“The pot speaks to me,” Sarah whispered, her trembling fingers tracing the earthen rim. The terracotta surface felt unusually warm beneath her touch, almost alive. “Every night, when the moonlight filters through my bedroom window, I hear it.”

Dr. Bennett adjusted his glasses, studying his patient with practiced neutrality. “And what does it say?”

“Memories… fragments… stories that aren’t mine.” Sarah’s gaze drifted to the window, where autumn leaves performed their annual dance of death. “Sometimes I hear my mother’s voice, though she’s been gone for fifteen years.”

The flower pot sat innocently on her windowsill, hosting a thriving peace lily. Its leaves swayed gently despite the absence of wind, casting strange shadows on the wall that seemed to form faces, then dissolve into meaningless patterns.

“Yesterday…” Sarah’s voice cracked. “Yesterday it showed me something different. A scene from 1985, long before I was born. A woman—not my mother—planting something beneath the soil. Not seeds, Doctor. Something else.”

“What did she plant, Sarah?”

The question hung in the air like morning mist. Through the window, clouds gathered, dark and pregnant with rain. The peace lily’s leaves trembled more violently now.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But every night since then, the soil has been disturbed. As if something’s trying to emerge.”

Dr. Bennett leaned forward, his professional demeanor slipping slightly. “Have you considered moving the pot?”

Sarah laughed, a hollow sound that echoed through her sparsely furnished apartment. “It always returns. I’ve thrown it away three times now. Each morning, it’s back on my windowsill, peaceful as ever.”

The doctor made a note in his leather-bound journal. “Perhaps we should increase your medication—”

“It’s not in my head!” Sarah stood abruptly, pacing. “The pot… it’s more than ceramic and soil. It’s a vessel, a gateway to… to…”

Thunder rolled outside, and Sarah fell silent. The peace lily’s leaves had stopped moving entirely, frozen in an unnatural position.

“To what, Sarah?”

She approached the pot slowly, her bare feet silent on the hardwood floor. “To truth,” she whispered, reaching for it.

As her fingers touched the rim, a flash of lightning illuminated the room. In that brief, brilliant moment, Dr. Bennett saw something impossible: Sarah’s reflection in the window showed not one woman, but two—one younger, one older, both reaching for the pot with identical expressions of revelation.

When his vision cleared, Sarah was gone. The flower pot remained, the peace lily now withered and black. Beneath its dead leaves, something gleamed—a small key, old and brass, covered in soil that smelled of decades past.

Dr. Bennett approached the windowsill slowly, his heart pounding. As he reached for the key, he noticed something etched into the pot’s rim: “Sarah Bennett, 1985.”

His mother’s name. His mother, who disappeared the year before he was born, leaving behind only a flower pot with a peace lily.

The pot whispered, and this time, he listened.