The tumbleweed is haunted.
That isn’t unusual. Tumbleweed is dead the moment it dries enough to crack away from its roots and start its journey across the land, a green ghost of itself, letting out a whispered chuckle every time the wind sends seeds flying into verdant soil.
Like so many others, this tumbleweed is released from its anchoring root, the wind flinging it into the air. It lands on a grasshopper mouse, trapping it and killing it with sharp thorns and percussive bouncing.
The little animal’s soul hangs on, going for the ride of its life. Squealing in fierce joy as the dead plant leaps into the air and rolls over dunes like they’re nothing. The mouse enjoys the speed of travel and the feel of wind flowing through its spectral fur.
As it travels across miles of desert, the mouse’s tumbleweed bumps into a fellow salsola tragus. This one carries the ghost of a dung beetle. The beetle, in need of companionship, reaches a strand of ectoplasm into the mouse’s tumbleweed, connecting them. The plants shuffle into one another, tangling thorns and enmeshing their souls in a tight embrace as they tumble along.
Another tumbleweed joins their party. This one carries the desiccated remains of a female Woodhouse’s toad. The mouse and beetle try to include it in their social circle. They reach out to the toad, only to be scorched by the spectral remembrance of poison glands. The mouse and beetle keep one another company, giving the toad a wide berth. The toad’s tumbleweed is another matter. Particularly thorny, it clings to the other two weeds, its brown branches pushing deeper and deeper into both plants until the extra weight slows the ungainly group.
A strong wind whips along the desert, pushing the trio into a pride of tumbleweed. The pack is filled with weeds of all sizes, each occupied by a duality of the weed’s green spirit and an animal soul. Each animal reaches out spectral paws and claws, seeking more ghost-inhabited plants. More company for their ride along the winds.
Tumbleweed filled with bees, rattlesnakes, and scorpions swarm in an advanced unit. Behind them come the stingless, poison-free animals, like the mouse and the dung beetle. The smaller animals flank larger, more uncommon spirits. Kangaroo rats, a pallid bat, several pygmy rabbits, and even, against all odds, a cougar cub. The plentiful small spirits push along ungainly animals, corralling their dried-out carcasses and keeping the pack moving.
More and more tumbleweeds converge on the herd, creating a mass, an impenetrable wall of thorns and sticks and dead animals. The wind pushes them west, toward the cities. They take the path of least resistance, rolling along wide highways and crowding semi-trucks.
Vehicles veer across painted lines, some crunching into ditches, others catch an errant tumbleweed in the grill. Some swerve to meet the mass of sticks and thorns head-on, breaking a few of the weeds and scattering bones and leathery fur across cracked windshields before the plants cram into their undercarriages. When the wind hits just right, the dried-out sticks burst into flame, leaving behind smoking wreckage.
The animal spirits feel the drivers – their fear and rage and hope. Feel those spoiling for a fight and those wishing for isolation. The feelings push into them like little spectral thorns. Some emotions stroke their fur and scales, while others scratch and claw at the animals, driving them into a frenzy.
That frenzy thrums through their ectoplasm.
The wind no longer drives them.
They use their pent-up energy to push forward, scratching paint and glass as they run headlong into the spires of office buildings, low-slung ranch houses, and apartment stacks.
The emotions swirl up and up, intensifying and building the frenzy into madness. The tumbleweed scratches cement and dirt and skin. It picks up urban animals along the way. Cats. Dogs. Racoons. A coyote pup. Everything pushes into a snarl of thorns and sticks and weathered flesh and fur. Crams together into a maelstrom of energy.
The mass of dead plants and dead animals rolls on, catching potted flowers, strawberry vines, and English ivy in its claws. Tumbling forward. Ever forward.
Ahead, a woman fumbles at the door of a ranch-style house. A browning lawn stretches out behind her, a pad of cement for a porch. Her keys scrape against a lock. A muttered, “Come on, come on.” Her terror is so palpable that even the little mouse feels it. Her terror permeates the mouse’s bones, even though they are broken and rattling in a wrap of leathery fur. The emotion fills the mouse’s ectoplasm as it clings to its personal tumble of thorns. The mouse licks its spectral chops, thirsty for more. More emotion, more frenzy. It strains against its cage to grab and absorb the terror, to build energy from it.
The woman whips her head around. Her eyes grow wide as the stack of tumbleweed, now draped in the ivy it ripped from the ground, looms toward her. The air is windless, yet the behemoth rattles on.
She pushes her key into the lock. Too late. The herd slams into her. Rending skin. Biting mouths. Stinging poison. Something - a claw? Jabs straight into her femur. She screams, and even that is ripped from her as the tumble knocks the wind out of her. It pulls her off her feet and into the air. She’s flying. Flying into thorns.
The pain evaporates, sucked right out of her. And now she’s laughing. Laughing with a thousand chattering voices. Filled with wild joy as she and thousands of fellow souls roll forward.
They roll through the streets. Topple plywood and drywall. Jab thorns into flesh. Seek out more souls to fill their everlasting arms.
J.S. Douglas is a horror author living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, daughter, dog, and a growing collection of fish. She has short stories published in several magazines and anthologies. Her works most often address the topics she knows best: existential dread, ghosts, monsters, and the everyday horrors of existence. You can explore her published works and find her social media accounts by visiting her website, jsdouglaswrites.com
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The dung beetle seeking companionship is such a perfect detail - it adds this weird layer of lonliness to the horror that makes it way more unsettling than just straight monster chaos. That moment where the mouse and beetle bond while avoiding the toxic toad ghost is oddly touching for a story about murderous tumbleweed spirits. I grew up in the Southwest and actualy remember seeing massive tumbleweed piles that looked threatening enough without adding ghosts. The eco-horror angle works really well here tho.
Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind.