Bunny’s garden had been dry for months. The drought was merciless, even for Southern California. Over the summer the dirt had cooked into a parched clay-like slab so unaccustomed to moisture that it hesitated whenever water hit its surface, letting the drops slide idly on top for a few seconds before smartening up and sucking them down. And yet, even on the brink of death, Bunny’s garden was unquestionably beautiful.

Her orange trees, which she had planted as saplings that spring, had grown impressively before the summer heat stalled their progress. Her tomato vines, brittle and fruitless, still managed to cling to their trellises in their own amusing little way, like plastic Halloween skeletons hanging off the side of a house. The rosemary, mint, parsley, and thyme were somehow persisting, still more impressive than the average suburbanite’s poor excuse for an herb garden. That Bunny was a master gardener would be an understatement: her little plot of land wasn’t just the envy of the cul-de-sac, but the whole town. It was a true Eden among the astroturf. And despite its current less-than-stellar state, the garden was the only place Bunny ever wanted to be. Each day, as she made her usual walks through the garden, she was joined by her small flock of hens, which waddled behind her to peck at any insects that appeared in her footprints.

Finishing her rounds for the day, Bunny slid off her gloves and tossed them in the greenhouse in the far corner of the garden. The greenhouse was a work in progress; a messy ground-zero of operations that would one day be a steamy oasis filled with rare and giant tropical plants. For now, it was used as storage for the most important tools of her trade: everything from shovels, hoes, bags of soil and fertilizer, and chicken feed. 

As she walked in, she cast a glaring eye at the large hole in the far left corner of the greenhouse roof. A pillar of light shone through it, landing directly onto the center of the dirt floor inside. The hole was a thorn in her side, exposing the greenhouse’s valuable inhabitants to mother nature’s curveballs: rats, birds, and rain. But rain was a distant memory, and whenever Bunny laid eyes on that hole in the roof, any initial urgency she felt to fix it was quickly replaced by the reminder that for now, her only enemy was the sun.

She closed the door and left the garden. Bunny hated leaving her garden; it was only when she left that a familiar malaise spread across her body, a reminder that everything else that comprised her home – the Spanish-style McMansion, the pear-shaped pool, the gray concrete patio – was unspeakably ugly.  

She spent the rest of that afternoon lying face down and motionless in the pool, only moving occasionally to twist her neck to the side and take a breath. The next time I need to breathe, I won’t, she told herself. But every time she tried to keep her promise, her body’s natural urge to save itself overpowered her conscience, and she surfaced for air with a sigh of defeat. Next time, she thought to herself as she rolled her eyes and threw herself on her back. Having once again failed at killing herself, she suddenly became aware of how ridiculous she looked floating there, moping like a bratty 35-year-old teenage girl, and she burst into laughter. It was during these brief moments of levity that Bunny forgot everything that made her sad and vowed to never try to remember. But then, her graciously allotted ten seconds of bliss now up, the emptiness of reality grabbed her ankles, dragged her to the bottom of the pool, and punched her again and again in the gut. 

She winced as a searing pain ripped through her midsection. This was no longer a metaphor; the pain was real. She clutched her stomach and dipped to the side, curling herself into a floating ball until the pain subsided. She splayed back out on the surface of the water. The cramps (her Pains, as she affectionately called them) had been hitting her harder than ever recently. 

They came on randomly and suddenly, normally not more than once a week. Each time in the throes of her Pains, Bunny had the same train of thought: that this was the worst pain she had ever felt, that it was not possible that anyone had ever felt this way before, that no could ever even begin to understand the way she felt. But as soon as the Pains stopped, Bunny would scold herself: other people knew this pain, they had for thousands of years before her, and they would continue to do so, forever and long after she was dead. Bunny righted herself and treaded water in the shallow end. This was now the phase where her brain twisted itself in knots trying to understand how it could even be possible that so many others endured a pain like hers; the uniqueness of her pain and the grief that caused it seemed larger than the universe itself. But all pain was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, Bunny suddenly decided. And now, done with pool time, she rolled her eyes at yet another round of self-inflicted mental anguish and pulled herself onto dry land. 

As Bunny toweled off she realized Charlie was outside. She had no idea when this had happened, but she wasn’t happy about it. He was circling the pool barefoot, glassy eyes fixed on the water, babbling into the phone like a tech-bro Sim set to fast-forward. Meaningless buzzwords and business idioms coagulated around the corners of his mouth before shooting off into his phone speaker in clumps of spittle. He talked in such a cadence that could convince a novice that these things meant something, but Bunny knew he was flailing. Somehow despite his success, Charlie still flailed whenever he had to talk a lot. Bunny used to find this boyish nervousness endearing. But watching him now, hobbling around the pool barefoot, she saw only a grown man drowning in his own words. 

 Dinner that night was Thai takeout. Each night was a different form of takeout from the usual rotation of Thai, Chinese, Mexican, and grain bowls of unclear origin. They never ordered Italian, because Charlie thought pasta in a box was disgusting. Bunny didn’t agree, but at this point she didn’t care; all food had tasted the same for the past five years. She accepted every one of Charlie’s suggestions with a shrug, which meant every night they ate whatever Charlie wanted, but not before Charlie went through the motions of asking Bunny five more times if she was absolutely sure she had no preferences? Because he didn’t want to be calling all the shots, to which Bunny responded with multiple assurances that she really, seriously didn’t care, until their little recital was over, the food was ordered, and dinner was eaten in silence. 

This night’s wordless ritual was broken, however, by a single question from Charlie. “How would you feel about moving?”

            Bunny looked at him. There was something grotesque in the way he asked, in the way he was attempting to disguise what was clearly a decision already made in the form of a question. She felt her legs starting to tremble. This was not something she had ever expected to hear. 

“Why?” she responded curtly. 

            Charlie sighed. Bunny watched him contemplate, fight an anticipated argument in his head. She hated watching him perform this mental arithmetic in real time. Really, she hated watching him do most things. 

            “I think it would be good for us.”

“Well, I’m very happy here.” Bunny said, biting her lip. “It’s nice. And it’s big.” 

Charlie’s eyes begged for her to be truthful. 

“You never liked this place. You actually hate this place..”

“I guess I’ve found it in my heart to like it!” Bunny smiled sarcastically and spun her fork. 

“Bunny, come on. If this is about the garden, you can have that anywhere. We won’t have to give that up if we downsize.” 

“Downsize?” 

Charlie looked at her incredulously, yet spoke carefully. “Yeah, I mean, we probably don’t need a two bedroom anymore.” 

Bunny placed a single noodle in her mouth and chewed it slowly, letting her gaze sink into her still-full plate. Charlie rose from the table and walked into the kitchen. 

            “I wanna talk to a realtor, at least. Just to see what we can get for this place,” he enthusiastically proclaimed. “Just think about it, please?” and he scraped his food off his plate and into the trash.  

That night soon became one of those terrorized by unrelenting wakefulness and eyeballs fixated on the ceiling. Bunny tried to distract herself by taking deep breaths through her nostrils and slowly closing her eyes, imagining her anxiety bouncing off her brain like smooth squares of Jell-O, just like her shitty therapist had told her to do. Her eyes couldn’t help but stay open and bore holes through the ceiling, and the Jello-O squares turned solid and tapped their sharp edges against her brain instead of sliding. 

The tapping got louder and faster. Bunny sat up; this wasn’t just in her head. It was a real, uniquely familiar tapping coming from outside, hitting the windows and the roof. It was raining.   

Bunny flung herself out of bed and ran downstairs. The drizzle had exploded into a downpour by the time she reached the patio doors. Without hesitation, she ran barefoot outside to her garden. She threw her head back and opened her arms, letting the rain soak her T-shirt until it melted into her skin. It was amazing: pouring rain, in the middle of July, during a record drought. Tomorrow Bunny would wake up to a garden revived, lush and green. The pounding rain would dig up swollen pink earthworms, which her chickens would happily gorge themselves on. It would be a paradise. 

But then her smile fell. She remembered the greenhouse, and the hole in its roof that she should have but never got fixed, and the tools and soil and chicken feed inside that were now at the mercy of the rain. Suddenly the rain lost its welcoming allure; a blanket of mist wrapped around the plants, and they took on the form of misshapen, veiled creatures surrounding Bunny as she trudged through the swampy earth to the greenhouse. . 

She opened the greenhouse door to find her worst fear realized. A torrent gushing violently through the hole in the roof had eroded the bags of dirt and chicken feed into shapeless, saggy mounds, and the cluttered heap of metal and plastic tools she’d acquired over the years were dripping wet. She took a deep breath and dove into the pile to extract a large, purple tarp. She threw it to the side and went back to the pile, frantically rummaging through shovels and hoes and hammers buckets until finally, at the bottom of the pile, she found a step ladder’s aluminum leg sticking out. 

She pulled on it; it breached about twelve inches before suddenly stopping. She pulled harder. It didn’t budge. She pulled even harder with all her weight, leaning her body at a comically sharp angle backwards. It was only when she felt her wet hair kissing the ground that she realized she was being an idiot, that when the ladder unhooked from whatever it was snagged on she would fall, and her energy would have been better spent moving the ladder laterally, shimmying it out from underneath the pile. Of course, all of this crossed her mind in the second before her strength finally gave, the ladder shot out of the pile, and one of its sharp metal corners pierced her stomach. She cried out in pain and fell butt-first on the dirt. She looked down at the splotch of blood slowly pooling from a huge rip in her shirt right under her navel. It stung, but the cut wasn’t deep enough to distract her from the mission at hand. She turned her attention back to the hole in the roof.

The act of physically forcing the tarp through the hole in order to cover it from the outside proved a much harder task in practice than in Bunny’s mind.  She may as well have been trying to plug a storm drain. The soaking tarp got heavier with each passing second, and it didn’t help that the ladder was just a few inches too short, forcing Bunny to balance on her toes. But somehow she did it, punching and punching the soggy tarp until it plugged the hole.

Bunny smiled victoriously. The rain was gone. It was not a long-term fix, but it would do for the night. Tomorrow she’d go to Lowe’s and get some putty and a new glass pane to replace it. It would be a whole project; she’d make a day of it. It would be fun. 

Suddenly, Bunny felt her body slash itself in half. It was The Pains again. No, it was worse – this was something else. She clutched her stomach, and felt sticky wetness. It felt like hours ago, but she suddenly remembered she had stabbed herself with that ladder. That stupid ladder. She pulled her shirt up; the gash was bleeding heavily. Maybe it was deeper than she’d thought. The thought that she had flippantly disregarded the wound seemed insane to her now, as she watched the blood snake down her legs and drip onto her feet. Her vision went blurry, her weight shifted, the ladder swayed, and she hit the dirt face-first. 

 She lay stunned in the mud for a while. She hadn’t lost consciousness; the slushy soil had softened the impact. But her stomach burned. She lifted up her shirt and winced. Her wound was caked in mud. Slowly, groaning, she sat up and brushed the dirt and dead leaves off the gash. Each time her hand passed over her stomach she cried out; the pain was now too great to silently bear through clenched teeth. A ball of fire seemed to be bouncing across her organs and trying to dig its way out. She clutched her stomach and bent over, trying to catch her breath, watching the sweat and rain fall from her hair and onto the dirt.

The pain slowly dissipated and gave way to a strange numbness in her midsection. Her vision went in and out of focus and she looked down at her stomach; a thin, rigid tendril covered in tiny black hairs was emerging from her wound. At first Bunny thought this was a momentary hallucination, or a trick from her blurry vision. But the more she looked, the clearer it became. It came out in brief, slow jerks, as if unsure of its surroundings and searching blindly for something. It continued to reach out into the air another ten inches, then it stopped. Bunny took a deep breath, a horrific wave of calm came over her. Then the tendril lurched down and nose-dived into the dirt. The rest of it followed like unraveling yarn, pulling Bunny’s entire body towards the ground. It continued at incredible speed, and it crossed Bunny’s mind that she might be taken down with it. And then with one final jolt, the other end left Bunny’s body and the thing vanished into the dirt.

Bunny just kneeled there in silence, staring at the spot in the dirt where this thing had buried itself. She couldn’t decide whether to cry or laugh. A dull pain washed over her whole body. It was a familiar pain, one she had definitely felt before but had forgotten when. She listened to the rain knocking against the greenhouse roof. She blinked away the tears that had glazed over her eyes and fogged her vision, and everything around her became clear again. Then she screamed. 

  She woke up around noon the next day lying face-up in her bed. The air in the bedroom was humid and heavy. As she sat up, she briefly wondered if last night had been a dream. But when she lifted up her shirt the wound was still there, though no longer actively bleeding; it seemed to have closed up and scabbed overnight. She threw off her sheets and almost screamed – half of her side of the bed was covered in a thick layer of dirt. She immediately bundled them up and stuffed them into the washing machine.

  Charlie was at his desk when Bunny descended the stairs. He had his enormous headphones in and his back, erect and gently curved in his seat, squarely turned away from her. Bunny poured herself a glass of water. This silence was typical of their mornings, but this was not a typical morning. Bunny spoke. 

“How did you sleep?”

Charlie immediately turned around and without taking off his headphones replied, “good, you?” His mouth moved slowly and out of sync with his words, as if badly dubbed. 

“Good.” She bit her lip.

“You know they closed the reservoir trail? I had to run on the streets. Hit a PR, though.” Charlie said before taking a sip of coffee. 

“Yay, that’s awesome!” 

This had to be a joke. He had to know. He had to have noticed that their bed looked like a peat bog this morning. Bunny felt like her brain was floating in honey. She lifted her glass and let it hover in front of her lip, watching the tepid water swirl.  

“You ok, babe?” Charlie asked, with an eyebrow raise and a half-smile, a pitiful expression which teetered between performative concern and cruel amusement. 

“Yeah, I’m just tired,” and she took a sip.

“The days kind of seem to blend together this summer, don’t they?” His gaze sunk to the carpet, and his smile slowly dropped. He promptly turned around and went back to work. 

Bunny went outside and into her garden. The wet gravel felt like sand under her feet. The last remaining raindrops clung precariously to the plants’ leaves. The sky was beaming bright blue, relieved after vomiting out a year’s worth of rain in a single night. It reminded Bunny of that famous Microsoft desktop background. She’d read somewhere that that photo was completely unedited and real, a hill somewhere in Northern California or something. She didn’t believe it was real until she saw the sky today. 

The events of last night, as distinctly fucked-up as they were, couldn’t stop her from walking towards the greenhouse. Whether it was morbid curiosity or just force of habit, she had to go inside. The door was still open, water was still dripping off the soaked tools. It was just as she’d left it, except for the thing in the dirt. It was directly in the middle of the shed – a fleshy chunk of something poking a few inches out of the soil. There was no other word to describe. It was large and circular like a stemless cartoon toadstool, and peach-colored with stringy red splotches that followed no particular pattern. Bunny knelt down and squinted. She couldn’t help herself; she had to know what it was. It was growing in her garden, after all. 

It immediately struck her that maybe it could be a type of caudex: a mound-like above-ground tuber from which new stems and leaves of certain exotic plants grow. Caudices were weird looking, but nothing new to plant enthusiasts. But this thing in front of her also looked squishy, and it was covered in a veneer of mucus. Though Bunny wasn’t quite ready to touch it with her fingers, she was sure it would feel nothing like the stereotypically rigid and bark-like texture of a caudex. This thing was different; it was unequivocally disgusting. 

So naturally, Bunny had to take a closer look. She noticed a root-like growth protruding out of the mound and snaking along the dirt, reaching a length of about six inches. This too was covered in a thin layer of mucus that was uncharacteristic of plant roots. Bunny grabbed a small stick and prodded the fleshy disc. It immediately constricted, its spongy body retreating into the dirt. Bunny gasped, threw herself back, and ran out of the greenhouse. 

She spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on her patio Googling things like “giant fungus,” “garden parasites,” and “mucus-y bulbous-y alien plants.” None of these inquiries yielded anything remotely helpful, although she did discover a new subgenre of porn. 

Suddenly Bunny heard the sound of growing and rustling bushes from the garden. She sprung to her feet; a few of her chickens popped out from between the vegetable beds in semi-flight, flapping frantically and plunging back to the ground like feathered medicine balls. They ran towards her like scared children returning to their mother as Bunny sprinted into the garden. There was a flash of black and white fur from behind a rosemary bush and suddenly a raccoon emerged, grinning at her with teeth wrapped around a hen’s limp neck. Bunny grabbed a shovel and swung at the little monster, and it dropped the chicken corpse and ran off into the greenhouse.

 She crouched over the dead hen. Its neck was horrifically twisted, its feathers braided around each other. The other hens ran in circles behind Bunny, squawking inquisitively at the sky. It wasn’t uncommon for a chicken to be killed by a suburban predator every once in a while, but it always pissed Bunny off. She considered it a personal failure on her part, and while she knew she couldn’t dictate the laws of nature within the environment she’d created, moments like these made her wish she could. 

A shriek came from the greenhouse and Bunny’s skin went cold. This time, it wasn’t the hysteric squawk of a chicken, but the tortured and familiar scream of a mammal. 

A putrid stench forced her to bury her face in her shirt as she stepped into the greenhouse. The raccoon was dead – no, obliterated. The upper half of its body was crushed, bones and all, and its entrails fanned out onto the dirt like smashed roadkill. Its snout was enveloped by a mass of slimy, maroon flesh, which trailed back to the growth via a thick tube. This tube, Bunny now realized, was the tendril she had earlier seen snaking along the dirt, only now it was twice as thick and twice as long. It bulged and undulated back and forth with a horrific sucking noise, and as it did, the raccoon’s corpse slowly deflated. Bunny covered her mouth as she came to a terrifying realization: this caudex, this growth – whatever she could call it – was eating the raccoon from the inside-out. 

Bunny returned to her chair on the patio and let herself think. Once the initial shock of walking in on an unidentifiable fungus sucking an animal’s insides out like a milkshake had passed, she tried to rationalize things a bit. There was nothing she could do to stop the growth at this point. The raccoon was already dead, and it clearly wasn’t her place to interrupt the growth’s meal – the thought that it might latch onto her instead if she intervened had definitely crossed her mind. A hands-off approach was best, she decided. The circle of life was brilliant and brutal, and Bunny could not control how fast it spun, even in her garden. 

Bunny didn’t step into the shed for the next couple of days. It wasn’t out of fear so much as out of respect. A watched pot never boils. Her brain kept returning to that phrase, even though its triteness made her roll her eyes. 

On the third day, Bunny was struck by a sudden compulsion to check on the Growth, which she now affectionately called it. She figured it would be hungry. In fact, she knew it would be hungry; something in her gut told her. She opened her fridge and brainstormed. It was obvious that the Growth preferred meat, so she grabbed some chicken breasts on the verge of expiration and took them out to the garden. 

Her jaw dropped immediately upon entering the greenhouse: the Growth had nearly doubled in size. It also had two tendrils now, sticking out of the central mound like flimsy tentacles. It really was like a plant: seeming to grow every so slowly, then suddenly unfurling a new leaf overnight. As for the raccoon, its rib cage was all that remained. Bunny approached and dutifully placed the chicken breasts in front of the Growth. It remained completely still. Bunny sighed and pushed a breast closer, so that it brushed up against one of the tentacles and might stimulate a response. There was nothing. She wondered if it might be shy, thenlaughed off her naivete at trying to anthropomorphize this freak of nature. A watched pot never boils. She really wished she had never let that stupid phrase burrow into her brain. What’s inside this pot, and what happens when it finally boils? 

Bunny spent the rest of that afternoon in her garden, reading from a huge book about fungus she had found stashed in the bookshelf. It was a gift from her mother a long time ago, back when she had first started gardening. She had never read it; she never understood why her mom had given her a book about fungus and not about plants or flowers. It felt like a cruel joke at the time. But now, since the internet didn’t have answers, maybe this relic would bestow some ancient wisdom. 

Her reading was interrupted by Charlie’s voice. Here he was yet again, barefoot as always, circling the pool and yapping on his phone. She looked at his feet and it suddenly occurred to her that those fleshy, leathery pads pressing against the hot concrete were beautiful. Had she always thought that?She couldn’t remember ever really thinking about his feet. But suddenly now it was true. She hated to admit it, but he had amazing feet.  She closed her book and looked at the shed. It was Golden Hour. She decided to check on the Growth one more time before the day was done. 

Much to her disappointment, the chicken breast was still there when she walked in, only now it was speckled with ants and flies. Not only had the Growth left the chicken untouched, but as Bunny moved closer she also realized the tentacle was no longer touching it – the choosy beggar had even receded a few inches. She wrinkled her nose; apparently her generous offer was so repugnant to the Growth that it expended all that energy to physically move away from it. It was suddenly apparent from everything Bunny had seen from the raccoon to now, that the little shit needed live food.

She looked at the chickens outside. A lone hen was pecking at the dirt close to the doorway. Bunny cocked her neck and stared at it, considering for a moment that having strayed from the flock and now approaching Bunny, the hen might intentionally be signaling her presence as some sort of message – offering itself. It was stupid, and yet, undeniably serendipitous. Bunny gently outstretched her hand and coaxed her to come closer. The hen diligently approached. Her chickens trusted her. They always had. Bunny took her in her arms and carried her towards the Growth. 

She took a few steps and stopped, sighing. Suddenly none of this felt right. How cliché was it to achieve moral clarity right before committing a vile act? But it was true – she remembered what she had decided a few days ago, that she shouldn’t interfere with acts of nature. Even though the garden and its inhabitants were hers, they were not really hers, and she had to step aside and let nature run its course.

But then it occurred to her that maybe her “interfering” in nature was not interfering at all, but simply participating in it as another creature. Maybe if by the laws of nature the chicken didn’t technically belong to Bunny, it was Bunny who had raised her, protected her, and nurtured her. There was no authority in nature, but there was hierarchy. Bunny was, all things considered, her mother. The more she deliberated, the less relevant the question of morality became. Nature did not concern itself with morality. It was just a word, appearing in her mind as a chain of letters in Times New Roman or Comic Sans or Wingdings, its importance diminishing the more mutated and artificial the font became. 

  And then the decision was made for her. One of the Growth’s tentacle’s sprang to life and snatched the hen by its beak right out of Bunny’s hands. Bunny yelped. There was a crack, and the chicken’s neck swung from its shattered spine like a tetherball circling a metal pole on a playground as it was dragged along the dirt. Bunny ran out of the greenhouse as the Growth started to feed. 

She woke up the next day at dawn. Her night had been blank and dreamless. The bed was empty and it was hot. She looked at her phone – it was already 70 degrees outside. She skipped the usual route to the kitchen for water and headed straight for the patio doors, floating by Charlie in his work nook, who was as always completely unaware of what she was doing out in the garden. Bunny flung open the patio doors and sucked in a mouthful of scalding, dry air. She hopped barefoot across the burning patio and crept into her garden. 

The air inside the greenhouse was moist and fetid, a capsule of tropical mist surrounded by suburban desert. The Growth had expanded overnight. Its tendrils had grown thicker, stronger; the central mound was now the size of a basketball. It was no longer uniformly spherical but bulbous and oval-shaped; an irregular canvas of grooves, depressions, and nodes. What most surprised Bunny, however, was the small patch of little brown hairs that had emerged on top of it. Everything about it was horrific and disgusting, obviously. It was an abomination. And yet, Bunny felt an overpowering urge to be close to it.Slowly, she sat on the dirt and leaned right up to it, as if it were a patch of flowers in a meadow to admire. She sat there for what felt like hours until she started sweating and, spurred on by the heat, summoned the courage to touch the Growth. 

First she grazed the delicate, stiff bristles dotting its tendrils; then the flesh at the center. It was soft, yet not as elastic as she’d expected. It was no longer slimy like it had been at first, but now had a firmness and warmth like that of human skin. Bunny’s eyes watered and her throat felt heavy. She tried to breathe through her mouth, but the air was thick and bitter. 

        The heat only got worse in the next few days. It was swift and inescapable, metastasizing across the sky and then plunging into the earth to pull out any and every remaining drop of moisture from the dirt. The thunderstorm just a week ago felt like a false memory – as far as Bunny was concerned, rain had never fallen here. The drought was back. 

However, Bunny wasted no chance to spend as much time outside as possible. Each time she stepped on the gravel it burned through the rubber soles in her shoes and branded pebble-shaped indentations into her feet. But she had to keep going outside: to water her plants, to feed her chickens, to sit with the Growth. 

Charlie stayed inside throughout the heat wave. Whatever was happening outside was not an issue for him, as spending most of the day in an air-conditioned stucco cocoon was par for the course for him. He had no plants to water; life did not depend on him. He and Bunny hadn’t uttered a word to one another in days, though she occasionally heard him grumble to himself in disbelief about how hot it was outside, about how he couldn’t believe he was sweating despite the constant jet of air conditioning. She couldn’t tell if these were involuntary vocalizations or insincere attempts at making conversation with her. 

Two days later, still the heat showed no signs of abating. Bunny went out every afternoon to hose down her garden, spraying such enormous quantities of water that any neighbor who saw her would most definitely have reported her to whatever local governing body existed to enforce water rations during drought. But no one noticed her, not even Charlie. And anyway, despite Bunny’s efforts, her garden seemed hell-bent on dying. The oranges, spotty from decay, fell from withered branches and melted into the earth; the tomato vines browned; the rosemary turned gray. 

The greenhouse had become unbearably stuffy. The heat, combined with whatever mysterious biological atrocity the Growth could be categorized as, created a highly concentrated nucleus of rot. The Growth’s appearance mirrored its stench – its tentacles looked thinner than normal, and its deep maroon hue was fading to a pallid gray. In a panic one day, Bunny presented it with another hen, but the Growth didn’t even twitch. The heat seemed to have sapped up all its energy, and it was sapping Bunny’s too. Each minute spent outside felt like walking on another planet without oxygen. Soon it became so hot that Bunny could only go outside for minutes at a time. The rest of the day she spent in the living room, pacing in front of the patio doors like a delirious tiger at the zoo, waiting for herself to cool down enough so she could step back in her garden. 

Two weeks into the drought the power went out, and along with it went the air conditioning. Bunny woke up that day in a puddle of sweat. She walked downstairs to find Charlie in the living room, screaming on the phone at someone at the power company. From the bits of conversation she heard, it appeared that most of the neighborhood had also lost power. There were probably hundreds of angry men just like Charlie screaming at the power company. Bunny imagined its office as an infinite grid of faceless people at little work stations accompanied by an endless roar of sound – a composite cloud of voices from all the different Charlies in the town shouting in different ears. 

“Should we go swimming?” Charlie asked as he hung up the phone and turned towards her. He was bright red, and had a bizarre, unsettling smile on his face. It was that kind of ironic yet pained smile men put on when they lose an argument and declare the whole thing stupid to begin with.

“I’m good,” Bunny muttered. She realized then that those were the first words they had spoken to each other in days. 

 “I think I’m gonna go in. Might as well use it while we still can.”

“It’s a pool. It’s not going anywhere,” she rolled her eyes. 

“Bunny, you know what I mean,” he sighed. 

“I’m not leaving. I told you.”

“Fine. I’ll make sure our new place has a bigger pool.” His sweaty lips lingered acrimoniously on the last syllable. 

“I don’t care about the pool. You can get a new place with a new pool, or better yet, dig up this pool and take it with you. I’m not leaving my garden. I have to wait and see if It grows more – ” she stopped herself, remembering Charlie knew nothing about the Growth, about her life in the garden. “I… I have to wait and help the garden get better. The drought is killing it. I can’t leave it like this.” 

Charlie rubbed his brow and paced back and forth. “God dammit, Bunny. Why do you have to do this? Why do you always have to do this?” 

“Do what, Charlie?” 

“Make things hard!” 

“Oh, please! Why do you insist on making things easy?” 

“Easy? Easy?” Charlie yelled incredulously. “Seriously? Do you think this is easy for me? Do you really think any of this has been easy for me?” 

“It’s different for you! You don’t –”

“I don’t…what?” 

“Nevermind,” Bunny lowered her head. 

“No, say it.” 

“It’s not you. Your body!” she spat. “You didn’t feel it the way I did. You didn’t feel it ripping you apart, over and over again.” 

Charlie slammed his fist on the table. His face was red. His brow was sweating. It suddenly occurred to Bunny that she had never seen him this angry. 

“Don’t do that, Bunny! Don’t you dare! I wanted them, all of them, just as much as you did! But… but…” he stopped, catching his breath. “At a certain point we have to move on. Explore other options. Keep seeing the doctor, at the very least.” 

“Oh, please, Charlie. She was a fucking hack.” 

“She was fine! At a certain point the doctors can’t do anything. God! You know what? Never mind.” Charlie wrinkled his nose and cleared his throat. “The point is, Bunny, you can’t just give up,” he sighed. “You can’t let it consume you like this. You have to move on. We have to move on. We can’t just waste away. ”

“I’m not wasting away.” 

“Really?” Charlie snorted desperately. “Could’ve fooled me.” 

Bunny stood up. A bead of sweat rolled down Charlie’s face, which looked so regretful it might vaporize into thin air. 

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.” 

Bunny was shaking. Charlie took a step towards her, and grazed her arm with his fingers. She flinched, but didn’t move back. It was the first time he had touched her in months. 

“I’m sorry. You know I’m wasting too. But we can overcome it. You and me. We can find a way. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to just happen overnight. But we can make something out of nothing. I know we can.” 

Something out of nothing.  Tears welled in Bunny’s eyes. Her lips quivered. She felt a stream of sweat slide uncomfortably down her back. 

 “I love you, Bunny.” 

He squeezed her hand. She felt a ball of flesh rolling up her trachea and hooking itself into her throat, imbuing her with memories of other hand squeezes, of warm skin pressed together, of wet lips interlocking, of jokes and arguments and conversations and, most vividly, dreams: all kinds of dreams, immense and sacred in only the way dreams shared between two people can be. 

“I… I…” Bunny tried to finish, but that ball of flesh in her throat suddenly slid down her throat and into her stomach. The existence of dreams, she realized, did not preclude their eventual death. 

“I have to go check on the garden.” She brushed Charlie’s hand off her, walked outside, and quietly shut the door behind her.

She pulled up a chair and sat directly outside the greenhouse, watching the Growth through the open door. It hadn’t moved, obviously, and looked as miserable as ever. It was late afternoon now. Sweat stung Bunny’s eyes, and the burning gravel blistered her feet. But she didn’t move. 

With the sound of the patio doors opening and closing, she languidly rotated her neck towards the pool. It was Charlie: he sat hunched over the pool’s edge, dangling his legs into the water. He stared intently at his reflection in the pool, then, as the sun reflecting off the water became too bright for him, he threw back his head and squinted at the sky. 

Bunny took a deep breath and slowly rose from her chair. Not letting Charlie leave her gaze, she felt around the ground until she found a large rock. She walked through the maze of dry sage, lavender, rosemary, and orange saplings, until she was no longer flanked by green and brown and stepped onto that awful gray patio stone, and approached Charlie. Bunny hovered over him, and her shadow offered a momentary respite from the glow of the sun on his face. He opened his eyes and looked at her from upside-down. They just stared at each other, until eventually, Charlie’s brow relaxed and his dry lips curled into a small, resigning smile, and a tear fell from his face and evaporated on the stone below. 

 Bunny swung the rock against his neck. He gasped and collapsed sideways, shaking uncontrollably against the edge of the pool, his legs splashing like toy noodles in the water. Another moan, and he rolled into the pool, now a stiff, six-foot-something plank of muscle. Blood poured slowly from the shallow dent in his neck, forming a cloud of maroon around him that turned the light sparkling on the water’s surface into rubies. 

Bunny waded in and hooked her arms under his armpits. He was heavy, but would only get heavier once he drowned. She painstakingly dragged him back onto the patio and, holding her breath, checked his pulse – he was still alive. Thank God. She didn’t have much time. She slid his body across the stone, across the gravel threshold, and back into the confines of her garden. She whispered delicate apologies whenever his back passed over a sharp pebble, whenever his cheek rubbed against the warm flesh of a rotten orange, whenever his limp hands slipped out of Bunny’s sweaty grasp and flopped onto the hot earth. She wondered briefly if, in his state, he could smell the lavender and mint and parsley wafting in the heavy dusk air. It smelled amazing. 

Finally, they made it to the greenhouse. 

“Just wait. You have to see this, Charlie.”

Bunny dragged him inside and closed the door behind them, then grabbed his legs and rotated his body, propped him up against the wall like a child arranging a doll before putting on a show. She took his face in her hands and shook him. 

  There was a groan, some drooling, and slowly Charlie’s eyes fluttered open. 

 “Look, Charlie. Look what I made.” 

She moved out of his way, and his tiny eyes widened at the sight of the Growth. But he could not move, could not get up and run, could not even turn his head and look into Bunny’s eyes and ask “why?” Instead, a low, raspy sound foamed from his slack-jawed mouth. Bunny immediately knew this to be him trying to scream. 

 “Don’t worry, Charlie. I won’t let you go to waste.”

She grabbed his hands and shuffled him towards it. Charlie’s eyes shook and he let out another long, tortured groan. She lay him on his side, positioning him face to face with the Growth. Taking his hand in hers, she reached out and laid their hands on the Growth’s central mound. It gently throbbed. Bunny smiled. Slowly, one of its tendrils shook to life, and slithered across the dirt towards Charlie. Cautiously, it caressed his neck with its tip, then it backed up. It rose a few feet above him and arched over his head. Its tip slowly opened, and from within it came a circular, fleshy disc that opened up like an orchid. 

“It’s yours, Charlie. It’s ours. See? We made something out of nothing,” Bunny beamed. 

Charlie’s little white eyes, shaking in their sockets, looked up at her one last time. The tendril lunged forward and that fleshy disc wrapped around Charlie’s face. His body convulsed as it began to feed.

Bunny left the greenhouse and waited outside until after what must have been an hour, the groaning and slurping and ripping coming from inside the greenhouse ceased, and the only sounds were a light tapping on the glass roof of the greenhouse. Bunny felt a tickle on her scalp, and she looked up and smiled. Rain poured out of the sun. Drop after drop hit the gravel, forming little black splotches of wetness from which tiny dandelions sprouted and caressed Bunny’s feet. The bushes and herbs and vines of her garden spun around her, morphing into one single verdant mass, and she heaved and sobbed happily as it kissed her skin. 

She heard the greenhouse door open and close behind her. She heard tiny feet sink into loamy soil and clumsily approach her. She heard a child’s laugh. She took a deep breath and turned around.  

[Nick Holterman is a writer, screenwriter, and, after going viral on TikTok for contracting MRSA in 2021, an internet one-hit wonder. His work explores horror, dark comedy, and LGBT+ themes in the digital age. His short stories and screenplays have placed in a variety of contests and festivals such as The Launch Pad TV Pilot Competition, The ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship, and the Launch Pad Prose Competition. He is currently working on his first novel. He is based in Los Angeles.]