Chuck’s Challenge of the week: The Stock Photo challenge.
Mine is the photo you see below. The story follows. I fear the end is a little abrupt, but it was really tough keeping this one from running away with me. You know. Like kudzu growing out of control.
Lettuce Be
“Hey, Hoskins, leave ‘im alone,” Nelson said.
Hoskins broke off sprinkling water on Green’s head and guffawed loudly; the pun never got old.
Green2378 ruffled his foliage and turned to the men slowly, the way all Greens do, and regarded them indifferently. A Green can’t look at you–not really–but it’s still disconcerting to feel those eyeless stalks straining in your direction. His (all Greens are considered male; Dr. Feingarten, who created the Proto-Greens, could not abide calling them “it”s and never thought to call them “she”s) thin, sinewy dendritic appendages stretched out toward Hoskins.
Green2378 only wanted to communicate, but Hoskins pulled away with a jerk, tripping over his feet and spilling coffee on his rumpled shirtfront. Nelson laughed and held out a hand, allowing Green’s thin spiraling vine-hands to rope around his fingers and slide across his palm. Hoskins felt his stomach turn just watching, but Nelson suppressed a girlish giggle.
“How can you let that thing touch you?” Hoskins asked.
“It tickles,” Nelson said simply. “Kinda like holding a snake. Or maybe a lot of snakes.”
“Creeps me out.”
Nelson shook his head and thought into his fingers, the way the Committee on Green-Human Relations had recommended. “He means no harm, Greenie.”
Green2378 twitched his encephalic bundle, and his leaves quaked with understanding. His vines traced a graceful pattern on Nelson’s hand and Nelson heard a tiny whisper in his head: friends?
Nelson grinned and spoke aloud, folding his other hand over the first and allowing the vines to encircle them both. “Yeah. He’s a friend.”
Hoskins’s face twisted. “I ain’t that thing’s friend.”
“Oh, lighten up. No, not you, Green.”
Hoskins shook his head. “Crime against nature, you ask me. It’s bad enough they walk and talk. Why do they have to cram them into suits?”
Nelson assumed that know-it-all tone he reserved for talking about economic trends and inflation fluctuations. “Studies show that people react more favorably to the Greens when they appear more human.”
Green2378 appeared to be looking back and forth between the two of them. His stalks coiled and uncoiled in what looked like a nervous gesture, not that Greens could feel nerves. “More human,” Hoskins muttered. The Greens only looked more bizarre wearing clothes, to his mind. Green2378 spilled out of a smart-looking pinstriped suit with a neatly pressed shirt and immaculate tie, and looked a good bit sharper than Hoskins did, despite being a sentient tangle of vines.
“Have you ever spoken to one? I mean properly spoken?” Keeping one hand in contact with Greens’ tendrils, Nelson reached out for Hoskins, who shied away with a sneer.
“Come on,” Nelson insisted. “What’s the harm?”
Hoskins’s lip curled, but he couldn’t deny his curiosity. It was, after all, just a plant. What could be the harm? He reached out his hand and suppressed a shudder as Green2378 laid first a few leaves, then a few tendrils, on his fingertips.
Then a whisper bloomed in the back of his mind, a soft insistent voice, like the wind in the trees, though he couldn’t make out any words.
“Go on,” Nelson urged, “say something.”
“…Hi,” Hoskins managed, squinting his eyes shut. The vines were encircling his fingers like dried-out octopus legs. It tickled a little bit, but it wasn’t all that bad.
Green2378 was in love. The taste of Hoskins’s skin was like water and sunlight and rich, loamy soil. He tried to tell Hoskins as much, but his thoughts became a tangle.
Hoskins cracked an eye. Green2378 quivered before him, whispering madly in Hoskins’s thoughts, the words indistinguishable. Then Green2378 reached out another leafy appendage for Hoskins’s hand, and in a flash the vines enveloped him to the wrist.
Hoskins squeaked out a surprised yell and yanked his hands back, rubbing them furiously together as if to scrub them clean. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.
“I think he likes you,” Nelson said, snickering a little.
“Keep him away from me,” Hoskins said, and stormed off.
Nelson shrugged at Green2378 by way of apology. “Sorry, Greenie. He just needs to warm up to you.”
Hoskins finished his shift that day trying not to think too much about the Greens, but always feeling like he saw 2378 out of the corner of his eye.
*****
That night Hoskins awoke in a cold sweat; he’d dreamt that he was drowning in tangling vines that pulled him downward forever, strangling and choking him as they bore him into an infinite dark.
Outside the window, the trees seemed to loom a little closer to his windows. Hoskins got out of bed to look, and sure enough, down by his front walk, he saw Green2378, still wearing his pinstriped suit, spilling over and merging with the rosebushes.
Hoskins flew into a panic. He called the police and shouted obscenities at the Green from his window, but it didn’t matter. The police had never arrested a Green before and they weren’t about to start now; no Green had ever shown any sign of malice or intent to harm. They didn’t have the brain capacity. No, they assured Hoskins that Green2378 had simply gotten lost on his way home. They told him not to think any more about it. Ignoring it proved troublesome, though, when Green2378 was back again the next night, and the next.
Hoskins was going slowly out of his mind. Green2378 was always there at work, almost stalking him. The weeds were overtaking his lawn and growths of kudzu were beginning to envelop his house, but the police wouldn’t do anything about Green2378. They thought the idea of arresting a plant was funny.
Hoskins had had enough. The next night, he saw Green2378 on his lawn again and invited him in for a cool drink of water. Green2378 greedily accepted, not knowing that Hoskins had laced the drink with enough herbicide to clear a football field. Hoskins tossed the limp pile of leaves on the refuse pile in his backyard and kept the suit for himself.
Accidentally Inspired 
Chuck’s challenge of the week: Build a story around one simple sentence.
I was inescapably drawn to the quirky and goofy sentence penned by Ryanjamesblack: “Merlin leaned against the bathroom sink, stroking his smoky beard self-consciously, studying the instructions on the “JUST FOR MEN” box with the surly frown he usually reserved for translating incantations scribed in a dead tongues.”
Here, then, is Merlin in Midtown.
Merlin in Midtown
“I’ve got a care package prepared for you when you arrive,” the man in black said. His name was Smith — obviously a fake — and Merlin much preferred the more ominous-sounding “man in black”.
“Clothes, shoes, letters of writ?” Merlin asked.
“We call them passports, but yes.”
“Hat?” The man in black held up a baseball cap before the mirror. Merlin passed an unimpressed eye over it. “Not pointy enough.”
“No pointy hats here.”
Merlin huffed through his prodigious mustache, blowing its points out toward the mirror. As likely, Smith would say “no beards” next.
“And about your beard…”
“Not a chance! I’ll not shear my face for some little upstart. Maybe in your time the men go around with their faces as smooth as the women’s, but –“
“Relax. You don’t have to cut it.” Smith reached into his devilish little contraption and pulled out a hand-sized box with a smiling, grizzled man on it.
“What in the name of Excalibur is that?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
He had delayed long enough. Worlds needed saving. Again. The man in black had contacted him using all the appropriate passwords; he was a member of the Order, even if his appearance suggested nothing arcane in the least. Still, Merlin had seen stranger things in his time. “Stand back.” He hiked up the hem of his robe, stood up on the washbasin, and stepped through the mirror. Smith stood a respectable distance away as Merlin emerged from the bathroom mirror in his twenty-first century apartment. Now in the flesh, Merlin finally got a good look at the man in his sharp but nondescript black suit.
Of course, Merlin didn’t know what a suit was, but it looked sensible enough.
“Is that how you’re dressing me, then?”
“Not exactly.”
Merlin leaned against the bathroom sink, stroking his smoky beard self-consciously, studying the instructions on the “JUST FOR MEN” box with the surly frown he usually reserved for translating incantations scribed in a dead tongues. After massaging the foul-smelling goop into his beard and a good, healthy rinse, a less grey Merlin looked back at him from the mirror. “What sorcery is this?” he demanded.
“Less sorcery, more chemistry. Your wardrobe is in the other room.”
Smith exited the building in his black suit, got into a waiting black car with black windows, and drove off into a black tunnel. Merlin followed a few minutes after, wearing leather chaps and biker boots and a jacket studded with enough metal, he figured, to defend himself against a knight’s broadsword, not that he expected to encounter any such weapon in this time. At the curb, next to the lumbering steel beasts that glided past in puffs of faint fading smoke, stood a wheeled contraption that looked like some blacksmith’s nightmarish invention, a two-wheeled tangle of pipes and plastic and leather that the man in black had told him to ride to the destination. He tossed one leather-clad leg across its seat, cast a few protection spells about himself, and forgot to breathe as the thing roared to life and spirited him through the streets at ludicrous speeds. Tingles of excitement zinged through parts of him he’d forgotten about.
He dismounted the iron horse and pushed his way through the swinging doors of a tavern that felt a bit more like home than the rest of this world. It was dark and seedy and smelled of ale and smoke. Smith had given him a magical imprint of the man he was here to find, a lifelike image on a piece of glossy parchment which he held at the tip of his long nose as he cast his sparkling eyes around the room. There, bent over a green table in the back, was the very same boy, the likeness impossibly undeniable. In his hand, a quarterstaff, tapered to a fine point, with which he propelled a series of balls around the table. Merlin lowered the brim of his disappointingly un-pointy hat and strode over to the boy. “Arthur?” he used the voice he saved for royal decrees and portents, a deep, rumbling and ominous affair designed to awe and mystify.
“Scram, old man,” said the boy, in complete disregard of Merlin’s melodramatic tones.
Merlin tapped a finger on the table and the billiard balls exploded in a cloud of rainbow-colored dust. Arthur drew a tiny flashing blade and pointed it at Merlin’s nose. Merlin squinted his caterpillar-thick eyebrows and the dagger flung itself into the edge of the table, yanking Arthur’s hand down with it. The boy pulled and wrenched at the blade but it was stuck fast.
Merlin chuckled to himself. In his time, a child of destiny would reveal himself through a feat of strength or a demonstration of wit; this lad seemed capable of neither.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Enough, Arthur. I’m here to help you.”
“My name’s not Arthur, you psycho.”
Beneath his copious mustache, Merlin’s lips creased into a terse line. He left the youth bewildered and shouting obscenities at his back as he stomped out of the bar, the ridiculous garments of leather and steel disappearing in puffs of purple smoke and being replaced with his comfortable, grey robes. Outside, Smith, the “man in black” leaned against his black sedan, smiling a cheshire-cat grin. Merlin waved a hand and the slick facade dissolved, revealing a pale woman in a cascading, swirling dress of green and purple. She held a tiny blinking device in her hand, which she aimed at him with a series of maddening clicks. “Damn you, Morgan!” In her own wisp of grey-green smoke, she vanished.
By the time he arrived back in his own time, all the stained glass in the castle had been replaced with images of Merlin in his ridiculous leather outfit astride that horrendous metal horse intimidating a poor, helpless twenty-first century kid; his latest indignity immortalized in multicolored mosaic.