Stories

Jack’s thirst for the interesting and the unusual was never quenched, and since he was so good at making stuff up he decided to put his talents to good use and become a professional liar. A fiction writer, that is. He flirted with journalism for a little bit, but after his own unpalatable experience with revelations and consequences, he decided that this field really wasn’t for him. He did some travel, learned a lot from his journeys, and a few years later, when he had the means, just to put the frustrations of his youth behind him, he bought a piece of land and planted a dome on it, which became his retreat and occasional writing studio. Of course people thought that was odd, but then again, writers get a pass on being eccentric.

“On a happier note, how is your life lately?” Richard tried to change the subject, only managing to add more gas on Jack’s emotional pyre.
“I’m in counseling with a child psychologist, thank you for asking. I got to revisit every second of my life, forwards, backwards and out of sequence, I discussed any and all childhood trauma that I might have been subjected to, I looked deep inside myself to find my true feelings and guess what? I can’t share them, ‘cause they’re the ones who unleashed this lovely medical specialty upon my life in the first place. It appears that I’m defective, Richard, and I owe it all to our enchanting adventure. This situation is almost bad enough for me to give up making up stories.” he threw a quick glance in his friend’s direction, to see if the latter would take the bait. Richard didn’t react. “Not!” Jack cracked up. “And how is life treating you, my friend?” he returned the favor.
“Well,” Richard hesitated to answer, trying to get the flavor of bitterness and defeat out of his mouth. Ever since his life had turned sour, he had this strange sensation that everything he ate tasted like ashes. He gathered his courage and continued. “My mother mourns me like I’m dead, and my father decided to behave as if I don’t exist. I’m a ghost with a heartbeat, Jack, quite an interesting experience, to tell you the truth. You like interesting, right?” he retorted sarcastically.

“I’m just saying,” Richard gasped, struggling to dislodge a large rock from the middle of the border he was trying to define, a place from which the cursed thing refused to budge. “You know, if our parents wanted to devise a punishment for our creative truth telling, this would probably be it!”
“Don’t mess with karma, dude!” Jack said philosophically, suddenly distracted by the fact that digging got a lot easier than it had been so far, and upon further examination he noticed he was shoveling through soft silt. “This medium is completely worthless!” he cussed under his breath. 
“Just mix it in with clay, I’m sure it’ll be fine!” Richard suggested, wiping his brow.
“And where do I get the clay?” Jack asked, and then, following Richard’s unspoken directions, retorted. “Since when are you the expert in plantings?”
“Since you made me study them. Hey!” Richard suddenly remembered. “Why is karma punishing me? It was your idea!”

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city’s inhabitants.
Richard’s family members, who had never been anywhere near the swamp dome, and who gathered all the information about the mechanical critters through hearsay, never connected the terrifying description of the crawling pan flutes to the innocent looking weather vane their son had designed. They had been around for enough of Richard’s contraptions to cease finding them scary looking, especially after the two versions of Brenda.

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city’s inhabitants.

“It is a living entity,” the biologist replied.
“What part of it, the plant and the extension ducts?” the other speaker replied. “We already know that!” 
“No, not only those, everything that it interacts with, the wall, the dome, the wildlife inside it, well, by extension, every person that enters it,” the biologist smiled.
The audience gasped. For months, rumors of the plant being capable of integrating people into its dense network of stems have been circulating, rumors that the factory was very assiduously trying to dispel. 

It’s not that people don’t expect life to change, it is the way that change comes about that always catches them unprepared. Sometimes it is as trivial as rain on the day of the picnic that everybody had spent months planning and looking forward to, or as significant as a shift in circumstances that makes one’s life plans lose consistency, but these are things that people usually adapt to, that they talk about with their loved ones, and then, after sufficient time had passed, they put behind them and move on. 
Other changes can’t be assimilated gradually, because they just don’t fit in the general understanding of existence, and they put a kink in the smooth passage of time, a singularity of sorts, that divides life into before and after. The reality of the plant belonged to the second category, and no amount of commiseration could make it blend gradually into the fabric of life.

Richard wasn’t the only one who found a way to put the plant/machine hybrid to good use, and as bio-based gadgets ceased to be an oddity, the town was soon awash with them, and they all looked strangely alive, as if nature had decided to grace the planet with a whole new branch of species, all at once. As it happens when life challenges ingrained concepts about what things are possible, it only takes one instance to prove the contrary. The plant had broken the ineffable barrier between organic and inorganic, the four minute mile of life and matter, so to speak, and from that moment on, the rift between the two forever ceased to exist. 
It wasn’t climactic, it was barely noticeable, and just like always when life is evolving, it happened in silence.

At times like these he stopped thinking of this large living conglomerate in terms of good or bad. One doesn’t question whether the squirrels or the lions, or the grass of the plain, are good or bad, they just are, and so is the sun in the sky and the snow on the mountains. When you open your eyes to life and see them for the first time, you don’t judge whether they belong or whether you belong. The wholeness of being is a shared experience and it is laid down before you, to provide the fabric and the context of your life.

The plant reached the back wall and went through it, as if it didn’t encounter any resistance, as if the wall wasn’t there at all. It was very strange how the two systems crossed without interacting, like they belonged to parallel realities, or different time lines. There didn’t seem to be a wall cavity where  the hybrid pipe penetrated it, and through the vaguely translucent material of the new branch one could actually see that.
Nobody questioned the new development, for more reasons than one, but mostly because after having lived with this constantly changing story for a while, about the plant that wouldn’t go away, people got kind of tired of worrying about it all the time. Everybody acknowledged the wall penetration that wasn’t there and simply put it out of their mind, in order to ensure life as they knew it continued to make sense.