Victor’s plant 

In a village called Trou-de-Taupe, tucked into the soft hills of the Alps, where even sunlight seemed a little drowsy and always late, lived a young man named Victor. People called him strange — “he hears things differently,” the elders would say. Some said it was autism, others whispered it was a gift. His eyes lingered on things no one else noticed: the breath of stones, the shifting of shadows, the flutter of a dust mote in a sunbeam.

Victor had no family left. His last relative — his grandmother who always smelled of dill and warmth — had passed away, leaving him alone. But people in the village didn’t fear Victor. Quite the opposite — they trusted him with the cows, as one might trust the silence of a pasture. He would lead them far into the hills, always carrying a bag of roasted sunflower seeds, which he’d eat slowly, squinting at the sky. Sometimes he’d fall asleep under a tree, and the cows would wander off like drops of milk. He would call them back by name, smiling, never scolding.

One day, he found a strange seed — not from a sunflower, nor any apple or pear. It was warm, as if something still lived inside it. Victor didn’t tell anyone. He brought it home, found an old green cooking pot with chipped enamel, filled it with soil, and planted the seed. He watered it with rain. Then he sat in front of it.

A week later, something sprouted. It wasn’t quite a flower, and it wasn’t a tree. It smelled like something long forgotten — like childhood, like a quiet dream, like the first snow.

Victor began to speak to the plant. He didn’t give it a name, because he felt it already had one, unpronounceable by human tongues. He told it about the cows, about how the sky spoke to the clouds, about how he didn’t understand why the seed had been given to him. Sometimes he would sit silently beside it for hours — and the plant, it seemed, listened.

Then, one day, Victor left to graze the cows and never came back.

They searched for three days. They found the cows — all of them — standing still in a circle atop the old hill, like something sacred had just passed through. But Victor was gone. No trace. No scarf. Not even a footprint.

He had vanished like a cloud — without sound, without warning.

The green pot with the plant remained, leaning against the stone wall of his house. No one dared throw it out. Soon people began to notice something strange: passersby would slow down near it, as though it were calling to them. Some would sit nearby and begin to speak — first about the weather, then about pain. Some asked questions: whether to sell a sheep, whether to marry, whether to move to the city.

The plant never replied in words, but everyone who spoke to it left with a kind of inner knowing, as though they had heard a whisper through silence.

At first, it was just the neighbors. Then people came from nearby villages. Then from Geneva. The plant never changed. It looked exactly as Victor had left it — with its scaly trunk like a miniature palm, and sharp leaves reaching skyward like hands.

Years passed. Victor’s house sagged with age, but the green pot remained. The villagers built a small canopy to protect it, and on holidays they lit candles beside it.

One day, old Etienne said he had heard Victor’s voice — not with his ears, but inside himself. It had said:

I’m here. I simply became what I planted.

Since then, in Trou-de-Taupe, people say that Victor never disappeared.

He bloomed.

And when the fog settles on the village, and the mountains breathe deep, you can hear the leaves of the plant rustle by themselves — even when the wind is asleep.