Post
The window had been dingy for at least a year now. Or it had first needed to be cleaned a year ago, and had remained in a state of neglect since then. The apartment had grown into more of a terrarium than a living space. I turned my headlamp on as I turned away from the glass that had let in no light, walked into the room and felt alongside the walls for a deviation in the verdant wall until I found a squarish shape that would have once been another window. I cut away the vines from around the windowsill trying to find if there was anything to be seen on the other side. I turned my headlamp off again, hoping to catch a glint of sunlight. Nothing. No light crept in through that dirty glass pane. The outside of the glass was covered, like it always was. When walking through the rooms it was always difficult to imagine that anyone had ever lived there. It was as if the room had always been that way, untouched by anything sentient. But that’s not true. The evidence was laying in the center of it. The lump in the middle of the growth showed that when things had gone south, someone had laid down and never gotten up. If I had been bold enough to displace the grass growing over the lump, I would have seen decay indicating at most eight months of stagnation. This one was unsavable and had been for some time. When all of this began there was far more desperation in these searches. There was still an intoxicating hope that there might be someone who could help or even an obvious way out. There was precious little of that thought left. Hope was something that I would snuff out deep within me, it couldn't have been allowed to taint my view of what was actually happening. If there was hope internally, it couldn't make up for its lack externally. Until a way out was found, there could be no lies told to myself. I had at one time really believed in a way around it. Ever since the growth took over, hope was few and far between. The reality is it comes for us all. No matter what. There is no way around the inevitable, we all join the decay, one way or another. “This one’s gone, next room.” She said. Ledia was our self declared leader. She was the only one who had any kind of scientific background, and at least pretended to have plans for the future though she was always quiet when we talked about what it may hold. We began to move out of the room when I thought I noticed some of the growth moving. I stopped and looked back, but nothing was there. No movement, no person. Just vines. I kept going. “That one had been there a while, stupid that we were even came out here,” I said. “We can’t just ignore rooms because you think they’re a waste of time. Even if it was a small chance, we had to take it.” Ledia retorted. She hated my attitude towards these checks. I knew she did, and I didn’t care. She cared that I didn’t care. “I just don’t understand why we’re still doing this, it makes no sense. We haven’t seen a living person in months. Theres no one left, Ledia. They’re either already back at the penthouse or dead.” I knew she hated to think about them as dead, but there was really no other way to describe it. Once the growth reaches their brain, and the vines have turned their bloodshot eyes olive, there was no word for them but “dead”. “If you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to be. You’re on your way to being more of a hindrance than a help with that attitude. I don’t need to constantly explain our motives to someone who can’t understand the importance of what we’re doing.” She was looking down at her notepad, marking the apartment down as an X, she had taped a fire escape map onto her notepad and was marking on it where we had been and had not yet. I told her when she took the map out of the fire escape that it was dangerous and now we wouldn’t know how to get out in a fire. She didn’t find that as funny as I did. . As we moved onto the next one, I knew she wanted so desperately to not mark it at all, but to bring back to the penthouse one more living person. One more bulwark against the marching of decay. “Of course that’s important, I’m just saying it's unrealistic. There’s no beating this, as much as either of us want to. This thing has been going on for far too long and far too successfully for us to do anything about it. Don’t you think we should just accept it? What good is this doing, Ledia? I mean, look at yourself! Your heart can’t take this constant stress. Things are bad enough being stuck here. We’ve gone as far as the growth will let us, there’s no more reason to go a floor lower than there is to ration food anymore. How much more are you going to put yourself through before you accept it?” I regretted the outburst as soon as I said it. She may have chided me but I knew better than to kick a woman while she was down. Her heart condition had worsened over the past few months, and it was becoming clear she would not make it much longer. Her last episode nearly took her already. It had nothing to do with the search, and everything to do with our inability to get outside and find help for her. Assuming there was an outside anymore. We turned the corner into the next hallway and found the room marked 4038. Ledia hadn’t spoken since I had stupidly opened my mouth, and the tension had widened the rift between us. I used my crowbar to pry the molding around the door off and began to work at breaking the door down. The brute force of slamming my body weight against the door slowly began to bring fruits to my labor. The door swung open, and the darkness awaiting us was a reminder of the severity of our task. There was danger in this room, and though survivors were unlikely to be found inside, the responsibility to them was still felt. In the darkness, I could see the vines moving. Throbbing and sliding about the floor, wall, and ceilings like worms under a freshly lifted log. There was nothing left of the walls to be seen, only the dark silhouettes of the growth. Due to the excess of vegetation, it would take hours to find where the doors to the other rooms were, and the growth hid any of the potential survivors or threats with equal vigor. I did not want to go in, I knew this apartment would be a bad one. I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t make it out. But I also knew that rooms where the vines still lived meant there was something organic they were feeding off of. I knew something or someone was alive in there. It had been forever since those living things we found were people, and now there were usually dogs, cats, or some other creature that the vines could have their fill of. But there was a chance. Even though I didn’t even believe in that chance anymore, I thought against better judgement that there may finally be something worth finding in there. I did not want to go in, but I had come to find survivors, even when I knew they were beyond saving should we find one. I walked in, but I knew hope was not inside. The darkness enveloped me. It had an almost physical presence, restraining my breath and even my thoughts. Fear of the growth was extremely present in my mind. The darkness was thick, but even in it I could see the vines moving, growing and decaying over every surface of the room. When one vine died another grew over it, thickening the layer of organic death that became the new border of the room. The speed of the whole cycle was dizzying. If you tried to follow a vine with your eyes, by the time you found it's end it will have already turned brown with death. I turned on my head lamp and looked around the room. There was nothing jutting out of the green blanket here, like there often was in the less active rooms. When the vines still held such a presence it was near impossible to distinguish anything from the original design or layout under the growth. Living creatures however, were easy to find. Simply find where the vines were coming from. There had to be food. There always was. I looked around and saw that the surge of growth was coming from the center of the eastern wall. I pulled out my pocketknife and took a deep breath. This was the worst part. “Are you ready?” I called out into the hallway, Ledia waiting at the doorway. “Only if you are, try to be more careful this time. Please.” It blows my mind how she thinks last time was my fault. I nod back anyway, even though there’s small chance she saw me in the darkness. I pulled the knot at my waist tight. We would always made sure to have a rope around the one who enters a living room. If something happened, we wanted to be able to remove them hopefully before the growth gets a strong grip on them. We wanted to find survivors, not feed the thing taking them from us. So with as much hesitancy as I’d imagine any person would have in this situation, I began to move toward the source of the vines. They surged and writhed under their own weight and compulsion. There was a disgust they brought about in me. They were a reminder of the death of the world I grew up in. They showed that there would be no returning to the peace and comfort that once was my life. It was like seeing maggots crawling in the corpse of your childhood dog. Life after death, sure, but at the expense of the life you wanted to preserve. I finally reached the edge of the room, huffing and panting after carefully wading through the thriving ecosystem of room 4038. I grabbed one of the surging vines, and it stilled in my hands. It was almost like it was waiting to see what I would do. This was the reason there was a rope around my waist. Sometimes the vines accepted their death without resistance, allowing themselves to be cut away like the vines before the decay would. But sometimes, sometimes they would fight back, and take the assailant captive as its newest source of nourishment. I made the first cut, and thankfully, nothing happened. “She’s gentle!” I cried back to Ledia. I couldn’t hear her, but due to many searches with her, I knew the heavy sigh of relief that was sure to follow that cry. I worked quickly on the vines, cutting away piece after piece until I began to make out the borders of the doorway. This one was going to be a lot of work. The door hadn’t been closed with the vines growing over it, it had been open with the thick stalks jutting through the whole area of the frame. It would take a lot to cut away this one. Speed was of the utmost importance. Removing dead vines was easy enough, but they were constantly replaced with living ones. You had to be faster than whatever the vegetation was. Or at least, fast enough for the growth to just allow you in. I kept working at it, and began to feel uneasy. How long had it been since I had seen this much? Surely there was a large organism feeding this one. It must be huge to allow this much life to feed off of its death. After about 20 minutes of constant pruning, I had opened up enough of a gap to slide through. Once I made it to the other side, I began searching for another room. I scanned the whole perimeter and found nothing. All the growth was even here, but all surging through to the other room. This isn’t right, I thought. There’s never been a room without a source. I must have been missing it. I began to cut through the undergrowth, trying to see if maybe the lower layers held the answer. But they were dead, like they always were. The vines were alive on top but left the room without answering for their source. I began to follow the trail of life, trying to track it backwards to what it must be feeding off. My eyes followed the vines back and back until somehow, my eyes found themselves back at the door. That can’t be right… I followed the other side around, and they were pointing to the door too. No matter what direction I followed, I always ended up back at the door with all vegetation pointing back to the same door they enter from. Somehow it was flipping from going away to going towards as I followed it. I must have spent far too long in there, because I felt three tugs on my waist, Ledia probing to see if I was still alive. I tugged back three times to offer her assurances. I took one last scan of the room, finding no resolution to the questions I had, I began to move back out of the room. I took several laborious steps through the growth towards the door, trying to put at peace the panic clawing at my head. This isn’t right. Something is wrong. You need to leave faster. I made it to the doorway and began to cut away the fresh stalks that filled in the gap that had been there minutes before. “Tyler.” I snapped my head back towards the room. I didn’t know that voice. I knew every voice in this building. But not that one. I looked around the room, the soft incandescent glow from my headlamp barely lighting anything except what it was directly pointing at. Panic found grip in reality as I scanned the room. As the light passed over the eastern wall, I saw a dull olive hued eye. It was wet and bulging from the growth like a cheap rubber toy squeezed too tight. I froze. This couldn’t be a person. The growth never dismembered its feed. It centered around the food, it didn’t ration it. The decay would melt uniformly, everything passing away in solidarity. My thoughts racing faster than I could act out any of their commands, the vines surged over the eye and it was gone. It had been visible no more than a couple seconds, but the pit in my stomach would stay for hours. There hadn’t been a talker in months, and they never knew names. They never spoke to anyone. It didn’t work like that. It was more like they spoke into a room than it was them speaking directly to anyone. Why did this one know my name? “H- Hello?” I was embarrassed of the tone of my voice and hoped to heaven that Ledia hadn’t heard me. I didn’t want to be seen scared, regardless of the situation. I wanted confidence, if I couldn’t feel it then I could at least fake it. “Who’s there?” I yelled with more authority. There was no answer. I scanned again all around the room and saw nothing. I waited quietly and scanned ahead of me, moving my eyes along the edges of the room like a hunter in a deer stand, begging any slight deviance in landscape to be what I was looking for. But nothing was there, not to be seen or heard. Only the writhing, convulsing organism of vines that was there at the beginning. Eventually I left the room, unsure if I’d rather be losing my mind or to have actually seen and heard what I had. After finding my way out of the apartment I found Ledia nervously watching the doorway. Her relief when she saw me was refreshing. Few people were left in my life that cared enough to worry. Well, few people were left at all. I turned off my headlamp. Ledia’s light was all that was illuminating the hallway now. We never used two lamps when one would do, we couldn’t afford to. Resources were so low, and the cheap batteries of the past had become priceless treasures in the Herringbone Apartments. “What happened in there?” She asked. “I’m… I’m not sure. I could have swore I heard something, but I couldn’t find a source for the vines. Like at all. They just wrapped around the room and when I tried to follow the growth they just flipped me around so I wound up where I started. I think I’m losing it.” I raised my hand to my forehead and rubbed it hard, as if trying to remove the anxiety with the friction of my palm. “There had to have been a source, Tyler. I’m sure it was just a hard room, nothing wrong with admitting it.” It wasn’t just a hard room. Hard rooms were ones where the vines didn’t let you cut them with just a pocketknife. Hard rooms had bigger sources of nourishment, but the source was still there. This one didn’t have any source at all. No, that’s impossible. This one was hiding it. That was new. That was different. “Yeah, I must be in my head or something. I don’t have anything left in the tank though. Can we head up?” I knew she would say yes, she was always eager to care for others. Ledia was devoted, and wanted to find survivors or a way out just as much if not more than the rest of us, but never at our expense. She nodded but didn’t look away. She was watching me, her headlamp shining just above my forehead but still bright enough to hurt my eyes. I squinted my eyes in pain to remind her of it. She looked away and down the hall, towards the stairwell that harbored safety. As we made our way down the hall I must have looked back five times. Too many times in too short of a hallway to inspire confidence in my faculties for Ledia. But she said nothing. Her silence more comforting than any words she could spare. When we made it to the door of the stairwell, Ledia insisted I go first. This deviated from our normal routine but her concern was apparent and she clearly just needed me to be in her sight. I walked through the doorway and was greeted with the dead vines of past growth. We climbed up the stairs. This was the furthest down we had been since before the growth had ever come. I didn’t even know Ledia the last time I had gone to the third floor, much less to the lobby. This trip to the fourth floor was scary enough, I shuddered at the thought of what we were getting closer to. It had been more days than I could count, with hope waning every morning. The others kept track but I didn’t. It made it harder to keep going. We kept trying to find survivors not just for their own benefit but also in the hope that they might have been able to help us. Either in food or in some kind of knowledge in how to get out of this damn building. When the growth started, it pushed us all further up, further to the top of the building. We had no way out. The vines covered every exterior edge of the building first, including the roof. So we were trapped in the penthouse. A tragedy, I know. Once we made it to the top, we banged on the door. A raspy voice answered, “Who is it?” “Is there an answer to that question that you wouldn’t open the door for, Winston? We’re the only ones here.” Ledia sighed, in a rare admittance of the lack of living people in our home. Winston mumbled something and we heard the large bookcase scraping the ground as he moved it aside. It was a stupid lock, the vines wouldn’t care at all about a simple hundred pounds when they came to claim their spoil. Light spilled into the staircase and we entered the penthouse. The door opened into the living room, huge by all standards. The Herringbone was a luxury complex, but this apartment made my own apartment from before the growth look like the storage closet of a Waffle House. The penthouse had evidently been vacant when everything happened, so its décor was all taken from other rooms the floor below, before the growth got too thick in the higher levels. By décor, I mean a couch, and two chairs in that room, a table in the dining room, directly adjacent and to the east of that room, and a few mattresses in the master bedroom and each guest room of which there were three. “Took you way too long. We started to think you weren’t coming back.” Winston said. His voice was borderline comical in it’s juxtaposition with his body and face. Winston was an extremely put together man, somehow maintaining appearances even now. He had a clean shaven face and hair that was carefully trimmed into that which would not be out of place on a lawyers head. His clothes were neat but dirty, none of us could afford cleanliness these days. All of this presentation couldn’t rid him of the evidence of his old habit. While his appearance belonged in high society, his voice belonged in a trailer park. The high rasp of his tones were indicative of a life spent smoking. Early this year he had been forced to give it up when we found his last pack on the 5 th floor. There were no packs left, and if there were any on the lower floors, they were already covered in growth. Winston had been amicable before he quit, but since the situation required he give up his pastime, he had become the grouchiest man I believe I have ever come in contact with even far after the withdrawals had subsided. If I could have given him a whole carton of Camels I would have, regardless of their horrible smell. “We did our best to make it back before you worried Winston, but unfortunately that goal fell to the wayside.” Ledia had little patience for Winston, though at times it appeared that a part of her did care for the man. “I wanted us to be more careful today, things haven’t seemed the same. The floors don’t just let us move through right now. It almost seems like the beginning days. Less dormant, like it's growing upward again.” She seemed extremely troubled over these words. Rightfully so, since it had been months since we had seen evidence of the vines growing upwards and not remaining confined to their lower dwellings. “If that’s the case then it only emphasizes my point, not negating it. You shouldn’t have been late without having told us beforehand, especially if it was on purpose. We don’t know what these plants can do Ledia. I sure as hell don’t want to be the one to lock a door, but we’ve seen people talk before, I see no reason why we won’t see people walk.” Winston looked more concerned than he had when we had just been late. Now there was a reason outside negligence, and reasons prompted reactions. “Regardless, you two need rest. Go wash, and we can talk in the morning.” The water was one of the many mysteries in this building. It never stopped running. There was no hot water, but there was still water pressure. Not just a dribble either, but completely normal pressure. As if the hot water heater had just gone out and the landlord was too cheap to fix it. No electricity, no way out of the building, but flowing water. It was our main source of hope that there was still a world outside. Maybe right outside the thick wall of growth, there was an entire world trying to figure out what happened to the Herringbone, and how to save it’s residents. It didn’t matter though, even if there was a living world outside, they would be just as useless against the vines as we are. Even the smartest people in the world couldn’t take this apart, this was something from God surely. Some kind of divine judgement against those of us stuck in this hell. Theres nothing left to do except search and pray for forgiveness. As I went to wash I found my thoughts constantly drifting back to that room. No matter how much I tried to tell myself it was just my mind playing tricks on me, I couldn't rid my subconscious of the sight of that pale eye. The olive hue to what should be white, the lack of the anatomy to support the eye’s presence; all of it haunted me. I was glad it was too late for the others to be up, the interaction with Winston was exhausting enough. I had no desire to rehash it with someone else. Ledia had already covered for me by not disclosing how odd I was behaving. I didn’t want her to have to do that again. I stepped into the tub and turned the frigid water on, I washed myself as well as I could with no soap. Soap ran out quick since it was something none of us thought to ration while we had it. When I closed my eyes my vision filled with the room I had explored earlier in the day. I followed the vines again and again and it still produced the same outcome. I opened my eyes and pretended that vision wouldn’t follow me to sleep when I went to bed. Looking into the mirror and seeing myself had become a kind of recentering ritual. The man who looked back at me was not the man I knew. Skin clung to my bones and there was a rats nest of hair covering my scalp and face. Lack of shampoo and shaving supplies contributed to my unkept nature, but Winston’s tidiness kept me shameful of my lack of effort. I had once been healthy. Not fit by any means, but not this carcass that stood before me. Food was so little in this apartment. We had to ration it. There had been booms of plenty of course; like finding an apartment with a pantry completely stocked with preserves and non-perishables that hadn’t been completely overgrown yet. The group hooped and hollered as Winston and Damon brought the food in, and laughed hard later on at the thought of a prepper having an apartment in the city. Those laughs were short lived, as the reality of the finite nature of the food slowly creeped in. The floors were becoming more and more overgrown, and food less and less frequent. The rations had to get light. So we went to bed hungry often, and usually more hungry than the night before. None of the group would dare hurt the others though, so we lived in squalor together in a penthouse. Starvation in luxury was a funny thought to drift off to. I got dressed and walked out to the guest room that I shared with Winston. He was already asleep, which he did quietly. I smiled at that, such a raspy and gruff man resting in near silence. It made me wonder what his dreams were of. I got in bed and closed my eyes. Before the darkness took me in, the eye visited my thoughts to remind me of it’s unanswered call.
Intent Score
8
Intent
96
Confidence
Summary
This is a fictional, literary post that mentions a window but is not about a real window problem or replacement need.
Reasoning
The post is narrative prose focused on decay and atmosphere, not a homeowner describing window issues, comparing options, or seeking repair/replacement advice. The window reference is incidental and metaphorical rather than an actionable home improvement intent.
Extracted Signals
- window mentioned in passing
“"The window had been dingy for at least a year now."”
- not a repair/replacement request
“"This one was unsavable and had been for some time."”
- fictional/narrative tone
“"The apartment had grown into more of a terrarium than a living space."”
Model: gpt-5.4-mini · Prompt: v3 · 8/9/2026, 5:01:28 PM