Tag: strange

Lettuce Be

Pavowski6 Comments

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.

VineMan

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.

Ornithoscillation

Pavowski5 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week:  The Opening Line Challenge.  I used the opening line posited by a member called, simply, Nikki.

This was a fun one, and not nearly so dark as some of my other flash fiction.  But still pretty weird.

1000 words exactly.  Enjoy!  As always, I welcome feedback and comments if you’re out there reading.

 

Ornithoscillation

There was a dead bird on the porch again.

When the first one had shown up, Gerald thought that the family tomcat had simply started bringing him gifts again.  Trouble was, the second day there was another, and the day after that there were two, and tubby little Snuggles had never been much of a hunter.

Flummoxed, Gerald had called Animal Control.  The man who answered the call had poked around the property for thirty minutes, inspected the crawl space, and stuck his nose under some of the bushes before telling him that he had no idea what was causing the deaths.

On the Monday that followed (and the eighth bird) Gerald had bagged a few of them up and taken them down to the University, where a raccoon-eyed grad student named Samir met him at the veterinary building and took them in for testing.  Tuesday arrived (birds nine and ten) and Samir called back to say that physically the birds showed no signs of illness or trauma.  They certainly hadn’t been killed by any cat.

Now, Wednesday.  Bird number eleven.  Burying them had gotten too tedious, not to mention all the unsightly little patches of dirt on his immaculate lawn in back of the house, so Gerald took a shovel and dumped it in the corrugated trash can next to five of its little feathered friends.

That night, in his dreams, Gerald heard the sound of a deep humming.  It penetrated the walls of his mind, it reverberated behind his eyes, it pulsed deep in the soft tissues of his brain.  He woke to a ringing in his ears.  The clock read 2:30.  A disoriented minute followed, in which he realized that the ringing was outside his head, not inside it.  He followed it, to the bedroom door, down the hallway, to his son’s room.  His son, twelve years old, fascinated with trains and clocks and electric things.  A dim light shone underneath the doorway, brilliant against the dark of the night.  Gerald cracked the door, making as little noise as he could, planned to see little Simon snoring away, tuck him in, and return to bed.  Instead, he saw Simon silhouetted against the tiny desk in the room, hunched over the makeshift desk of milk crates and plywood, earphones clamped to the sides of his head, scribbling madly on a notepad while he fiddled with the dial of a radio with the other, twisting it this way and that, a lunatic safecracker dialing until his fingers bled.

“Si,” Gerald whispered, but Simon did not waver in his work.  “Simon!”

Simon stopped, but not because he heard Gerald: the noise-canceling headphones made that nigh impossible.  No, he had stopped because he had heard something.  A phantom wavelength, a rogue echo of a noise which should not have been there.  It had only been there for a moment, an infinitesimal crackle of static in a sea of white noise, but it was there.  He stopped writing, craned his neck, and twisted the dial back in the other direction.  There, again, and gone, just as quickly.  He focused his entire being on the noise, gripped the dial as delicately as his clumsy adolescent fingers would allow, and ticked it by the tiniest of degrees back toward the noise.

Gerald had crept up behind Simon, his hand outstretched to shake his boy’s shoulder, when Simon found the frequency, and this time he held it, letting go of the dial as if it might shatter.  Behind him, his father clutched at his head as a lance of sound seared his ears and burned his vision hot-white.  He fell to his knees, and the noise was gone.  Simon, still oblivious, tapped and banged at his receiver, checked his notes and began to spin the dial again, chasing the lost frequency like a rabbit into the brush.

A thump at the front door.  Fatherly instinct pushed all else aside and Gerald dashed downstairs, stopping at the side door to the garage to grab a worn and polished Louisville Slugger off the wall.  He crept to the door and peered through the keyhole.  Nothing.  Flexing his fingers on the bat, he unlocked the door with his free hand, stepped back from it, and used the end of the bat to shove it open wide.  Nobody there.  He stepped out, in bare feet and boxer shorts, ready to swing for the fence at the sight of anything moving.

Squish.

He jumped back in horror.  Another goddamned bird.  This one had hit the door so hard its neck was bent in the wrong direction, as if it had been built of Legos and put together backwards.

Then it clicked.  Simon had brought his science project about radio frequencies home from school the night before the first bird showed up.  Something about how sound frequencies, properly amplified and directed, could alter living tissue.  Gerald hadn’t really paid it that much attention — it was a sixth grade science project, for god’s sake — but Simon had been engrossed.  Obsessed.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, Gerald ran back upstairs, taking them two at a time.  “Simon?” He called, rounding the corner into Simon’s room — where the boy jumped in circles, pumping his fist and shouting, the headphones still clamped to his ears.  Gerald yanked them off.  “Stop it!  You’ve killed them!”  And if the sound had killed all those birds…

But Gerald caught a glimpse of the radio equipment, as Simon stared at him, open-mouthed.  It wasn’t a receiver.  It was a transmitter.

“Dad,” Simon said, tugging at his sleeve, “I’m not killing them.  I’m saving them.”  Simon pointed to the window.

With trepidation, Gerald peered out the window.  Something had set off the motion sensor in the driveway.  The light was on; he saw a cloud of birds spilling from the trash can and from his lawn like swarming bees, twisting and writhing as one like some great dark winged beast, spiraling out of the light and ascending into the darkness.