Every soldier carries a houseplant. If your plant dies, it’s treason.

“Like a kind of environmental reworking of Matt Darby’s ‘The Sound Gun or Craig Padawer’s 'The Meat Garden,' Missives takes a military coming of age story and torques it into something absurd—and yet, it remains human and moving. It refuses to play realism’s game, but still offers more of realism’s payoff than most so-called realistic stories.”

                       —Brian Evenson

Short on fossil fuels and life-sustaining flora, a new military compels its soldiers to carry houseplants. To allow your plant to die is treason and death.

Hershel Boyd is by all accounts a poor soldier. When a fellow recruit convinces Hershel to choose a plant he didn’t intend, their two lives become entwined to the bitter end as they search for the last green places on earth.