The Nursury

Inside the steamy greenhouse incubating under halogen it germinates. They see it sprouting, hatching from a rockwool cube discarded in the dark corner where cobwebs melt from the pitchfork leaning. They see its roots twisting feebly. They see its foliage unfeather, pale and infantile, dicot and serrated, with tips that curl like fingers in involuntary gesture. The sapling contracts, the bud dilates, the cotyledon split, and the face passes utero.
    Bewildered, they inspect the plant. Such odd botany; leaves with reticulated veins, vascular bundles pumping under the skin, and the head of a newborn babe; jade skin, lips and nostrils, eyes sealed shut and gyrating wild spirals behind the lids.
    “Mutation?”she says.
    “Miracle?”he replies.
    She washes away the afterbirth with the watering can. She cradles the rockwool in a styrofoam pot and places it under the UV lamp. She strokes it’s nose with her delicate phalange and it’s brows perk and it’s lips purse. “It has soul.”
    He checks the pulse. He takes leaf samples and photographs. He pries open it’s mouth and looks deep inside. He reaches in elbow deep, probing his hands about it’s innards, searching for it’s heart. It bites down hard with thorny teeth. He rips himself free and tends to his wounds. On his fingertips his blood coagulates with the pollen and sap. “It has a sugary aftertaste.”
    They keep the nursery locked. Their silhouettes twitch on the glass like brittle trees in the wind. Inside they tend to it. They pluck leaves and mist its forehead. She studies the organelles under a microscope. She peers deep inside, trying to decipher the genes, hoping to find secrets of the omniverse in it’s codex. He feeds it fertilizer from an eyedropper. It suckles and gargles, spits and swallows. He watches it photosynthesize, swell cell by cell, and he wonders if the child knows it is alive.
    It thrives. It stretches gnarled stems of arms from its burgeon. It opens it’s seedy eyes and thrashes it’s head helplessly about its atrophic spine. He catalogues it’s features; the angle of the magnum forum, the calibration of the occipital, the prominence of the nuchal. She waters it and cleans the mucus from it’s nose. She holds it’s head steady and whispers lullabies. It breathes in her carbon monoxide.
    He sprays the babe for gnats and nematodes. It spasms and seizures. The umbilical stem twists from the navel to a noose around it’s neck. They unknot it and twine the fetus to a tomato cage. It whimpers and shivers and wilts.
    They feed it from a drip line. They trim it’s legs like bonsai. They splay it’s hands into prehensile appendage with jointed digits and an opposable thumb. They crop it’s ears and splice it’s genitals with orchid blossoms. It squeals and writhes and climbs the lattice. It glares into their iris with chloroplast tears. Inside it’s heart is ripe and alive; bruised fruit decaying on the vine. It waits patiently for the watering can, the n****e of the bottle, the nitrogen and nutrients necessary. They feed it. It grows.
    The roots knot and the feces overflows the styrofoam pot. He holds it down and clamps it’s jaws tight as she wrestles the container from the clump of rootbound rockwool and s**t. The nodes snap and crackle. The child contorts, convulses, the umbilical stem breaks away.
    It scrambles about the nursery, manic and rabid. It hisses, exposes its fangs, jaw unhinged like a Dionaea muscipula. She tries to comfort it, her hand outreach, her voice the timbre of their lullabies. It recoils and strikes. It strangles her in it’s vines. It swallows her face.
    He maces it with herbicide. It does not let go. He bashes it’s skull with pottery. It does not let go. He finds the pitchfork in the corner where the afterbirth washed into the dirt. The flesh is soft, like a cucurbit, the fork penetrates between the shoulder blades, the spine, the back of the head and out between the eye-sockets. It lets go.
They bake it at 350 for 45 minutes. The butter melts into its pores. They picnic in the nursery, on the ground with a plastic tarp between them and the plasma and the chloroplast, with a bottle of pinot and a sourdough baguette. As he slices filet from his face she plucks the nuts from his eye-sockets. Inside it’s guts are full of seeds. It’s head is hollow and dusty with pollen. It’s intestines are syrupy. It’s bones are stringy like soggy asparagus. Deep in the vegetable mess they find it’s heart, shriveled and dehydrated, hard like a pit and burst like a the putrid fruit it is. It is still beating.
“ It is alive.” he says.
“It is delicious.”she replies.

fin.

dYlanJames
October 18th 2012
( the Mandrake)
Fiction; Short Story; Flash fiction; magic realism