When it first started, the reactions ranged from horror to fascination to amusement. People would post pictures of deboned vegetables and videos of bones bring removed from veges. At first, this was dismissed as a hoax. Just another "trend" started by a generation that lives for "likes" and "shares".
However, as the phenomenon became increasingly common, people realised that it wasn't made up. Somehow, impossible as it may seem, vegetables had bones. It started with potatoes.
Nupur could remember the first time when she felt that strange hardness when she tried to cut a potato. As she pulled out the white hardness, she realized it looked a bit like a chicken bone. Though the rest of the potato looked just fine.
The government kept denying it, but Nupur would bet her life that all this had started ever since those strange lights had appeared in the sky above their farmhouse. No news channel had reported on it, but thanks to the wonders of social media word about the lights, and even a few pictures, reached the world at large. People from many other countries shared similar experiences.
Lights in the sky, flashing a blindingly bright red, followed by green and yellow, had appeared in the night sky. When mainstream media could no longer avoid the subject, they merely dismissed it as mass hysteria. But when vegetables suddenly began growing bones, they couldn't dismis that. Though not for lack of trying.
In time, social media influencers began posting pictures of "bone-in" roasted vegetables. The bones added a flavour apparently.
Nupur always deboned her veges though, as she worried they might poison her and her family. She would have used only boneless vegetables, but those were becoming exceedingly rare, and as a result, expensive.
As wierd as all this was, things were about to get much worse.
Nupur's blood ran cold when she saw that one green leaf growing on one of her sheep. At first she had thought it had fallen on the sheep and tried to get it out of her fleece. Only to realize that it was embedded in the animal's skin. Her sheep was growing leaves.
Nupur immediately opened her social media apps, and saw that many people had reported having seen something similar. Her feed was flooded with unsettling pictures of farm animals, sheep, goats, cows, covered in green leaves.
Soon, these animals began to eat less and less and would simply stand in the sun. They were becoming autotrophs, generating nutrition through photosynthesis.
So far, this condition hasn't affected predator animals. But how long before it did?
And how long before it would affect human beings?