Parched

Some plants need more than water

Monica has a million good intentions and even more regrets. When she opens her apartment door, after a wild and completely unplanned week with her ex, she’s struck by the sweet-sharp odor of vegetal decay.

Damn it, she’s done it again.

Holding her breath, she walks slowly down the hallway. Maybe, she thinks, they’re still OK. Perhaps they’re merely droopy or a little brown around the edges.

Nothing that a little pruning and clipping can’t cure, right?

Wrong.

Phil, Lily, Poe, and the gang are dead in their pots. They’re forlorn, withered things, bundles of naked stems. Brown leaves dot the floor, as if they had reached for succor and, finding nothing, cast themselves into the air.

Monica’s lip quivers, and she blinks back a tear as she pads into the kitchen to get a funerary garbage bag. Her plants had withstood her erratic brand of love, a furious oscillation between affection and neglect, for years.

They’d been there for her, always. Even when her friends stopped returning her texts. Even when her parents cut her off.

She sobs as she drops them into the trash bag one by one. Goodbye, Spathiphyllum. Goodbye, Monstera Deliciosa. Goodbye, Phil, she blubbers as she wads up his desiccated vine and pulls him out of his glossy ceramic pot.

She’s about to throw out the smallest plant, Oddny, the one she took the day she quit her job at the lab, when she feels a strange sensation. Like an electrical zap inside her brain. Or a buzzing insect. She shakes her head and looks down.

Oddny isn’t dead, after all. Her leaves are a mix of brown and green. Monica wipes her tears, and her lips curl into a tremulous smile.

“Ooh, little one,” she coos, “you’re the only one who didn’t leave me. The only one.”

---

Oddny spends the next few days recovering; she is regularly moved between a bright windowsill and an overstuffed nightstand. Monica sings fragments of made-up songs, a pastiche of Lorde and Taylor Swift, bathing Oddny in clouds of warm, moist carbon dioxide. She hurries to and from the local greenhouse, buying special lamps and nutrients, sighing over Oddny, and journaling her gratitude.

Until she hears from her ex again.

Monica, reads the text, I’m outside. Come to me.

A queasy thrill of adrenaline courses through her, even as her brain seems to fill with bees. She absently swats the air in front of her as she runs downstairs. The feeling quickly fades.

She sees him parked across the street, revving his bike and scratching his beard. His name is Diesel. He likes to drink a sixer and then take Monica for fast rides up and down Route 1 on his ancient Harley.

It’s terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time, and, without her friends or family, it’s the kind of broken-glass moment she lives for.

She runs across the road, ignoring the curses and the horns, and jumps on the back of Diesel’s bike. She wraps her arms around his broad chest.

He smells like sweat and oblivion.

---

Monica’s mouth is full of cotton, and her head fills with bees, but louder this time, as she climbs the stairs.

She and Diesel fought like they always do. Her arms are mottled with bruises, each one a small, purple regret. She’s wondering if it’s time to grow up, to shape the spiky chaos of her life into something softer.

She’ll worry about that later. She’s parched. She needs water…right now.

Breathing heavily, licking dry, chapped lips, she hurries into her apartment. She turns on the faucet in the kitchen and laps straight from the tap, letting the water sluice down her chin.

She drinks until her belly is taut. Until it hurts.

Then, for a moment, it all stops. She takes a breath and remembers her one surviving, dearest little darling plant. She fills up the fancy silver watering can she bought last week and gives Oddny a drink.

And suddenly she’s thirsty again.

---

Time passes quickly, and not at all.

Monica’s lips latch onto the tap. She relaxes her throat, lets the water flow down into her belly, feeling it strain and swell.

With a single, gurgling belch, it all comes back up as frothy, diluted bile. But she thirsts, and she drinks.

Now her bladder is filling; she can tell by the dull ache. But she thirsts, and she drinks.

Warm liquid trickles down her leg, but she swallows, and she swallows. And she thirsts, and she drinks.

She drinks until her heart begins to flutter in a way that feels wrong. It triggers a cough and a gasp and a lungful of water. She flails and staggers and slips on a pool of something warm and wet.

She falls. Her head hits the floor with a crack.

Her head hurts. Her breath is a watery wheeze. Her heart is playing an odd, syncopated rhythm in her chest.

She is still parched, but now the bees are back, swarming in her head, pouring in from her ears and her nostrils. They buzz and sting and turn her body into a bow.

She screams, screams, screams.

And then, all at once, it is quiet. Except for a single voice. A subsonic rasp she knows somehow is Oddny.

You steal me…trap me…

kill the others…

I seed your thoughts…

root inside your mind…

Now I kill and you die.