Kudzu has fascinated me (and freaked me out) since I saw a short documentary as a kid, footage of an abandoned farmhouse being completely overtaken by the voracious vine in a matter of weeks. Thanks to rapid time-lapse techniques and public television, I experienced the event as happening in a matter of minutes — maybe even seconds. Years later on a road trip across the south I drove through miles of back-country highway shrouded by towering strangled forest, trees dead underneath but giving the semblance of life in a weird kind of vegetal zombification process, a green and vibrant undeath.
Here’s my fiction tribute to this slow-motion strangler of the plant kingdom, now in audio over at new Canadian venture The Centropic Oracle: