Grandma decided to knit some new ears for Susie and chose a wool from the pound shop with little silver sparkles. It was four pounds a ball, and she complained all the way down the high street. A pound shop should sell things for a pound; that’s what it says, that’s what it should do. But it was the only shop left in town selling any wool. The ears took the entire ball, even though Susie reminded Grandma she was only six and had very little ears.

When the ears were ready, Susie swapped them for her old ones, the ears that didn’t listen when it was time to put on her shoes or find her mask for school. The silver sparkles glimmered in the light as she walked to class. Her friends all asked her where she got her new ears from, entranced by how they shimmered as Susie moved her head from side to side. Grandma made them for me Susie said, her grin as wide as the ball had been.

At lunchtime, Susie heard the first voice. It spoke to her as she was putting back her plate on the stand for dirty dishes.

‘I am hungry,’ the voice said. Susie looked around, seeing no one nearby. Her tray made a clatter on the stand and her fork bounced on the floor. ‘I am so hungry,’ the voice repeated, a sound of sadness in its quiet words.

‘Where are you?’ Susie whispered, picking up the fork.

‘Here, standing in the sun.’

Susie glanced around the room. The dinner ladies were scuttling around behind her and the rest of the Reception class were already putting their masks back on and making their way outside.

‘No one is here,’ she said to the empty room. Perhaps there was fluff inside her new ears. Susie dropped her fork on the tray and turned towards the door to the playground.

‘I am so small no one ever sees me. That’s why I have no water.’

No water? Thought Susie, gazing over at the windowsill. A little plant lay there, the drooping leaves glinting in a beam of light passing though the dusty window. Filling up a little plastic cup full of water, Susie tipped it into the plant tray.

‘Thank you so much,’ the plant exclaimed.

‘I didn’t know plants could talk,’ replied Susie, cleaning off a piece of dust from one of the leaves.

‘We only talk to other plants,’ said the plant.

‘I’m a little girl, not a plant,’ frowned Susie.

When she got home, Susie called Grandma and asked her what her ears were made of. They are made of wool, silly Susie, Grandma had said. Susie looked up what wool was made of and the computer said it was from sheep. Even Susie knew that sheep aren’t plants, so she asked Grandma again. The label said the ball of wool was cotton, grown in a special greenhouse somewhere near the sea. Cotton ears that could hear the plants, thought Susie.

After dinner, Susie played outside in the garden and poked her finger at the flower growing on their magnolia tree. It was a small tree, no bigger than little Susie and this year it had made three new flowers.

‘Don’t poke me,’ the magnolia tree complained.

‘You can talk,’ cried Susie, bouncing on her toes.

‘I see you have new ears.’

‘Grandma made them for me.’

‘That’s nice. Tell Grandma I need more water,’ the tree’s subdued voice added.

More water? Susie looked around the garden for a watering can. Daddy was surprised, but he helped her fill it up, feeling the dry soil around the tree with a frown upon his face.

‘Good call, Susie. This tree definitely needed more water,’ he said, pouring water on the soil.

Susie lay in bed that night a warm glow inside her body. It was lovely to be able to talk to the plants. When Saturday morning came, the family went for a walk into the hills, the sun bright and warm in the early summer sky. Grandma came too, her knitting needles in her bag. I’m knitting you some new eyes, she said. Susie smiled and nodded, she loved her new ears, she was sure she would love her new eyes too. The picnic place was by the river; Daddy had found a bench beside the hedgerow to lay out their basket. Susie looked at the white flowers growing inside the hawthorn, they looked like tiny trumpets. As the adults chatted over coffee, Susie skipped to peer at them.

‘Hello little flowers,’ she whispered to them with a smile.

‘GO AWAY,’ shouted the flower. Susie was not expecting the flowers to shout at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ replied Susie, ‘I did not mean to anger you. I have ears made of plants.’

‘THEN I WILL DESTROY YOU TOO,’ shouted the flower, a long green tendril reaching out from it, twisting its way up a bare brown stem.

Susie ran back to the picnic table, perhaps some plants were like the Sick People, you ought not to talk to them.

After they had finished lunch, Grandma finished her new eyes. They took out her old ones and put the woollen ones in their place. Cotton eyes for Susie, she thought as she danced around the field. On the walk home, she could already see the shining. Long strands of glowing light stretching out across the grass and from plant to plant, from tree to tree. A spiderweb of silver meshed across the world, over their heads and beneath their feet. Her family walked right through them as if they were not there, and Susie could see them all with her wonderful new eyes.

Grandma had bought every last ball of the special greenhouse cotton that was on sale in the pound shop. By the time the summer holidays arrived, Susie was completely made of wool. They started with her arms and legs then moved on to her body. The heart had taken longest to make, all of its knitted compartments and tubes being stitched to every other piece. When it was done, Susie’s woollen tongue could only speak to the plants.

Using a pencil, she wrote out her words in her wobbly letters where she wanted to be planted. A little patch of empty soil next to the Magnolia Tree. It would be a good place to stand and grow. The shining network of silver lines let Susie talk to every plant across the town. One day she would try and talk to the pine trees reaching up into the sky, the ones that lived on the sides of the hills. There was no more need for maths and spelling and Susie was glad of that, she learnt instead of light and rain, of the way the winds blow and the seasons change. When autumn came, she learnt of sleep and death. During the long, dark winter, Susie spent her time talking to the pine trees, awake through the cold nights. Grandma knitted her a woollen scarf to keep her warm as she slept.

Grandma would sit and chat to Susie as she took root next to the magnolia tree, growing up and out, making her own shining lines of light within the warm earth. When Grandma was no longer there, her father sat with her as he knitted socks on an old deck chair, telling her stories of the schools closing and the people leaving the cities. He would not leave his Susie alone, he would stay no matter what.

In time, Susie’s cotton body grew white flowers, blossoming across her chest. Little cotton balls sprung up, soft and silky like Susie’s hair had once been before they turned it into yarn. Her father plucked the little balls of cotton from her body and made them into string, fashioning a spinning wheel from spare parts he found abandoned in the streets. The town was mostly empty now, so her father spent all his time sat beside her, turning the cotton into yarn, and the yarn into little woollen people. Together they taught the little people how to talk to each other and the other plants. How to breathe the air and light, how to drink the water from the ground. Susie’s father taught her how to spin her own yarn. When he too was finally gone, she made her own little woollen people to fill the world.

Then the day came, as they had known would always come, when the towns and cities were at last devoid of the lingering remnants of all the people. There was excitement and frenzied chatting between all the plants on the network. The world was theirs once again. Susie’s children were set free with their new skills, to walk the empty roads and find their own gardens to plant themselves in. They would never need to know how to tie a mask on their little woollen faces, or how to fear the purple and blue skin of those who carried death in their wake. They were free. They needed nothing more than air and light and water, and each other. No matter how far away they walked, Susie could still talk to them all, she could hear their chatter across the whole new world of woollen people; of course she could, after all she had the most wonderful pair of new ears.

Copyright © Angelique Talbot 2025. All rights reserved.