The botanist took blue pills to sleep. She disappeared for seven days. Things started to dissolve, lights, household objects.

She poured over books about birds. Bee eaters and nightjars flew off the pages. Their green and orange plumage blended with the wallpaper.

Blackberry loopers and ermine moths floated outside her windows.

Indigo light dwindled as the ghosts of clouded sulphur and wood nymphs searched for soft meadows. They found concrete.

The moon rose. The botanist observed chemicals in plant sap. She sought an alternative to an assembly line of cow heads. Bovine brains were dried and crushed into powder. Parents mixed their melatonin into their children's water.

She stopped time, sewed wildflower seeds into dirt. There weren't enough soft spaces to land. Wetlands were filled with sediment. Migrating cranes looked for black pools. The roots of willows were dredged for electrical lines. 

She went back to her day job. Everyone was separate, hovering, engaged without engaging. Their lives were funeral pyres. Sacred plaques and benches. Weather wore it away.

She ate more pills, took scissors to the netted trees that kept the birds from nesting, broke into museums to touch passenger pigeons.

All these things she thought in the daytime. Numb driving down the highway as the leaves curled over witch's butter.

Everything was eroding. Fleeting. The air once thick with insects, quiet. She filled her cabinets with plant compounds, elixirs to alter emotions. Everyone was trying to dampen the quantity and color of wings. Intensity waterlogged the senses.

Bite marks, swelling, tiny legs, universes buzzing around on different temporal scales, hundreds of thousands of sounds, chitinous exoskeletons in motion.

Adults wanted their children to sleep. They wanted quiet. The youth drank cow brains and dreamed of pasture.

On the weekend, the botanist compared experiences: once living plants, woven and spun into fabric, hung in stores, hard surfaces replaced squirming earth, controlled noise replaced forest calls.

It's no wonder everyone feels dead, she thought. People were ferried through sterile rooms until placed in a box. Even in death, separated from the motion of nature.

In the paper, the botanist read about a mass wave of nightmares. Children refused to sleep, reporting unconscious terrors. Green fields turned to dust-lots.

The botanist floated between Erlenmeyer flasks, incandescent liquid, telescopes, spectrometers, trying to synthesize a solution to the madness.

Vines curled around her doors, created climates with humidity and humus. She dissected cellulose, xylem, phloem, pith. Clear liquid stained her fingers. She opened her closet shrine to a dead physicist. She had her own saints. She placed them around the house. This one had a shaggy beard and spectacles. He said, The struggle for existence is a struggle for entropy.

Outside, people pushed snow off rooftops. The years plants and fungi spent mining for minerals went unnoticed. Their efforts fell into the ocean. No one thanked them for their work. The botanist tested more pills and found herself in the warm embrace of the physicist, somewhere undisclosed, a place beyond her own reach. 

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