The blue Toyota MR2 shined in the bright morning sun, the window of the driver’s side door sending a flash of light right into his eyes as he looked down from his perch on the deck. His home floated above his latest visitor like it was suspended in time and space and not merely supported by steel beams that held the glass house some twenty-five feet in the air.
“I brought dinner,” called out the woman standing beside her car, sunglasses on, hand shielding her eyes. “Sushi and rice.”
He’d watched her car approaching from a mile away, coming out of the forest into the clearing in which his house stood silently, above all the abundant foliage. She looked to be about thirty-eight, another flawless beauty with the lines on her face from the concentration needed to get that much deserved PhD in botany or organic chemistry. Or maybe it was biology this time. Or physics.
“I’m not a Venus Flytrap,” he shouted down, turning from her, tying the sash of his white silk translucent robe which he always donned in the presence of guests. It prevented them from staring at his skin color and becoming embarrassed for doing so while not interfering, well not much anyway, with his normal photosynthetic processes.
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The Goodes World Atlas classified this area as being mollisol, soil which was organic-rich, naturally high in nutrients. He was experimenting with ways of drawing the minerals he needed from the soil, ways of farming them from the soil in an attempt to end his dependence on vitamin and mineral tablets. He kept his experiments to himself. He had chosen this area for his home for many more reasons than just its rich soil.
Agriculture in the region had managed not to strip the earth of its vital nutrients. Nearby farms used less irrigation, leaving the rivers and streams to run their course without much interference from dams and drainage ditches. This left the aquifer to support the land naturally. While the land was not cheap to its owner, there was plenty of it, protected by the national government from farming or hunting or trespass. There were owls in those trees.
It was near enough to the coast that rainwater here was in abundance. However, there were many, many more sunny days than overcast ones. The sun’s position in the sky, while not as stable as it would be on the equator, varied only a little with the coming and going of the seasons. This suited him fine. He dare go no closer to the equator. Out of fear. This was as close as he’d ever like to get.
It was also some comfort, although he didn’t like to admit it, that if strangers did happen upon this plot of land, he’d be able to converse with them in his native tongue. And, in the end, it was still his home, this land.
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“They want you back,” the woman, dressed in her dark navy business suit, explained having now gained access inside the house.
“Why? So they can lock me away in a dark, cold room and watch me wilt?” the man quipped, standing across from the woman on the warm stone floor.
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In the strange way that evolution sometimes worked, he’d been given blond, almost white hair that was fine and thin on his head. He often wondered if his hairline would recede with age and whether he’d end up with a bald head. But he thought not. His hair was so fine and light yet grew with great vigor that he theorized a method behind his blondness.
Why not green? Chlorophyll didn’t exist in dead cells. Black or brown? It would block sunlight from his scalp. And he needed all the green surface area he had to sustain himself.
But blond, especially his very light blond-almost white hair, it would reflect light onto his scalp, onto his neck even. If he let it grow long enough, it might reflect light onto other parts of his body—his shoulders, his back.
Alas, that might be too much. The majority of his photosynthesis occurred in his shoulders, the back of his neck.
But the sparse blond hairs that covered his whole body did not interfere with his food processes. And he could always wear his hair in a ponytail or up off his shoulders when he needed. He could use a personal vanity.
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“I’d like to stay if you don’t mind. Just for a couple of days. The air out here is so purifying,” the woman admired, leaning against the railing of the terrace, looking out across the miles and miles of undisturbed green foliage.
“Do what you like. I mind everything nowadays. It’s of little consequence,” the man declared from the terrace just below, watering the peonies and snapdragons, thinking of them by their names, feeling the woman’s eyes on him like a warm sunbeam.
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“The experiments are important. You’re the only one of your kind,” the woman asserted, eating an apple he had given her.
“Dr. Hailey, they treated me like a weed but without the usual persistent attacks,” he argued, minutely flinching after every bite she took.
“Call me Tobie,” she insisted.
“Dr. Hailey, you’re wasting your time,” he repeated for the fifteenth time since she’d arrived while trying to keep his body from quaking at the sound of her teeth needlessly crunching and shredding the tiny plant cells to no benefit of Persephone, the Newell-Kimzey he’d met when he’d moved in.
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“You shouldn’t live in such isolation. It isn’t natural; not even for them,” the woman admonished, trying to close the space between her and the man.
“I’ve too little humanity to live in society and too much to live among them. This isolation was chosen for me,” he commented, turning away from her as she approached.
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“You’re still a man. You have needs and desires,” the woman maintained, watching his eyes in the reflection in the mirror.
“I’ve no use for that act any longer. It furthers no human purpose for me,” he stated, trying very hard not to look at the rest of her.
“You mean you actually produce seeds instead?” she queried, fascinated.
“Pollen,” he corrected, breaking down and letting his eyes wander.
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“I’ve never slept under the stars like this before. It makes me feel naked,” the woman spoke from the living room, her voice carrying into the bedroom.
“That’s a feeling that most humans are afraid of,” the man stated, his mind offering images to go along with her honeyed voice.
“I’m not afraid of it,” she whispered after a pause, knowing that a pin drop was an orchestra in this house.
“Mmmmm….I want to know him….want to….you tortured him…how could you…learn…why won’t he call me Tobie?….I want to learn from him….I want him to….” The murmuring went on.
“Damn,” he muttered and at 12:45 a.m. finally decided that he would…one last time. And for different reasons.
“What were you dreaming about?” he asked her as she slowly opened her eyes, becoming aware of his presence.
“Water. A crisp, light stream of it gurgling down a wall of obsidian. Strange,” she admitted, not bothering to sit up and face him. “What did you dream about?”
“Oblivion.”
The morning touched his skin like a warm spray of water, filling him with energy, making the formerly impossible possible. He waited for her to open her eyes, to touch his hand, to invite him to. The wait seemed necessary. He had lain at the foot of the couch all night, inhaling her pheromones, waiting for the morning, waiting for the sun’s light to activate dormant homology: tropisms to better orient and adapt more quickly; electrophysiological signals to sense instinctively where to begin, to feel everything in every cell of his green body towards convergent evolution. Her eyelids fluttered open.
“I know why you’re alone,” she said, her hand tracing a line along his green skin.
“I don’t,” he responded and reached for her.
“I’ve never done this in broad daylight. It makes me feel….” she couldn’t find the word.
“Naked,” he finished for her, hands wrapping around her body.
“Yes.”
“We all are.”
The sensation of green light expanding within her, through every vein, every artery. Her cells bathed in a great emerald vibration, altering her within, triggering morphogenesis, the cycle strangely slowing, then stopping altogether. No breath.
A folding inward as her body stilled.
Then, the cycle began to move again but in the opposite direction. Her shape was changing now. Impossible. And she still thought.
But how can this be?
She sighed and the air embraced the oxygen exhaled from her stomates.
Water running down the black smooth wall, collecting around the base of her, soaking in deep to the roots, then through the root hairs, up the root tissue to the stem, up through the xylem to become a part of the process.
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“Hello up there!” the doctor in the business suit declared from below on the plain.
The green man continued to water the newest addition to the garden, a magnificent, fragrant Rosa carolinae with bright pink simple blooms with yellow centers. He whistled to himself.
“Did Dr. Hailey come to see you?” the doctor called up.
“No more, Doc.” He caressed one of the green leaves and decided he’d be anxious for his rose to convert in six months’ time. If she chose to do so. The Hibiscus syriacus and Gardenia jasminoides remained.
“No more,” he whispered and heard a slight hissing sound coming from the rose, a sound he knew to be her new laughter.
© 1993 Stacie Benton
I recently hosted some friends over to share my love of food and the ease of the Instant Pot. While I do hunt through a lot of recipes and often blend then without much thought, there are some key basics I always look for with Instant Pot recipes.
Style Just Be 