Elizabeth Rossi (11) | STAFF REPORTER
The hallucinations were the same as always. The same three-eyed felines and one too many winged birds slinking between the branches outside her window, singing away. Pollen and dust clouded the creases of her walls and furniture in a hydrodip smog. Her hands wove around the stem of one of the cocooned buds, too young to flower. The plant couldn’t help its innate hunger to spread, seemingly starved and equally as determined to leave no surface within the basement untouched.
Maybe it would have been best to leave it where she’d found the jarring plant, crude; misshapen with dizzyingly lurid in its colours and diaphragmatic contractions, every sunken motion expelling carpets of hallucinogenic particles. But this was normal and why should she shy away?
This was all a minor taxation on her comfort in the scheme of discovery.
That’s what she told herself, the first of the three ideas that had her stepping towards a promise of not discovery, but downfall. It’s what she reassured herself with when the sickening vegetation snagged her interest, curiosity’s lockjaw bite curling around her mind and subsequently, also curled its roots in her makeshift lab. The blood-curdling spikes of adrenaline were temporary but the notion truly did little to ease her mind when the seams of her walls, floor to ceiling, felt too long-legged and humanoid; sable blurs swimming past her peripheral too quickly to be a trick of the light, birds still singing without a care outside of her window.
But they were just hallucinations, worrisome but normal at this point in her work, and she knew they stemmed from the odd flora she’d allowed, practically invited into her home. She never discovered unwelcomed bugs nestled in its silken leaves, razor edged and contorted in inorganic silhouettes, nor did the soil ever even seem to run dry, rich with moisture that pooled around the unnatural rosiness of the twined stem, fraying outward in hunched buds of urchin like blossoms. Today was no different. Every day was no different for that matter and she was growing sick of the blossoming hive of pollen and the lack of progress she’d made with the plant.
Whether the flora had more airborne qualities yet to share was beyond her but it was also the very basis of her inquisitions, what compelled her to pash past the haziness of the unknown. She used to fall into the habit of wishing for an extra protective layer between herself and the particulate breaths but there were little commodities a university student such as herself could afford; especially for an expelled student, name withdrawn from the good graces of her friends and family alike.
They weren’t right about her, the second of her motifs; they’d be wrong when she would finally make a ground-shattering breakthrough that would have her name printed in textbooks and articles and surely then, surely no one would be able to doubt her.
They weren’t right about her and this discomfort was a minor taxation she had to pay in the scheme of discovery.
Today was going to be different. She couldn’t care if the fabric of her lungs felt heavier, rigid and drenched in the iced water of sunken yellows and pinks, sweet fumes swallowing the flesh of her alveoli. Her hands grasped her cheap scissors, blades’ ends softened from use like her mind beneath the cloud of toxins and anger, equal poisons to which she denied herself of any cure. Cradling the bruised blue of a flower, she snipped it off.
There was a molten silence, consuming and viscous in the room. Why was that? Where had this noiselessness sprouted from? Well, most unknowns could be redefined as newfound knowledge with observation. Her gaze, locked on the plant swiveled to the dingy window plastered near her ceiling.
Outside, the birds had gone quiet, their song ending without a warning diminuendo. Inside, the plant had stilled, its airy pulses absent. Between, she was taking breaths so carefully they felt forsaken, thieved in the sudden quiet. Eyes hurriedly snapped towards the dizzyingly indigo blossom nestled between her fingers; no, the yellow, not blue bud that hadn’t flourished. Was it always yellow and had she hallucinated the blue hue? Her thoughts swam, a disarray of uncertainties and variables that couldn’t be determined when there was no logic to ground herself in. What good were observations when she couldn’t trust her own sight?
They weren’t right about her and this discomfort was a minor taxation she had to pay in the scheme of discovery.
She hadn’t gone too far.
Were the flora’s roots always that far out? Tendrils hugging every crease of her desk and wall, she blinked repeatedly. She wouldn’t let the plant get the best of her, to have the last laugh as her peers and professors has. There was no shying away now despite how her thoughts felt so far away they wisped into a pool of pollution pressing behind her forehead as she struggled to think.
The hallucinations would not win this game against her.
She wouldn’t win the game against herself for that matter.
Two Truths and One Lie.
This was all a minor taxation on her comfort in the scheme of discovery.
They weren’t right about her and she would uncover new science.
She wasn’t extreme and knew when to stop, when to draw the line.
Her uncomfortable discovery, her studies regarding the rottenly neon flower, were the first of its kind but she just had to push herself to make more progress. The roots, one could not fathom to be real, of the very real plant, slithered and coiled behind her. She only had to blink repeatedly to snap herself out of the vivid hallucination because that’s all it was, eyes locked onto the twining roots.
She blinked once and her cat only had two eyes.
She blinked twice and the headache seemed to dull, the blue flower she’d cut sitting lifelessly on her desk.
She blinked again and the sickeningly sweet roots, observationally real without a doubt now, pried open her jaw.
