The general knowledge of a plant whose memories I could tap into was useful, but still somewhat limited. She was just a plant, after all. If only I’d summoned a library demon instead. I kept trying to secretly delve into her memories. I often had to set aside whole mornings to give time to recover from the sheer discomfort of feeling Mimsy’s blood-soaked memories, but I was determined to decipher something from them. She must know something that could help me. Most of her memories, and aspirations too for that matter, revolved around absorbing blood-rain with her roots. It was hard to see through the red mist to the tiny snippets of useful information, but I knew it was in there somewhere. I was sure I could gain some insight from this. I felt a little guilty about prying into her thoughts, but she did it to me all the time, so I didn’t feel that guilty.

As I probed the depths of her short botanical existence, I saw little red demons sail down the blood river on boats of bone and skin. Only their goofy little grins distracted me from the sheer mortal horror of seeing stretched out flesh-sails - they seemed so happy to be floating along the blood river to whatever tortures awaited downstream. I tried to look away, but remembered I was a plant. Plants can’t really look away, they just sort of passively experience everything around them. Perhaps that passivity was why it wasn’t as horrific as it should have been. Perhaps I had to stop trying so hard and shift to a more passive approach, seeping knowledge through those roots as well as blood. Never had I felt so small - a tiny sentient plant in a meadow of bloody roses. It was too abstract to take much meaning from but I felt some subtle understanding growing. After a few more visits to her memories, I somehow sensed the leak - it must have been the spot where the blood was crossing from the river into my mug. I still don’t understand how I knew, how I could pinpoint that abstract sense to a defined point of anomaly not far from my tiny static position.

I sensed, surprisingly, discomfort. Mimsy felt almost as unsettled by this rift as I did. Perhaps hell wasn’t invading our world, but simply leaking through into it. Could there be some way to close the rifts? I delved deeper still into Mimsy’s subconscious, into those strange, alien, plant-like experiences. The contradiction of my human cells feeling experiences unique to plant cells was overwhelmingly strange. I wanted to throw up, or to do the plant equivalent of throwing up, whatever that might be. I wasn’t keen to find out, but I forced myself to focus anyway. I dug to a dead end, unable to parse any facts from it. The extent of my roots was too limited. There was only so much I could decipher.

Perhaps there was a way to be less Mimsy and more Charlotte without breaking the connection. I focused on the feeling in my roots while picturing myself on my bike, imagining that there was a cycle path in this strange memory-space, and superimposing these experiences on top of one another. Somehow it was working. I felt like I was there, cycling through the meadow by the river like some astrally projected spirit. The geometry wasn’t quite right and I couldn’t bring every direction into focus - but it was achievement enough to be here without also completely realigning spacetime from plant perspective to full human immersion. Gravity seemed wrong, too. Pedalling the bike uphill was much easier. Was that just the nature of this place, or was it because the plant part of me struggled to understand the physics of pedalling?

Drifting so close to the plant perspective again was a mistake. My roots were not equipped to pedal, my leaves not equipped to grasp the handlebars. I abruptly found myself tumbling downhill. The shock of rolling down immediately snapped me back to feeling human, but too late - I plunged over a precipice into the river. I sank into the blood. I tried to wake up, return my mind to the mortal world but I felt stuck. I thrashed and gargled, only making things worse. I sank deeper, deeper into the river of blood.

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I forced my eyes open, hoping that would free me, but I was still there. The blood was more translucent than I would have thought. Little razor-sharp fish scattered around me. I had to get out before they realised I was prime torture material rather than a giant intruder to fear, but how? I had lost sense of which way was up. I could only think to approach where it was lighter, but the light I found was not the surface. Instead I found a tiny mote perfectly static as blood flowed around it. At this point I would have tried anything. I reached out and grabbed at the light and felt something earthy. Soil - the plant pot! This was the portal! In my panic, I pried it wider with my fingers, too distressed to worry about the implications of widening a portal to hell. Within seconds the rift was expanding by itself, out of control. I prayed it would stop before it split the whole earth in two. As soon as it was big enough, I swam forward, into the bright rift.

The next thing I heard was the smash of pottery and an unbearable splash of blood. I snapped to consciousness and spun around to the noise. The pot was shattered. Blood was everywhere. A pathetic little mound of red-stained mud lay on the floor and among that mud lay Mimsy, bent and broken. I could still connect to her thoughts, but she was dying. I had done this. I rushed over and knelt beside her, staining my jeans in the blood. But she was already gone. And I had a lot of cleaning up to do.

The initial shock gave way to pure emotion. I cried. I cried and cried for a plant that claimed to be me and invaded my memories and only existed for a few days. But she had been alive, and she had sort of been me. I couldn’t process it in any rational way, which in hindsight is understandable because it was not a rational situation.

When I calmed down enough to think, I took a better look at the murder scene. The broken pieces of the mug were there in the blood-soaked soil. There was no sign of the rift, no sign of any more blood pouring through to my world. The portal really had been completely destroyed by whatever I had done. Maybe it got too big and unstable and collapsed in on itself. Maybe the reunion of my spirit with the mortal world rebalanced things and fixed it. All I could do was speculate and all it cost was the life of a little copy of me. Was there anything I could have done differently? Not in the moment, but I should never have let it reach that moment. I pushed too far into things I didn’t understand against every instinct I had and this was the price. I scooped up the remains. She deserved a burial at least; it would be awful to leave her to the compost heap. If nothing else, I could give her a respectful interment.

I dug a small rectangular grave and arranged the shattered parts of the pot and mug as best I could around her roots and laid her flat beside it. She looked a lot less like me now. Perhaps death reverted her back to being a simple plant. Perhaps demons can’t die and her spirit returned home, hopefully to be herself and not a copy of me. I was speculating about unknowable things once more. I looked back down at her lifeless form to ground myself. I could think about that later. It was wrong to spend her funeral trying to ease my mind and convince myself there was some explanation that would soften the blow. I made some small speech which I will leave between me and her, and then began to quietly cover up her remains. I left a nice piece of driftwood as a marker, stood silent, eyes closed for a few minutes, then went back indoors.

I spent hours and hours scrubbing at the blood, pausing only to air my emotions. If I had started to clean earlier instead of leaving it to dry while I held Mimsy’s funeral it might have been a little easier, though I think much of this irreversible staining was inevitable. That would be a tough thing to explain when someone saw it. Maybe I could convince them I branched out from pottery to learn to be a butcher? Unlikely to work, I’ve been vegetarian for years. That was a problem for the future, not for now. For now all I could do was clean as best I could. Normally I would bring Kazz through for some company while working, but I just needed to be alone. With neither he nor Mimsy around, it was silent save for the scrub of my brush and the shudder of my breath.