Liza loved her greenhouse.
Lurid blossoms of red and orange, snaking vines of green, and berries the deepest shades of blue and purple were all a part of her ever-growing collection. She called her plants her babies, talking to them in the same doting voice you’d expect of any mother.
I loved to watch her in the greenhouse. There was a rhythm to Liza’s movements. It was as if she were a dancer and that glass building was her stage. An unsung song played as she delicately clipped leaves, raked her long, pale fingers through dark soil, and sprinkled little white bits of plant food into flower beds.
Liza was a botanist by trade. Having space to build a greenhouse was her only stipulation when we entered the housing market ten years ago. I didn’t share her love of plant life, but I often joined Liza in her sanctuary. She seemed lighter in the greenhouse. Her eyes sparkled. This was where she was meant to be, so I never complained even if the greenhouse humidity didn’t appeal to my sweaty self. If I made a stink of it and tried to tear her away from the place that made her look so alive, wouldn’t I be an awful husband?
Maybe if I’d been crueler, I wouldn’t be here, huddled in this too-bright closet, the thorns of my daughters’ little fingers pressed into me painfully as we await the sound of shattering glass and dragging vines.
God help us.
I won’t make it out of this alive, but my girls… I’ve never been one to trust a stranger, but I fear what will happen to them when I am no more.
A year before her death, Liza had brought in a coworker. She was desperate for answers, to rid our girl’s reliance on that bulbous yellowed sac with its feminine shape and stink of rot. You should have seen the sick way his eyes lit up when the unexpected appearance of Danica illuminated the true nature of Liza’s research. Questions about her blood. About what happened when she was cut. How she healed. What her cells looked like with their incomplete wall.
A million people would want to chop them up and call it science. Say it’s being done in the name of progress. Fuck people who think progress and ethics are in opposition.
That’s why I haven’t bothered calling the cops or alerting a different authority. Liza was never religious, but she did believe in goodness. My looming death has given me no other option. I’ll reach out here and have faith in that innate goodness my wife saw.
I have been poisoned and do not have much longer. My daughters are 7 and 5. Their names are Danica and Mira, respectively. We live in the big blue house on XXXX Greenwalt Drive. If you have a heart, please listen.
My girls aren’t ordinary, but they’re like their mother. They have a piece of life within them, an energy that pushes through the darkness of this world like a blinding white light. They’re sleeping now, little wrists still rigid with their hands tightly wrapped around my arms. Instead of crying. Instead of screaming. Instead of bargaining, they put on brave faces when everything went to shit. They keep cleaning the purple-oozing wound on my face, worrying about my comfort, as those horrible words and sounds continue to emanate from the greenhouse.
People like that. People who can stand in the face of tragedy and care more about the collective than their safety, those are the people that you need to protect because you can be sure that they won’t defend themselves. Liza didn’t.
So, hoping that I’ve appealed to the heart of someone who possesses a kind soul, let me tell you what’s going on. What my girls are. Some info about that awful creature outside because it will almost surely be free by the time you finish reading this, let alone the time it would take for you to help.
It started eight years ago. We were hardly two years into our marriage, but we’d been trying- and failing- to conceive for about that same time. Liza was 30, and I was five years older. After that birthday, Liza became strange. Some idea that had been planted long ago clicked into place. She felt like she was suddenly running out of time, and the want for a family suddenly became a need.
Unfortunately, this is where we learned that she had endometriosis. The scarring was horrible, and even though she underwent a scraping procedure that left her sore and crying for what felt like weeks afterward, we still couldn’t conceive. This story is sadly a common one, but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking to those living through it.
Liza, sullen and feeling as if something was wrong with her, stumbled upon a group full of women in the same situation. I wish I could have helped her the way the community did, but I couldn’t. She needed to know that she wasn’t alone, that there were other people like her and that it wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t have given her this reassurance even if I’d had a thousand years and a bullhorn to deliver the message.
“It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” an older woman said when Liza had hosted one of their annual meetups. “Maybe one day science will progress to the point that they can grow babies, but until then, we have to make do with what we have.”
I was in the kitchen making coffee. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I noticed how Liza lit up. Her eyes sparkled in a way they hadn’t since that first consultation, and they flitted briefly to the greenhouse. I can’t be sure, but she mouthed something slowly after that advice was given. It was just one word, and it looked awful like: GROW.
After that, she wasn’t as active in the group. I thought she’d thrown herself into her work. She became elusive, either at the lab working on a ‘side project’ or in the greenhouse. We had many packages coming in during this time. Little unmarked cardboard boxes that Liza told me were temperature sensitive and that I was not to open.
She could be aloof at times. Her focus was nearly always directed at just one thing, but during this time, a period of about a year, Liza became distant. The rhythm I’d become accustomed to observing as I toured her greenhouse was gone. Instead of a humming falsetto, she grunted and cursed. She clutched the soil with angry handfuls rather than gentle touches. On nights she bothered coming to bed, she smelled of sweat and earth.
I loved her so much. It felt like I had lost her even when I could look out the window and see her standing there. I stopped visiting the greenhouse about a month into this behavior. She’d never expressly said that my presence there bothered her, but I could tell from how her narrowed eyes lingered that it was irksome. I didn’t want to push her further from me.
If you love something, you let it go, right?
I can hear the strain of the greenhouse outside. My daughters are resting fitfully. They’ll need their sleep to keep their strength up. I hear that voice that sounds too much like my wife laughing.
“Family sticks together. Why don’t you all come back to me? Now! I’m the mommy now!”
She’ll be free soon; I can feel it.
Jumping back in and trying to hurry this convoluted past along. One day, months after I had stopped visiting the greenhouse, I noticed that the plant she was growing within the center of that vast building was getting awfully large. Even through the distortion of the glass, its sapling green color seemed to take up quite a bit of space, looking perhaps ten feet tall and a couple of feet wide. The shape was like an eggplant, bulbous at the top, seeming to rise out of the soil like a bobbing sea worm peeking out of ocean sand. I wanted to ask Liza about it, but silence had descended upon our house. She’d bitten her nails to the quick, and the bags beneath her eyes seemed to be striving to reach a shade darker than black.
I’d been gaining weight, the stress causing me to add an extra 15 pounds that did me no good. The people in our wedding pictures looked like strangers to our current forms. A smiling pair with no clue what storms they’d soon weather.
The area we live in isn’t heavily wooded. Still, it’s rural enough compared to other neighborhoods in town, so when I started hearing the high-pitched sounds that nearly resembled a woman’s cry, I thought there might be some dangerous animal prowling the area. Looking online, I found several big cats were capable of making noises that sounded eerily human. Even foxes can make some sounds pretty damn close. Hoping there was a fox, not a mountain lion, I warned Liza to be careful.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she said, brushing me off, but I couldn’t believe her.
A few nights later, those shrieking noises started again. I had the living room window open and heard it clearly. The shrieks sounded like a woman crying, but what drew my attention was how horribly close it sounded. It almost seemed to be coming from the greenhouse.
“Stop!” I heard Liza squawk. There was pain in her voice. “Stop!”
No shoes nor shirt, I ran out the door, hearing the screen door rattle as I threw it shut behind me. For protection, I grabbed the only thing between my place on the couch and the front door: a pink, polka dot umbrella. I barged into the greenhouse without thinking about what good that could do against a wild cat.
“Ow,” Liza whined, gripping her left wrist with white knuckles. “Frick!” I saw red blood dripping from her fingertips. It plopped soundlessly onto the white sand floor. The crying continued, but I saw no source.
“Liza?” I was focused on her, brandishing my umbrella to fend off whatever had hurt her. “What’s going on? Are you- “okay? I was going to finish that sentence with okay, but I had looked up and seen it.
It was like an underripe banana, primarily green with hints of pale yellow, towering at least three feet taller than me. It was ridged, vaguely hexagonal in its sloping shape. It didn’t have a trunk or texture; the plant was smooth and looked like it would be soft to the touch in the same way most flower petals are. It had a singular thorn at the top from which a purple liquid oozed. Below that thorn was one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen. On the… ‘head’ of the plant, for lack of a better term, was a face I knew well. Her eyes were closed, but it was Liza. The features were exactly the same.
I noticed there was a little piece of furniture, something new and small, resting at the strange plant’s base. It was the bassinet Liza had bought years ago when we first decided to have a child. Within it lay a little green baby.
Danica.
“I’m sorry,” I heard Liza say, and then a puff of sparkling orange powder snuffed out my vision.
I know time is limited, but I need to say this. This time in our lives was a weird and highly stressful one. What I’m about to recount to you is my wife at her absolute worst. Before judging her, I implore you to think of yourself. What have you done at your worst? What did you get out of it? Please think of that before you cast the stones of judgment.
The following morning, I woke up in bed with no idea how I’d gotten there. The previous day’s memory rose in my mind, and I wanted to dismiss it as a nightmare, but it was too real. I remembered how the umbrella felt in my hand, the press of gravel into my bare feet as I rushed out. It couldn’t have been a dream.
Issuing a loud, over-the-top yawn, Liza rolled over to face me. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d laid next to me. “Someone’s up early. It sounded like you had a nightmare.”
“What was that plant?” I asked, rubbing at my head as if that would alleviate the pain. “And was that a baby?”
I sat up. Even my clothes were different.
Instead of responding, Liza took a beer bottle off my nightstand, frowning at it. “Were you drinking last night?”
“No, I- Liza, what’s going on here? What are you doing in the greenhouse? Why was that baby in there?”
She pursed her lips, looking away from me. “I don’t know what you’re saying. You sound crazy.”
Wordlessly she got up and changed into an outfit suitable for work. I watched her, thinking of the millions of answers I needed, but she focused on the ground. “I’m going to work,” she said. “Maybe you should talk to someone if your silly dream bothered you that bad.”
“Liza, please. I know what I saw last night. What’s going on?”
She gave me a blank look of confusion that must have been practiced. “You’re really sounding crazy right now. Feel free to check the greenhouse if you think there’s a ‘baby’ in there. Don’t touch my plants.”
I watched her throw her bag over her shoulder and slam the door on her way out. A moment later, I heard her engine turnover and knew she was gone. That was the most we had spoken in weeks. I stumbled out of bed in half a daze, wondering if I had gone crazy. I knew what I had seen, but Liza. The fact that she was usually so honest made her gaslighting particularly potent.
I nearly convinced myself there was no need to check the greenhouse by the time I had a cup of coffee in my system, but then I noticed one thing out of place. The umbrella was no longer in the stand. This was flimsy evidence to prove that what I’d seen wasn’t a dream, but my mind was insistent that I had seen that alien-like plant. That there was a little green baby in the white bassinet I thought would never see use.
This time I put on my shoes and even a light jacket before running out to the greenhouse. I threw open the door, and if you thought I’d see that behemoth of a plant sporting my wife’s face again, you’d be wrong. There was no sign that it had ever existed. Even the bassinet was gone. J moved through the flowerbeds, looking around as if Liza could have hidden that giant, purple oozing plant behind one of her shelves.
“Am I just crazy?” I remember asking myself. “Have I finally lost it?” And yeah, after asking myself a question aloud, waiting in silence as if for an answer, I determined there was a good chance I might have gone crazy.
I started to walk back to the house, thinking it was time to invest in therapy, when something crunched beneath my foot.
It was the umbrella.
I bent over to examine it and saw there were a few drops of blood marring the white sand. An image of Liza’s fingertip dripping with crimson flashed through my mind. Hadn’t she had a bandage over her wrist this morning?
I don’t know what I was hoping to confirm, but I reached out and disturbed the red sand. It was wet beneath my hand. It could have been red clay soil, but I knew it wasn’t. It was Liza’s blood. As I stood, I noticed something strange about how the sand lay. I’d been walking through the greenhouse, disturbing the sand floor, so it was unlikely that the sand could have formed anything yet…
I bent over closer, looking at the raised bumps of sand that seemed to form unfamiliar symbols. They looked purposeful, like a swirling alphabet of letters far more eccentric and geometric than the one I learned in grade school. They seemed to form a large circle around the center of the greenhouse, which was, coincidentally, where I had seen the giant plant in my ‘dream.’
I gently traced my hand over one of the sloping letters without ruining its design. I could tell it wasn’t meaningless in the same way I could tell the characters of another foreign language like Japanese or Russian deliver a meaningful message, just not one I can understand.
Within my gut, dread pooled like a bubbling black pit. It wasn’t a dream. It couldn’t have been. That plant had been here. The green baby had been here and Liza. The orange dust. Had she drugged me? Question after question sprang to mind, and I didn’t know if it was worse to know the answers to them or to remain in the cold dark.
The room was spinning. That sweet citrusy smell that used to be so comforting, putting me in mind of my wife, had turned sour, rotten. The air felt heavy, as if I were under a thick heavy blanket, unable to draw air save for my hot breath.
I stumbled backward, my foot dragging through the symbols drawn in the sand. The circle, now broken, glowed a bright orange. The color illuminated the spiraling characters, confirming they were more than mere lines in the sand. They seemed to lift from the ground, floating untethered for a moment before the orange lost shape and disbursed like a dusty shock wave. I felt a chill breeze as the light passed through me, but it had no effect otherwise.
One moment the center of the circle was empty. The next, the monstrous plant stood towering above me. I stared up into the green face of my wife. Her eyes suddenly opened, a sickly shade of yellow instead of her healthy brown.
“Boo!” Shrieked the creature.
Already out of breath from the panic attack I’d had earlier, this shock devolved me from a man to a fainting woman in a 1920s silent film who’d just received bad news. I hit the greenhouse ground for the second time in under two days.
Say what you want. I won’t be around to hear it, but yeah, I know that it was a pretty ridiculous and weak reaction. If that thing had been in feeding mode, Mira wouldn’t exist, and I’d be long dead. I’d have been consumed without a second thought, leaving Liza with the awful task of deciding what to do with my clean-picked bones.
When I came to again, I found myself staring at my bedroom ceiling. There was an unfamiliar noise beside me, like a guy desperate to get the last drop of Buffalo sauce off his fingers.
I looked over and saw Liza breastfeeding a baby. It looked exactly how I imagined our child would. Bronze-colored skin and curly hair. My nose, Her eyes. I felt dazed still, half asleep, and I reached over to place a hand on my wife’s stomach, but then I noticed the baby’s hands and feet. They were green.
“I want you to meet our daughter,” Liza said matter of factly. “I’ve been calling her Danica after your mother.”
I felt like I was in a silent 1920s film all over again. It’d be pretty silly to faint while lying in bed, right?
“How did this happen?”
She said she didn’t want to explain everything, not this early, but that she would have told me eventually. She’d been inspired to grow a child, one using my DNA fused with hers through a unique plant. The way she talked made it sound like this process was more occult than scientific. I kept asking questions. How? Why? Why didn’t you tell me? Wasn’t it green before? But honestly, there’s no way to explain this.
My wife is a genius, so even if I tried to regurgitate half of the jargon she spat at me, it probably wouldn’t make sense. Let me delve into the supernatural side, which was easier for my mind to grasp. After securing a unique formula, my wife drew symbols of an ‘old fertility god’ (He had a complicated name with too many Zs, Xs, and Ls for my half-dead brain even to attempt to spell) upon the ground, and from there, it gets a little weird. A sapling sproted from the center, she fed it with blood: mine and hers.
“Wait,” I interrupted. “How’d you get my blood?”
“Unimportant. You sleep soundly.” She continued. “Anyway. After a few months of feeding the little plant blood to very little growth, I was starting to feel discouraged.”
Liza told me it felt like a little piece of her hope was eroded each day. That she’d sit and watch that sapling, waiting for her miracle. Just when she’d almost given up, crying above the little plant, she’d spent so much time, money, and energy on, something amazing happened.
She felt little fingers wrap around her pinky. The sprout has taken the form of a green baby hand. She said it was chubby, cute, and exactly what you’d expect from a regular child.
Over a period of days, Liza grew Danica, and with our daughter grew her food source. That yellowed plant with my wife’s face.
“I’m not sure why it has my face, actually,” she admitted. “Dani was unable to feed from me. She needed different nutrients than I could provide, but she still needed to eat from me simultaneously. I was able to meet both of these needs, I found, by supplying her food source with both my blood and milk. The face formed shortly afterward, but it appears to have no consciousness. It has a carnivorous element, only instead of insects, as most plants draw supplemental nutrition from, the Mother requires more substantial, heartier meals. But again, no consciousness.”
I should have interrupted her then and told her that it had opened its eyes and its face had contorted to scream ‘BOO!’ at me, but Liza looked like every word, every admission she gave me was like choking up glass. I didn’t want to keep cutting in.
She explained how the baby drank a combination of purple sap from the giant plant, likening it to a placenta, and her milk produced via hormones. Liza ended this explanation by assuring me that our daughter was normal.
“She’s still a little green,” she said. “Just a little, but she really only gets that way when exposed to sunlight. We have to wean her off the juice, and she’ll develop into a normal human, give or take a few quirks.”
My head was spinning, there were so many questions, but do you know what the one thing that registered was? Liza. How she looked. How she talked. It was like she’d been toiling in a grave for almost an entire year, but at that moment, she was risen. Alive once more. Yes, she was obviously anxious. She was scared of telling me this insane story, of her deception, but that was much better than the drained version of her I’d been living with.
This was a critical moment.
I knew that my reaction would set the tone for how we moved forward, so instead of asking questions and vocalizing my many concerns, I took Liza’s chin within my hand and pressed a kiss to her lips.
“Danica, huh? And here I thought you’d want to name her after your grandma.”
From there, the barrier between us shattered. It was as if a thick, heavy curtain had been drawn between us and suddenly fallen. I saw Liza again, and she saw me.
She brought the bassinet in from the greenhouse, setting it up in our room, but it didn’t see much use. Liza often fell asleep halfway up in bed with Danica on her chest. I worked from home and kept my daughter on my hip or in my arms. The flesh on her extremities slowly lost its green tint.
Liza was the one who handled feedings, mostly because I was terrified of messing up the proportions.
“Too much could end up poison,” she told me as she bandaged the cut on her hand. “Too little could leave Danica malnourished.”
Dani grew and grew, hitting all of the developmental milestones roughly the same as an average child. Before I knew it, we were celebrating her second ‘birthday.’ Her skin would still go green when exposed to sunlight for too long, and being outside seemed to drain her energy, causing her to shut down. Still, other than that, I could almost believe that she was extraordinary only in the sense that all fathers think their daughters are extraordinary. Not in the weird plant sense.
Liza had been able to wean Danica from directly drinking from the placenta plant, and the tall structure had yellowed, looking slightly deflated. Instead of bottles of purple fluid, we were now giving her sap diluted half by water. Around this time, Liza began to experiment with supplementing the fluid into foods (and by food, I mean mac and cheese, which was about the only thing our picky eater would consistently down) rather than having her drink it.
The less she drank, the more the plant wilted. The green face of my wife dropped, and Liza only gave blood to its roots maybe once a month.
“It’s going to wilt soon,” Liza informed me over breakfast. She didn’t meet my eye and kept glancing toward the greenhouse.
“That’s good, right?” I asked. “You said that might happen when Dani doesn’t need it anymore.”
“Well,” she bit her lip. “Yes. But I was thinking, you know, Dani’s getting older, and I can’t help but think….”
“What?”
“Do we want to stop here?”
Confused, I waited for her to elaborate.
“You know, with kids. I always wanted two.”
It seemed like we had already gotten our miracle: Dani. The year that led up to her ‘birth’ was shrouded in mystery, mainly because what Liza could explain was beyond my understanding or too fantastical to merit, but I knew one thing. It had taken its toll on my wife. She’d been depressed during that period about her infertility, but I knew the work was draining.
“Liza,” I said softly. “You put yourself through hell for this. You don’t want to do that again.”
Her hands kept smoothing out invisible wrinkles in the placemats. “I don’t think I would. Not while the ‘Mother’ grows.” This was what she called the placenta plant. “I think I can gestate a new child. No new formulas, not much more work than I already do. Maybe I’d have to set more traps, find dome more animals for Mother. But I’d have to do it before the Mother wilts, or I’d have to start from scratch.”
How could I say no?
So, Liza took blood samples from the two of us- many blood samples. She drew what felt like a pint a night and spent much more time in the greenhouse than usual. Dani trailed after her, happily learning the names of plants and tasting sweet fruits.
Soon, the placenta plant was once again a healthy green color, and there was a bulge at the midsection of it.
“The Bio lab didn’t have a suitably large offering this time,” Liza said, and I pretended not to think about what that could mean. “But the flesh of this plant functions just fine. It almost looks like it’s pregnant, huh?”
I looked into the face of my wife. Not the one on her body, but the one on the plant. With those eyes peacefully closed and the swell of what resembled a belly in perhaps its second trimester, I could see what she meant. If you shifted the hues and added some limbs, this would look like a giant, pregnant Liza.
My wife was different this time around. When she’d been working towards creating Dani, she’d been so dark. Now she was flooded with light. She brought home something new daily: a jumper, a stroller, and a can of fresh paint for the ‘girls’ room.’ Dani still slept with us, Liza clutching her even in sleep. She’d wake up sometimes, breathing hard from a nightmare, but then she’d see Dani and smile despite the tears pricking her eyes.
“What about Bella?” Liza asked as she ran a pale hand over the growing bulge in the plant. “Sounds sophisticated, right?”
“No,” I mumbled. “Not quite what I was thinking.”
“Maybe Sunshine?” Danica suggested. “That good, daddy?”
“Sunny for short!” Liza laughed. “Dani and Sunny- oh! Look, she’s kicking again!”
I could see movement beneath the green, the imprint of a tiny foot dragging itself downward. I lifted Dani, and she spread her hand along the foot. Her little eyes widened with wonder as she felt the movement.
“Daddy, she’s moving!”
Liza smiled briefly at me before turning her gaze back to the plant’s ‘belly.’ I felt so lucky.
“How about Mira?” I asked. “As in Miracle.”
“That’s a perfect name.”
Not long after that, as I was fixing the regular mac n cheese dinner, I heard familiar noises. I’d once thought that scream was an animal. The wooden spoon I had been using clattered against the tile, and I ran out to the greenhouse. What I saw shocked me.
The eyes of the green Liza were wide open, as was its mouth and that animal-like sound, the sound that sounded more like a mimicry of a human rather than the real thing… that sound was being expelled from her contorted face. I’ve never seen Liza make such a pained expression. Not even at the end. It shrieked and shrieked without a pause for breath.
“Here we go,” I heard Liza say.
I shifted to see what was going on over my wife’s shoulder. She held a knife as white as bone and had sliced open the bulge. She went into the plant, elbows deep, and there was a wet squelching sound as she moved, as if she’d stuck her hand into a vat of thick butter. The green Liza screamed louder.
Liza pulled out from the slit and in her arms was a squirming green ball of wetness. I knelt beside my wife. Finally, the animal-like screaming stopped. The green Liza’s eyes slipped closed; there was a smile that couldn’t be described as anything but tender.
“Here,” she handed the squishy ball to me. “Hold her.”
Unable to tell which side was the head and where the feet were, I struggled to properly support all parts of the slippery, slimy ball of movement. Liza took a warm washcloth and began gently wiping away the green goop, revealing a chubby baby at its core.
“Hello, Mira.”
At first, it seemed like Mira was just like Dani. She grew, hitting milestones at a normal pace, but when it came time to start weaning her off the juice of the placenta plant, things got bad.
“She can’t function… I… I don’t know what’s wrong. She’s not maturing the same way Dani did. She’s still subsisting more off photosynthesis and the mineral sap than off of food.”
“So, what can we do?”
Liza pursed her lips. “I think maybe we need help.”
It was only a little over a year ago that she followed through with this statement. I already told you about how she’d brought in a colleague. It wasn’t her intention to show our children to him- Dr. Barry- Liza had been trying to speak entirely hypothetical but inviting him to the house was a mistake.
Liza had been downstairs, going over samples and theories with Dr. Barry while I kept the girls on the second floor. If you know anything about children, you know that they can be hard to confine. I stepped out for a second and needed to use the bathroom- but that’s all it took. Dani heard her mom talking downstairs and a new voice. Due to her circumstances, her exposure to others has been limited. I’ll take her to the movies on cloudy days or out to the park at sunset, but it’s not the prime way to socialize.
“As you can see,” my wife explained. “The cells of this particular plant exhibit movement, not in the standard way of growth or light seeking, but a more purposeful type. However, when exposed to light, the cell wall becomes more rigid, limiting the amount of movement. I’ve found that this special mineral acidic coating secreted by the plants seems to weaken the plant’s cell wall allowing it to exist healthily in conditions that would cause other plants to become flaccid. Additionally, like an animal, they seem to prefer isotonic solutions, requiring nutrients and having a vein structure consisting of- Oh! Dani! What are you doing?”
This is basically what I heard while sitting on the toilet. My wife’s voice floated up through the vent, and the panic I heard when she said our daughter’s name had me shooting up without bothering to flush or wash my hands. Dani hardly ever needed the placenta plant’s juice anymore, but she still had adverse reactions to sunlight. Her skin went green after prolonged exposure, and I’d taken the girls out to play earlier that day.
“Oh my,” I heard her colleague say. “And what might you be?” Not who, what.
I already mentioned some of the things he’d said. The majority of it asked before I could wrangle my curious daughter away. The damage was done.
Liza broke down and told him everything. She made the man promise secrecy, but there was no way I trusted him.
“Maybe he can help us,” Liza said as Dr. Barry collected samples in the greenhouse. “I mean, it’s not like we can keep the girls in the house forever. They deserve a normal life, and I just can’t help Mira alone.”
She was right, but… “I just don’t trust him.”
Liza gripped the counter’s edge, her lips pursed as she looked through the kitchen window at the greenhouse. “Me neither,” she admitted softly.
Before I had time to respond, we heard a short sharp scream followed by a loud splatter. It was like an amplified version of a foot going through a pumpkin, cracking through the tough skin, and squelching in the orange guts.
When we got to the greenhouse, my wife and I met a gruesome sight. I recognized his glasses, but that’s all. Dr. Barry’s clothes were mere tatters of cloth mixed in with meat. Visceral bits of pink-red flesh had been flung in every direction, and the placenta plant was at the center of the carnage.
Standing at most minuscule 15 feet tall, the plant had taken a shape more akin to a person. Instead of the shapeless tube it had been previously, it had curves… edges. There weren’t arms nor legs, but it seemed thinner at an area that must have been a neck and waist and thicker around the chest and hips. It looked like one of those minimalist sculptures with only the vaguest features.
From the bottom of the placenta plant, long vines that hadn’t previously been there writhed. They were covered in gnarled thorns with the same purple substance that once leaked from the top of the plant, oozing from the crevices between sharp points. Each vine ended in a spindly structure resembling the mouth of a Venus fly trap at the end. They eagerly snapped at the little pieces that had once been Dr. Barry. The vines bulged like a snake that had just eaten a mouse.
“Protect,” said green Liza in a voice that sounded just like my wife’s. Blood dripped from her yellowed teeth. “Protect. Protect.” Then her eyes closed once more, but the vines did not stop in their feasting.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, realizing human bodies don’t smell so great from the inside.
As I emptied the contents of my stomach, one of the vines came up to wrap around my leg. I shrieked, trying to kick it away and not fall into the vomit, but it retreated before I could even land a hit. I felt something else brush against my leg.
“Wait,” Liza- my Liza- said. “I think it… I think it’s trying to comfort you.”
When I looked down, it did appear that the plant mouth was nuzzling against me in a cat-like manner rather than, I don’t know, rending the flesh off my bones.
“Must… Protect…” the green Liza sleepily mumbled.
“Maybe this is for the best,” Liza seemed to say to herself rather than me. “If Barry had told anyone about the girls…” She physically shuddered. “Yes, this is for the best.”
From there, I knew we were on our own. Liza worked tirelessly to try to get Mira to the point that she could live like Dani, to live without the need for the purple juice, but every skipped meal led to more tears and hunger than either of us was willing to allow.
“She’s our daughter, not a guinea pig.”
Asking for help was out of the question, and I hate to say it, but I am not as qualified as my wife was. Solving this problem rested all on her shoulders. All I could do was try to lessen her load and take care of the girls.
“Maybe,” Liza said. “Maybe if I can cut into its core… maybe I can remove the secreting glands from the Mother and fashion them into Mira. She’d still need blood to live. Our blood, preferably, but she’d be able to continue getting the nutrients if…”
If the placenta plant were to wilt. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. I knew. It had been drooping lately. Its newly found human form looked bent over, the back hunched as if it were applying for a position tending to the bells in Notre Dame.
Liza gave me a steeled look. “I think it’s our only option.”
Knowing that she knew better than me, all I could do was take her hands and say: “Tell me how I can help.”
All she wanted was for me to watch the girls. Liza said it’d be simple. She’d cut into the placenta plant, remove what she needed and then have to put it on ice, slowly introducing the cells to Mira’s biology.
“This has to work,” she said. That’s the last thing she said to me. She kissed our girls on the forehead and then went to the greenhouse, gloved up with a scalpel in hand.
It wasn’t long before we heard her screaming.
I got out to the greenhouse as fast as possible, but I was too late.
Liza was still breathing when I got there, her eyes wide with shock. She reached out to me, a single drop of blood falling from her fingertip into the white sand. She was trying to say something, but the vine. It had pierced straight through her neck. All she could make was rasping, rattling sounds. The Venus flytrap at the end of the vine snapped at me, flicking droplets of my wife’s blood onto my face.
“Liza!” I screamed, running to her. My hand found hers, and I tried to pull her to me, but. The vines. They entered her in a vertical line from the back, twisting as they split her in half. I was still holding her hand when the right half slid to the ground like a broken doll.
The green Liza smiled down at me. She looked even more human, shoulders defined, clavicle bone jutting out. “Husband,” she said. “Let us be complete.” There was a hole in her chest, presumably from my wife. One of the vines snaked into that hole and pulled out something that looked an awful lot like a beating Purple Heart. It pulsates in the creature’s hold.
Still grasping my wife’s hand, I was frozen. I watched the heart, staring with my mouth wide open. What a mistake. It shoved the organ into my mouth, wrapping around my face to force it shut.
I dropped Liza’s hand and struggled against its might.
“Mommy!” Dani shrieked. “Mommy!”
“Daddy, help!” Mira cried, and I turned to see the vines snaking past me to my children. I bit down hard on the vine, the thorns cutting into my gums and tasting of acid. Surprisingly, this caused them to loosen their grip.
“Run!” I ordered my girls, stumbling to join them.
My wife’s voice laughed. “Run? Run? We’re a family. You can’t run! I’ll have legs soon, and I’ll run too! You can’t keep them from me!”
I closed the door to the greenhouse, locking the creature in. Its mouths slammed against the glass, but it couldn’t break through. My girls stood at the front door, silently holding onto each other, and then Dani said something that made my guy plummet.
“Daddy, Mira hasn’t eaten yet.”
I felt dizzy. The world kept spinning. I could taste something awful and suddenly an idea struck me
“Mira,” I spat into my hand. A purple liquid spilled into my bile. “I’m so sorry, but can you make do with this?”
She was disgusted but hid it well. “Thank you.”
I took them up to Liza’s growing closet with the last of my strength. It’s got special lights in here. It makes the girls sleepy and their plant traits more active, but this was the only way I could think to keep them fed. My wounds are oozing purple, and I’ve instructed Dani to be sure her sister keeps drinking the liquid. Even when I become still, but they can’t stay here subsisting off photosynthesis and my poisoned blood.
Please… I don’t have much longer.
Help my girls out of this hell.