The Living

  The doctor’s news to her mother was not good. “She is in a persistent vegetative state,” he said, “And there is little to do but to wait and hope.”

  As they waited and hoped, years passed by. The sixteen-year-old who was hit by a car became a human who was a vegetable for too long. She was lucky that her brain was active; otherwise, she would’ve been dead long ago. Instead, she was brought home, cared for by her parents, as she lay in her bed and breathed.

  As she breathed, someone brought a plant into the room. They watered this plant every day, and in the cool, humid place, a mushroom began to grow.

  It was small, hidden in the roots of the plant, but it grew. After many years, it finally spread its spores. With how close it was to the vegetative young woman lying on the bed, her the spores entering her lungs was inevitable.

  They swiftly took root in but remained hidden by her vegetative state. However, it could not be hidden forever. Her body soon began attempting to expel the foreign elements in her lungs, coughing up blood. Her body heated up in an attempt to kill the developing spores.

  The family buzzed around her, worried. They gave her water; they watched her daily. They opened the windows and checked her throat. What they could not see, however, was how she changed. She soon stopped coughing, as her body accepted the foreign fungus as a part of it.

  Believing the window was the key, they left it open, allowing seeds to float into the room. Her body accepted these as well, and soon she became a living habitat, full of little plants and tiny bugs.

  The plants tangled around her body, growing and reinforcing it. It soon became impossible to tell that the vegetation within her had not been there her whole life.

  The change began to associate the plants as part of her, and so they grew better to assist her in the most important task. Autonomy. Awareness.

  The flora within her advanced, changing faster than would be naturally possible, faster, even, than what would be possible in a laboratory. Their only goal was to maintain her and reestablish her awareness. They grew so that she could.

  They forced apart muscle to wrap around bones, they took in blood to give her sugars. The bone was replaced by stems, as her blood became sugars and water. Under her skin, a green epidermis grew, covered by a waxy, water-resistant cuticle.

  The family noticed her unusually green complexion and prepared to take her to the doctor.

The change was not yet done, however. Plants that would never be seen in the outside world reached up, wrapping themselves around her brain.

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  That night, the twenty-two-year-old vegetative woman, who had been unaware of the world for six years, opened her eyes. Her skin felt itchy, but from the inside, like the entirety of her skin had been covered in a rash.

She tore at her skin, and it fell off in long, scratched off strips, revealing a shiny green layer underneath. She tore at her scalp, her face, every inch of skin she could grasp until it was all off. When her face and body were ravaged, she carefully plucked off each nail, then peeling the skin off it like one might peel an orange. The tatters of her old covering lay around her after her furious tearing.

  The simple hospital-style gown she had worn was shredded as well, falling off with the skin as she stood. She felt taller and larger than when she was aware. She could remember her time after the crash, but the days all blended together.

  She breathed in deeply, hearing a rustling as the air entered her lungs, flowing around leaves. From her vague memories, she recalled where the bathroom was. As she strolled to the bathroom, getting used to her bigger body, she passed by a calendar hung on the wall. The date was 2025. She stumbled. It had been six years since the crash, six years since her life had changed. She wondered who the president was and if Freaks were still seen as monsters.

  She made it to the bathroom. She walked self-assuredly inside, though internally she was terrified to look at herself. She knew she changed because when she woke up, she had literally torn her own skin off. Finally, she looked at the mirror, at what she had become.

  The first thing she noticed was her skin, a glossy green that covered her entire body. Her hair had been left behind in clumps where she tore it off, but now she saw vines winding their way down her scalp, leaves protruding from them intermittently. The hair-like vines hung all the way down to the end of her back, curling and winding their way down. Her fingernails, which she distinctly remembered ripping off, must’ve had another layer underneath, for at the end of each finger lay a dark green fingernail. Her face looked sunken, enough that her skull would’ve been visible if not for the plants under her skin.

  Was she beautiful, or a haunting facsimile of what was once a pure human? It’s difficult to say. The uncanny valley just barely affected her, causing her to look slightly unnatural. Nonetheless, she had to accept that the being in the mirror was her. If she did not, she might go mad.