently on the desk in the far corner. It is the key to immortality, a plant that never dies. The Lily-ponter is a mutated form of the lily, and we are so close to finding out the properties of such an ecological mystery. It was completely green all over. The petals were long and soft, stem silky to the touch. Such a fragile plant, but why have built-in defences when you are immortal? I walk past the plant and gasp.
My hand is coated in red, it is such a contrast to my sun-starved pale skin that all I can do is stare. The flower was tangled around my hand and a liquid, again green, slowly seeped into my hand as I watch, transfixed as it entered my long gashing wounds these seemingly innocent petals had inflicted upon me.
"Ellan!" Anjela screams, jumping from her desk with a thump. My eyes tear from my hand to her, and then to her desk. The chemicals had spilled. A rookie mistake, a deadly mistake.
"We have to get out of here!" Anjela yells, reaching for my hand and attempting to detangle it from the plant, but the plant won't budge, and the chemicals were beginning to hiss.
Neighbouring scientists are rushing in by the tens to assist. There is suddenly huge series of bangs and I come crashing to the floor. I can't breathe, I can't see, I can't think and the world is spinning. My hand comes loose, did the plant get destroyed? No, it regenerates within milliseconds of destruction.
When the spinning stops I stand and stare silently at the chaos around me.
Bodies strewn across the floor, blood and chemicals covering every inch of the lab. Total and utter destruction.
A small smile covers my face, “So this is what insanity feels like" I murmur. I wipe away the powdered mercury from my bag with my hand; if the chemicals were going to affect me they would have done so a long time ago. I grab my relatively clean phone from it and text my friend, Chloe, a final goodbye. I feel numb, strangely uncaring of the death of my friends and colleagues.
I look over to the lily-ponter, lying innocently untouched and pure in the middle of devastating chaos; almost glowing and I began to wonder, wonder why such a plant exists, and how I had managed to replicate the power in myself. An unearthly green glow surrounds the plant. Always green. Always defenceless, or was it? A small hiccup of a laugh escapes my mouth, which quickly morphs into full out laughter. Immortality, it is the human dream, and I had finally found it. We are human, selfish, self-righteous and completely and utterly insane.