Friday is writing creepy bummers.

One year after the last person walked down this street, a bloom followed a bud that followed a stalk. Under the ice that hadn’t melted in months, under the ice that must be four inches thick at least, there was undoubtedly a flower.

I leaned my elbows on the sill and gazed from my dining nook window directly downward into its depth. The ice so clear I could see each individual petal and stamen, and I saw the core of it glow. I gazed from my window for seven days. Not constantly, but often and long enough to tickle the edge of obsession (from the latin, obsidere). The deep purple petals sieged my senses. They tasted velvety, like a dark caterpillar inching from the tip of my tongue to the wide base in the back of my throat. I hated the feeling. I couldn’t drink it in fast enough.

My sister used to sing a song about a purple flower. I think she did.

The stamens were gold, emanating light as though each were a holy sword wielded by the tiniest angel. On the seventh day, a leaf pushed through the ice, which neither cracked nor melted from the pressure. It simply pressed through, grew through, slid through as though it faced no cold resistance. This frightened me. I adored it. The scent of metal filled my nose and angels sang behind my eyes. I was promised eternal life and eternal oblivion by beings I couldn’t see in one thousand human lifetimes. We weren’t built to. I had heard of this sensation in each of my family’s final moments, been waiting my turn. 

The theory held by most scientists, when there were still scientists, was that we were compulsory subjects being claimed one by one through a transdimensional portal of some kind, subjected to testing by extraterrestrial beings for god-only-knows-what purpose. News reports said the epidemic of tumors in the brains, noses and mouths of the victims (chosen ones) had a 99.98% fatality rate and anyone could be infected (chosen) at any time. There was no apparent pattern to the subjects. Geography, age, health, influence…it didn’t matter. Eventually, after five years of subjects, there were no longer enough scientists or news reporters to carry on the story. 

The laboratories and television stations and newspaper offices were ghost towns, occupied only by the specters of interns and pencil-pushers. The reporters were no great loss, they had it all wrong anyway. Just set dressing yapping mouths about things they didn’t understand. My mother would have called them “charismatic megafauna” and laughed. She had an eloquent and indecipherable sense of humor and was a great loss to her own laboratory when she died. If I were a bragging man, I’d tell you all about her groundbreaking work on the mysterious tumors of other subjects (disciples) before succumbing to one of her own. Not one of the lucky .02%, nor was my sister, nor my friends, colleagues, neighborhood butcher or favorite librarian. Nor the woman down the hall whose cat I adopted after she passed. Poor thing would be on its own now, perhaps to find a family with one of the gangs of ferals out there in the wasteland.

Non-human animals weren’t suitable for study, it would seem. Packs of formerly-domesticated dogs, cats, even rabbits and tarantulas now fended for themselves. Many couldn’t survive the nuclear winter. Just enough button-pushing hands left alive to panic at the first wave of deaths, apparently. My hunch was that Russia started it, but then I was fed horror stories about the Cold War by an uncle as a small boy and may be prone to bias. It doesn’t really matter anyway, all I know is that after the first missile struck Canada, our government here in the US (united forever and ever with two percent of the population maybe not even so many still alive amen) launched right back and so did all other countries with nuke power. After that? The cold settled in and now no one on the planet had seen the sun in a year or more. 

And still I waited my turn.

And now a flower. My time, without a shadow of a doubt. Finally. In the golden purple glowing flower core of my heart, I knew they had been saving me. Special. Precious. Chosen. The flower opened golden glowing yes yes you yes and the angels sang stinging chorales in the depths of my sinuses. My nose began to bleed and it ran between my teeth as I smiled. Finally.

In the center of the flower, even in the center of the gold in the center of the purple breaking through from the center of the ice, a deep dark black hole so profound and miraculous it glowed brightest of all. My eyes bled then too, and the rivulets tasted like laughing. I was laughing. A voice soothed me with more promises of the everything of it all. This was the moment at which my mother had died at her chosen time. My sister lasted longer, managed a visual of our visitors before perishing (o lucky girl, but I will be luckier).

The portal inside my flower birthed a hand, four-fingered and pale grey. It extended impossibly from the flower’s gaping maw of cosmic glory. So obvious now through the haze of my ensanguined sight, we had only to open ourselves to the reality beyond perceivable realities. So obvious. The cat mewled behind me on the kitchen floor. I placed my hands on the window frame and lifted.

The pane caught, stuck at a crooked angle in its setting. I could not be stopped, not now. It was all so clear. I was needed, chosen, had been prepared over time. My tumors grew through beautifully organic sustainable channels, and though my spine and lower hind-skull were bulbous and misshapen, I stood beautiful in my purpose. The glass shattered easily beneath my strong, aging construction worker’s hands. Grateful for my short stature, I tumbled from the third floor window and into the center of the flower. The size of a silver dollar. The size of the universe. A sea of hand caught me.

I was held in the grey palm of my savior. I was one of that treasured .02% who survived the choosing. Tenderly, tenderly, I was placed in a glowing box of light. A clear pool of water occupied one corner, a sandbox another, a bed the third, and a shiny steel refrigerator the fourth. My new home was a perfect rectangular prism, down to the atom. I held no doubt, only faith. Faith that my every need would be provided for in these 1,500 cubic feet of safety and love and serenity. My thinning hair was stroked and the blood washed from my face and hands. The tension I’d held for years and  months and especially the past seven days dissolved and all was a gauzy fuzz of simply existing. Thank you.

* * *

“Subject shows remarkable resilience to the treatment. We’ll increase dosage here in the lab and keep tracking until failure. I believe we have a new record for tolerance, does the data support?”

“Yes, Doctor. Our researchers over at brain mapping believe they’ve found a correlation between cross-sensory perception and resilience to the drug. With a few more trials, they think we’ve got a good chance at approval to take this product to the next level and test on actual people.”

“Cross-sensory perception? You mean to say the higher-resiliency humans differ neurologically?”

“Yes, Doctor. This field subject, for example, tastes words and smells emotions.”

“That’s promising, let’s hope it translates beyond their primitive neurology. Imagine only experiencing one sense per sense. A shame this planet’s population had to be sacrificed, I think we happened upon a positive evolutionary pattern here. Animal testing is a tedious level, but necessary. With luck we can get this out of phase one soon and have product to hospitals before our citizens suffer much more loss.”

Blinking large black eyes, Doctor Ki-Af89 stroked the head of Subject #82935E one last time before closing and securing the cage. The poor little tumorous human would never know how much it was contributing to the greater good. The doctor and intern left the lab for the evening, clicking off the light behind them.