Paul Bellow winced when he felt the small splat on his forehead as he was walking by the park near his apartment that night.

“Eww!” he grunted, wiping the gunk off of his forehead with a plain, white handkerchief. “Bird shit?” He hurried over to a streetlight to stand under and see. The spot on his handkerchief wasn’t brown.

It was blue.

“Well, whatever it is, at least it isn’t bird shit,” he said.

***********

Back in his apartment ten minutes later, he washed his face. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror on the medicine cabinet. Most of the gunk was gone from his forehead, except for tiny little dots of blue embedded in the pores where the gunk had made impact.

“That isn’t me, whatever it is,” he whispered.

He took out his handkerchief, which now oddly had lost its softness and smoothness, yet was also brittle. In his hand, instead of being its original white, with a blue spot in the middle, it was all grey, and it crumbled into what looked and felt like broken-off pieces of rock, pebble, and ashes.

“What the hell?” His eyes and mouth were agape. “I guess I’ll have to buy a new handkerchief.”

***********

The next morning, he got out of bed and, still half-asleep, plodded his way into the bathroom.

As he walked through the bathroom doorway, he mumbled something unintelligible even to himself: “Mmmbzemplibmbizum.”

“His head pricked up a bit after making that meaningless noise.

“Mmm?”

He stood before the toilet, pulled his underwear below and behind his balls, took a deep breath, and waited for his piss to start pouring out.

It did.

It was blue.

“What the fuck?!” he shouted.

It continued to come out all blue, never yellow.

“I don’t believe it.”

He finished his piss, flushed the toilet, then went back to the medicine cabinet mirror.

There was a huge blue spot covering most of his forehead. It looked like a birthmark, like a port-wine stain, only a blue one.

“Oh, fuck me!” he said in a trembling voice. “That may not have been bird shit, but…was it alien shit?”

He rubbed his forehead. The blue spot didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel like skin, either. It felt rather like soft plastic, if it did feel like anything from Earth. 

“How the hell am I supposed to go to work looking like this?”

************

He went to the office wearing a baseball cap, the stiff bill pulled down at the front to cover the blue spot as best he could. 

This was no casually-dressed office; everyone else in the office, wearing suits and ties like him, or skirt-suits for the ladies, looked askance at him in that cap as he approached his desk.

“Why’s Paul wearing a baseball cap?” a woman whispered to another female colleague.

“He always was weird,” the second woman said. “Who knows what his problem is now.”

He sat at his cubicle, hoping no one would want to chat with him much. Then Craig Whittaker, that bullying piece of shit from the other side of the office, walked up to him.

“Hey, Bellow,” he said. “What’s with the cap?”

“None o’ your business,” Paul said. “Leave me alone.”

“Leemee alone,” Craig said in the whining, mocking tone of a teenager. He snatched the hat off of Paul’s head.

Paul put his hand over his forehead and got up, reaching for the hat that Craig held up too high for him to get. Paul punched him in the gut and grabbed the hat. He quickly put it back on.

“Jesus, Bellow,” Craig grunted as he held his gut. “What’s your problem? I saw some blue on your fore-“

“Fuck you, Whittaker!” Paul shouted. “What’s your problem? Why can’t you mind your own goddamn business?!”

“Hey, what’s with all the noise out there?!” their boss, Ms. Kramer, shouted from the doorway of her office.

“Bellow punched me,” Craig said. “Is wearing baseball caps allo-“

“I’m not surprised he hit you,” she said. “You pick on him enough, which by the way, I don’t pay you for. I do pay you, however, to work. Now, stop fighting and get back to it!”

“Asshole,” Craig whispered to Paul as he returned to his desk.

“And as for you, Muhammad Ali, which sport do you prefer, boxing or baseball?” she asked Paul.

“Please, Ms. Kramer,” he asked her, as if she were his mother. “May I keep the cap on? There’s an embarrassing mark on my head, and-“

“OK, whatever,” she said. “Just get back to work.”

************

That night, back in his apartment, Paul was feeling strange. Not in pain, not uncomfortable, just different. 

There was something inside his body that he knew was not him. Again, it didn’t hurt, it just felt like something other than him…and it seemed to be growing.

He’d kept the cap on, even at home, for he was afraid to see if that blue spot had gotten any worse…any bigger…any uglier. He avoided looking at himself in mirrors.

A local news story on the TV mentioned a blue slime that had been found on the leaves of a tree at the side of the park he’d passed by the night before. No biologist studying the slime had any idea where it had come from. Nothing known on Earth was like it. But it was spreading all over the tree, and seemed to be about to spread throughout the park, so wooden boards were being put around it to stop people from entering, to stop the slime from spreading.

“An alien slime,” Paul said in that trembling voice. “on me and in me.”

Suddenly, in his nervousness, he needed to take a shit.

“Mmzmplitzk,” he mumbled as he hurried from his living room to the bathroom. “Why do I keep mumbling nonsense like that?”

He raced in, avoiding seeing his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, pulled his pants down, and sat on the toilet.

As the crap came out like an avalanche, making strange slurping noises as it squeezed out of his asshole, he noticed how it felt even stranger. Again, it didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel uncomfortable, but it didn’t feel like normal turds, diarrhea, or anything in between, either. He could describe the feeling only as…alien.

He finished and wiped his ass. He slowly moved the toilet paper, with a great feeling of expectant dread, to come within his field of vision.

Please, he thought. Just be a brown streak.

It was blue.

“Jesus fuck!” he said, his voice cracking like a pre-teen’s.

He got up, pulled up his pants, and looked down at what he’d left in the toilet bowl.

He saw what looked like blue sponges.

“What the hell is happening to me?” he almost sobbed.

He flushed the toilet, hearing each of the blue things slip through the hole with that slurping sound. Then he went over to the mirror.

He took off the baseball cap and raised his eyes with the utmost reluctance to see his head.

“Oh, my God!”

**************

He went to work with a hood over his head, gloves that tightly covered his swollen fingers, and a scarf around his face, covering as much of his skin as he could. Sunglasses covered his eyes.

He got to his desk without anyone saying anything to him, but lots of people looking at him strangely and whispering to each other.

Please, everyone, he thought, just leave me alone.

Then Craig walked over.

“Alright, Bellow,” he said with a chuckle. “What’s going on—?”

He pulled the hood off, and yanked the scarf away before Paul could react.

“Jesus Christ!” Craig screamed, backing away.

Paul got up and took off the sunglasses, then stared hard into Craig’s eyes. “Here, Whittaker! Get a good look, you’re so fucking curious!”

A woman’s scream was heard from the other side of the office, followed by gasps and groans of “Oh, my God!”

Not only was the blue covering most of Paul’s face, there were bulges on his forehead, cheeks, his right eyelid, and his chin. These protrusions looked like giant blue warts.

Paul stepped towards ever-retreating Craig.

“Are you satisfied, Craig?” Paul shouted. “You wanted to see the freak-show, now you get to see!—NOT ENOUGH BODY,” he suddenly said in a bass, buzzing voice, then his voice went back to normal—“Come on, Craig, get an up-close look! Why are you backing away?”

“Stay away from me, you disgusting, deformed, ugly bastard!” Craig said, his back bumping into a wall. “I don’t want to catch your germs!”

“Then you should’ve minded your own goddamned business, as I told you to do yesterday, but you just couldn’t let it go, could you?!” Paul shouted. “Now, I’m—NOT ENOUGH BODY—gonna give the blue to you!” Paul removed a glove, revealing what looked like blue plantar’s warts dotting all of his fingers and thumb.

“Keep away from me!” Craig shouted, balling up his fist to punch Paul.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Paul said, his ungloved hand coming within millimetres of Craig’s wincing face. “You hit the monster, you turn into the monster!” Paul laughed like the villain of a cheesy movie.

Ms. Kramer stormed out of her office. “All right, what the hell’s with all of the noise out—oh, my God!” she yelled. “Paul, what the hell happened to you?”

“Did he get that blue shit from the tree in that park on him?” a female colleague asked. “I saw it on the news last night.”

“He lives near that park, Queen’s Park, doesn’t he?” Craig said, trying to dodge Paul’s finger. “Get him away from me!”

“I don’t want to touch him any more than you want to, Craig!” Ms. Kramer said. “Someone call an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Paul, why haven’t you been to a doctor?”

“On my salary?” Paul said. “I can’t afford a doctor! And what doctor can fix this?”

“Paul, leave,” she said. “Don’t come back until you’re better.”

“I won’t get better—NOT ENOUGH BODY,” he said, the second part always in a buzzing, alien voice, as if he had a split personality.

“Then don’t come back at all!” she shouted. “Get out of here! You’re fired!”

As Paul took his things and hurried out of the office—with his hood, sunglasses, and gloves all on—everyone getting out of his way like the parting of the Red Sea, Kramer shouted, “Has anyone called an ambulance for him? Don’t let him go home freely. He must be quarantined!”

******************

Paul rushed out of the office building and bumped into a number of people on the way before he got to his car. 

“Hey, watch it!” one man shouted.

“What’s his problem?” a woman he bumped into also said. “And why is he dressed like that, in this warm weather?”

You don’t want to know, lady, he thought as he reached his car. Really, you don’t.

He drove home, which was on the other side of town.

He parked in his apartment basement, went up the elevator, and went down the hall of the fifth floor to his apartment. As he rushed there, the last room on the right side, he passed a mother and her ten-year-old son.

“Hey, who’s that freak, Mom?” he asked.

“Honey, don’t be rude,” she said.

“But some of his skin is blue,” he said.

“Oh, don’t talk nonsense,” she said. “Get in the elevator.”

********************

Two paramedics wearing decontamination suits arrived in the office.

“Someone called about a man with blue skin?” one of them said.

“Yes,” Ms. Kramer said. “We think he may have been infected by that blue stuff found on that tree in Queen’s Park. Did you hear about that on the news?”

“Oh, yeah,” the other paramedic said. “Nobody knows where the blue slime came from, but we do know it’s extremely contagious.”

“That whole park has been walled off so no one can get inside,” the first paramedic said. “The blue slime feeds off of living things. When it’s completely absorbed one living thing, it quickly looks for others, or else it will die.”

“How do you know it will die if it doesn’t pass itself onto another living thing?” a female employee asked the paramedics.

“The tree is no longer blue,” the first paramedic said. “It’s all grey…and dead.”

“Anyway, Paul Bellow is the man you’re looking for,” Ms. Kramer said. “You just missed him, actually. He probably drove home, which probably isn’t far from Queen’s Park.”

“Do you have his home address?” the first paramedic asked.

“Well, uh…, just a second,” Ms. Kramer said, then went into her office to find her employee file on Paul. She sifted through some papers and found his file. She looked it over. “Oh, shit. We have only his old address, which wasn’t in this city. He moved here about a year ago, but he didn’t tell us his new address.”

“Is his address anywhere to be found online?” the second paramedic asked.

“Bellow doesn’t like people, and the feeling is mutual,” Craig said. “So I doubt he’d ever want to reveal that information. Besides, who’d want to go to his home?”

“Well, we do,” the second paramedic said. “We’ve got to find him and quarantine him before he infects anyone else. If he lives near the park, we can ask neighbours there if they’ve seen a strange-looking man.” The two paramedics left the office.

When he poked his finger at me, he got really close, Craig thought with a shudder. He didn’t touch me, did he? Would getting really close be enough to infect someone?

“OK, folks, the show is over,” Ms. Kramer said, then looked at dazed Whittaker. “Go on, Craig, get back to it.”

He mumbled something she couldn’t make out as he walked over to his desk.

*******************

Paul locked the door to his apartment, went into his bedroom, and stripped down to his boxer shorts. He looked at himself in his bedroom mirror, which reflected him from head to toe.

“That isn’t me,” he whispered in a raspy voice. “So much of that is not me at all.”

The blue had spread all over his body in polka-dots of varying sizes, from the ‘plantar’s wart,’ smallest kind, to large lumps on his arms, chest, left shoulder (which made him look almost like a hunchback), and legs. A particularly large lump was on his belly, just to the right of his navel. Several medium-sized lumps were on his back. Many of the ‘plantar’s wart’ variety were on his ass, dick, and scrotum.

He could feel the alien substance in many places inside his body, that almost plastic presence: in his gut, lungs, and especially, in his brain.

“RUNNING OUT OF BODY,” his mouth was forced to utter in that buzzing, monotone, bass vocal fry that had to be an alien’s speech. He sounded like a robot talking at those moments.

“Who keeps making me say things like that?” Paul said, trying to draw the alien intelligence taking him over into a conversation. “First, it was mumbled nonsense, now it’s talk about ‘not enough body,’ as if the aliens have learned how to speak English. Who are you, that’s inside me? What do you want?”

“WE ARE USING YOU TO NOURISH US,” the alien presence buzzed through Paul’s mouth. “WHEN YOU ARE NO MORE, WE WILL FIND ANOTHER LIFE FORM AND DO THE SAME TO IT.”

“You’re killing me.”

“CORRECT.”

“What did I do to you to deserve this?” Paul asked in sobs.

“NOTHING.”

“Then why are you doing this? You’re hurting me. You’re destroying my life.”

“WE MUST DO THIS TO SURVIVE AND GROW.”

“But I need to survive, too!”

“NO, YOU DON’T.”

“Yes, I do!”

“NO. ONLY OUR NEEDS MATTER.”

“When you’ve made me all blue, and I die, you won’t have any living things here to latch onto. My apartment has less life in it than Eraserhead’s did.”

“YES, THE LACK OF LIFE HERE IS A PROBLEM. NOT ENOUGH BODY. WE’RE RUNNING OUT OF BODY.”

“So you will die, too.”

NOT NECESSARILY. WE CAN FIND A WAY TO GET YOU OUTSIDE, OR GET LIFE FORMS LIKE YOURS IN HERE.”

“Good luck with that. No one likes me.”

“OUR ARRIVAL ON YOUR PLANET HAS BEEN NOTED BY THOSE LIVING HERE. THEY KNOW WE ARE IN YOUR BODY. THEY WILL WANT TO FIND YOU, AND THEY WILL PROBABLY TRACK YOU TO HERE. WHEN THEY ARRIVE AND YOU ARE DEAD, WE CAN ATTACH OURSELF TO THEM, AND RESUME NOURISHING OURSELF.”

“You’re crazy. Eventually, you will run out of life on this Earth, and you’ll die here.”

“THEN WE WILL FIND ANOTHER PLANET WITH LIFE, AND WE’LL RESUME OUR NOURISHING PROCESS.”

“You survive only by killing others,” Paul noted with horror. “You’re crazy.”

“NO, WE’RE RATIONAL. WE THRIVE. WE PROSPER. WE GROW. LIFE LIVES BY KILLING OFF OTHERS. YOUR EARTH SPECIES SHOULD KNOW THAT ALREADY.”

*****************

The paramedics drove their ambulance to a parking lot just a few blocks away from the walled-off park. They got out and started walking in the direction of the park.

“This is stupid,” the first of them said. “We have no idea how to find this guy’s home. We’re just going to go around asking about this…Paul Bellow?”

“It may not be as hard as you think,” the second paramedic said. “We’re talking about a guy with freakish blue blotches on his skin, a guy in warm spring weather, covering up all of his body in a hood, a scarf, long sleeves, and gloves. He should be strange-looking enough that someone in this area might have seen him.”

“He probably drove home, barely spotted by anyone!”

“Look, we’ve got to try, OK? We can’t let him go around without being quarantined. The police are looking for him, too. We’re just gonna have to try our best. In any case, I have a hunch, I don’t know why, but I have a strange feeling we’re going to find this guy sooner than it seems.”

“Great, we’re counting on your hunches.”

Then they saw a man at a newsstand on a street corner just across from the park. “Him,” the second paramedic said. “Let’s ask him if he’s seen anyone strange looking.”

*****************

Paul just sat in front of the bedroom mirror, watching his body continue to deteriorate. The spreading of the lumpy blue was accelerating; the tiny ‘plantar’s warts’ were growing into big bulges. His hands were so disfigured now that they were no longer usable. His fingers were fusing together, as were his toes.

“RUNNING OUT OF BODY,” his mouth, blue and grotesquely bloated, buzzed over and over again.

Paul no longer spoke; he barely thought his own thoughts anymore. He barely even existed. His eyes, the irises of which were originally brown, but were now blue, just stared at the monstrosity in the mirror reflection with a look of nothing other than despair. 

“RUNNING OUT OF BODY. RUNNING OUT OF BODY.”

His nose had rounded and enlarged into a blue bulge like all the others on his body, including other rounded, wart-like bulges on his face that so resembled what his nose had morphed into, one wouldn’t be able to decide if he had five deformed noses, or no nose at all, but rather five bulbous blue growths instead.

“RUNNING OUT OF BODY. RUNNING OUT OF BODY.”

Indeed, very little of his body wasn’t blue now. Only his left ear, his eyeballs and pupils, a few tufts of hair on the back and sides of his head, a few spots of peach on his face, arms, legs, back and chest, and his right nipple didn’t have that bright, pure blue of the rest of his body, as well as almost three quarters of the plant life in Queen’s Park, the other quarter being grey and dead.

Speaking of the growing blue in Queen’s Park, the blue taking over Paul’s body was working out a solution to the problem of…”RUNNING OUT OF BODY.”

A message was being sent out from Paul’s blue brain, through psychic vibrations, out of his apartment to the blue in the park, which returned such vibrations to the blue brain, in an alien conversation.

Paul’s fat blue mouth buzzed, “GET PARAMEDICS TO PARK. GET BOY AND MOTHER TO PARK. DIRECT PARAMEDICS TO THIS ROOM. THEN TAKE OVER THEIR BODIES. MUST KEEP FEEDING. RUNNING OUT OF BODY.”

The blue in the park sent back a message, vibrating that the paramedics, mother, and boy were already being psychically influenced to meet by the park.

**************

The man at the newsstand didn’t know anything about Paul, so the paramedics continued down the street across from Queen’s Park. A fruit vendor was halfway down that block, and Paul’s neighbours—that woman and her son—were buying some fruit there.

The paramedics stopped there. “Excuse me,” the first of them said. “You haven’t by chance seen a man with strange blue blotches on his skin, have you? He’d be trying to hide his deformity in a hood, with a scarf and sunglasses to cover his face, gloves,…”

“Sorry, I haven’t seen anyone looking like that,” the fruit seller said.

“Mom, that guy we saw in the hall of our apartment,” the boy said. “That freak—“

“Oh, yeah, him,” the boy’s mother said.

“Wait…you two saw him?” the second paramedic asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the boy said. “He covered himself all up so no one could see how ugly he is.”

“Ron!” his mother said.

“I don’t think you’d like it if you were infected by those plants in the park over there, and kids were calling you ‘ugly’ and ‘freak,” the second paramedic said.

“That’s right,” the boy’s mother said. “Show some compassion! That poor man…Do you think some of that blue on the trees got on his skin?”

“It must have been that,” the first paramedic said. “If he lives in your apartment, do you know which room he’s in?”

“Well, no,” she said, “but we saw him on the fifth floor of the Maynard Gardens Building, our apartment building on 36 Bay Street, just down that way.” She pointed in the direction opposite of the way the paramedics had been going. “I’m sorry I can’t take you there now because my son and I have to catch the 11:00 train, and…oh-oh, that’s in ten minutes.”

“Well, where is he on the fifth floor?” the second paramedic asked.

“We live in Room 506,” she said. “We saw him rush past our home, so that leaves a few rooms before the end of the hall. That’s as close as I can narrow it down for you.”

“And that’ll be good enough,” the second paramedic said. “Thanks! Let’s go.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “C’mon, Ron! We gotta go!” 

Both pairs rushed off in opposite directions.

******************

Paul was little more than a large clump of blue lying on his bedroom floor in front of that mirror. His arms and legs were absorbed into the clump. There was no distinction between a head and a torso anymore, either. There was no hair, no nose, and there were no ears. All that was visibly left of him were his mouth and eyes…and that mouth was essentially only a moving hole. 

He was a blue blob with eyes and a maw that said…

“ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST OUT OF BODY!”

As for his brain, he barely had a consciousness that was his individual own. What little he had of a mind, mused and wallowed in despair.

So, this is how I’ll die, that vestige of a human mind thought. I thought I’d just die a lonely old man, but that at least I’d die with a human body.

Those blue eyes, now lacking pupils or whites in which blue irises might be distinguished, stared at that mirror. They were Paul’s only sensory connection with the world outside of the blue blob that had consumed his body.

Look at me, he thought. I’m a monster. An alien. A disgusting, inhuman, unlovable thing. I’m a giant blue turd.

“ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST OUT OF BODY!”

I never had friends as a kid at school, or as an adult at work, he thought. My older brothers bullied me, no girl ever liked me…and look at me now. I’m a huge lump of blue shit.

“ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST OUT OF BODY!”

I never was worth anything…now I’m really worthless. I’m just a mess somebody will need to clean up.

His sight grew blurry, then darker. Slowly but surely, what he saw grew less clear, with less and less light, little by little…

“ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST OUT OF BODY!”

After ten minutes, his eyes disappeared, absorbed into the blue mass, which was drying and losing its blue brightness.

Well, at least I don’t have to see myself anymore, he thought, his consciousness beginning to fade. It felt like drifting off to sleep.

To die, to sleep, no more, he thought. And by a sleep to say…

“ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST OUT OF BODY!” that hole uttered in the same, buzzing tone, the only indication of any kind, however vague, that that blue blob housed life.

A duller and duller blue.

Drying.

Greying.

*****************

The paramedics reached the fifth floor and got out of the elevator. They saw a sign on a wall with an arrow pointing to Rooms 500-510.

“That way,” the second paramedic said, pointing to their right. “Let’s go.” They raced down the hall.

When they reached Room 506, they stopped.

“OK, so what are we going to do now?” the first paramedic asked. “Knock on each door after this one and ask, ‘Excuse me, but do you have blue skin?”

“Shut up and put on your decontamination mask and cap,” the second one said while putting on his. The first one put on his. “Let’s just poke around the remaining rooms and try to find anything unusual about them.”

They went past Room 506, moving as quietly as possible, listening for any unusual noises. When they reached Room 509, they heard this frantic chanting, over and over again:

“ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST OUT OF BODY! ALMOST…OUT OF…BO…DY…”

“I’ve got a hunch we’ve found him,” the first paramedic said. He knocked on the door. “Hello?”

“AL…MOST…OUT…OF…BODY…AL…MOST…OUT…OF…BO…DY…”

“Hello?” the first one said again. “Can you open the door?”

“He’s ‘almost out of body’,” the second one said. “I don’t think he can.”

“We’d better kick the door open,” the first one said. “It sounds like he’s dying.”

Both men took turns kicking at the door. The door barely budged.

“Let’s kick together,” the second of them said.

After over a dozen kicks, between each of which they could hear, weaker and weaker, softer and softer, “AL…MOST…OUT…OF…BO…DY…OUT…OF…BO…DY…OUT…OF…BO…DY…OUT…OF…BO…,” they finally kicked the door open.

They rushed inside and first checked the living room, then the kitchen, then the bathroom. Then they paused to listen.

Silence.

“The chanting stopped,” the first paramedic said.

“Yeah,” the second said. “Let’s check the bedroom.”

They went in. Apart from the usual things seen in a bedroom, they saw a dry hill of what looked like grey ash. White boxer shorts were wrapped around the middle of it.

“That must have been him,” the second of them said. “Shit.”

“Well, at least the blue hasn’t spread to anyone else,” the first said. 

“Not so far as we know.”

“The park has been walled off.”

“With only wood panels, which can be easily broken into. I wish they’d used something stronger.”

“It’ll be broken into only if someone’s stupid enough to do that,” the first paramedic said. “Anyway, if anyone else has been infected, we surely would have known about it by now.”

**************

Two nights later, Ron and three of his friends were riding their bikes by Queen’s Park. They read the sign on the wall: KEEP OUT! CONTAGIOUS AND DEADLY!

Their bikes were parked at that section of the wall separating the boys from the tree that had infected Paul.

“So, this is where all that alien blue shit is, eh?” one of Ron’s friends said.

“Yeah,” Ron said. “My neighbour got that shit on his face.”

“I wonder what it looks like in there,” another of his friends said. 

“We should find out,” the third of his friends said.

“No way!” Ron said. “That’d be stupid.”

“You’re just a chicken,” the third said.

“Well, if you’re so fuckin’ brave, you ride your bike through the wall,” Ron said.

“Wait,” the second boy said. He took out a box of toothpicks from his jacket pocket. He took four toothpicks from the box, put them behind his back, broke one of them in half, then presented them to the others. “We’ll draw straws.”

“OK,” the first friend said.

They drew the toothpicks, and Ron got stuck with the short one. “Oh, fuck me.” He was shaking.

“Come on, Ron,” the third friend said. “You agreed to it, now ride your bike through the wall so we can see inside.”

Ron remembered the blue he saw on his ‘freak’ neighbour.

He shook some more.

“Ron’s such a pussy,” the third friend said.

“I am not!” Ron shouted.

“Then, DO IT!” all three of his friends shouted back at him.

“OK, OK,” Ron said, then backed up his bike. The other boys backed up as well, even farther away from the park.

Shaking all over, Ron nonetheless charged at the wall, breaking through the wood and plunging his entire body and his bike into a huge blob of blue slime. He was completely engulfed in it. An avalanche of blue fell out onto the road. Grey ashes of the original, infected tree powdered the blue slime as it poured out.

“Holy shit!” the first friend shouted. All three boys rode away.

I’m such a fucking idiot, Ron thought as the blue seeped into his pores.

After a few minutes of unintelligible mumbling, a buzzing voice could be heard from the hill of blue:

“VERY LITTLE BODY! VERY LITTLE BODY!”

Muir Cantell stared at the new flower he found in his greenhouse late that night. How did it get there? If his wife, Paula, had brought it in, surely she would have told him about it.

It was a beautiful, but unique flower. He’d never seen this kind of flower ever before, in all his years of gardening. It had silvery-gold, shining petals, with touches of bright red along some of the edges. A silvery gold that made wealth seem like poverty, a red like freshly-shed blood.

The flower seemed to stare back at him as it emerged from the black shadows; the bright petals were a chiaroscuro contrast to their home in the darkness. The petals seemed to speak to him.

Their language was their scent, an alien, dirty smell, but a smell that made him want to stay by the flower more and more, the longer he smelled it.

He watered it lovingly, then left to go to bed in his house beside the greenhouse, wanting to stay with the flower, but also afraid to stay.

***************

The next morning, he and Paula went into the greenhouse to begin the business day of selling flowers. He hurried over to the new flower, while his wife stayed at the other end of the greenhouse, as if trying to avoid the flower. When he reached the corner of the greenhouse where the flower was, he noticed an odd thing.

There were now two flowers.

The second was an identical twin of the first. The smell of the flowers was, as would be expected, twice as powerful as it had been the night before.

“It’s a…miracle,” Muir sighed, and stood before the flowers, almost as if in a trance. “They’re magical.”

He picked up his watering can and poured water on the two flowers, grinning at their glowing beauty.

The petals opened wider to receive the water. The flowers were like mouths that were opening not only to drink the water, but to thank their loving gardener. 

Tiny black seeds, ones as small as sesame seeds, flew out of the centre of both flowers and landed in the soil surrounding them.

“Does this mean I’ll get two more beautiful flowers by the end of the day?” he whispered to the flowers, imagining they could hear his words.

“Hey, Muir!” Paula called from the other side of the greenhouse. “We have customers here! Come on!”

“You handle it, honey,” he said, gazing at his flowers. “I’m busy here.”

“You bastard,” she whispered, then turned her frown upside down to meet the customers. “So, Helen, what can I do for you today?”

“What are those flowers your husband is so interested in?” Helen asked. “He looks as if he’s under a spell.”

“Something we got recently. They sure are pretty, but–I don’t know, there’s something about them…”

Muir pulled himself away from the flowers and rushed over to where Paula and Helen were.

Wow, he thought, I mustn’t let myself be around those two beauties for too long. They have some kind of hold on me. He went past the two women without saying a word.

“Good,” Paula said, assuming he was going to serve the other customer there, a man in his thirties looking at some orchids. “It’s about time you did your jo–hey, where ya goin’?”

Muir ran out of the greenhouse.

“What?” the male customer said. “I thought he was going to–”

“So did I,” Paula said. “Maybe he needs to use the bathroom. Well, I guess I have to take care of you both myself. Do you want some orchids today, Mr. Gadd?” 

“Yes, Mrs. Cantell,” he said. “But what about those flowers your husband was obsessing over?”

“Yeah, what about them?” Paula asked, then all three of them went over to those two flowers.

When they came within smelling distance, the dirty reek was overwhelming. The three tilted their heads back and said, “Whoa!” at the same time.

“They are pretty flowers, but that smell,” Helen said. “It kind of pulls you in and pushes you away at the same time.” She held her nose, but kept looking at them.

“All they do is push me away,” Mr. Gadd said, squinting and holding his nose. “They’re a dangerous beautiful. It feels like they’re pulling you in to destroy you.”

“I agree,” Paula said, frowning and looking askance at them. “I remember just one flower. Muir seems to have sneaked another flower in here.” She looked closer before wincing. “And what’s that little stem in the…”

“What are you doing?” Muir shouted as he rushed back to the flowers, pushing his wife and Mr. Gadd to the side to get back to his darlings. “Don’t touch them!”

“Muir, what’s the matter with you?” Paula asked.

“Well, they are lovely,” Helen said. “You just have to get used to the smell. I’d like to buy one.”

“They aren’t for sale,” Muir said. “They’re mine.”

“Honey,” Paula said. “You and I are going to have a talk about those flowers later.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he said, gesturing to them to go away. He looked down at the soil in anticipation. He was practically salivating.

Paula and Mr. Gadd walked away with furrows of worry on their brows. Helen followed, but was looking back at the flowers from time to time.

“Paula?” she asked. “Before I go, could I please borrow your purple hat? I’d like to take it to the haberdasher to have him help design a copy for me. Your hat is so unique, and so pretty. May I copy it, please?”

“Sure,” Paula said. “As soon as we’re done here with Mr. Gadd, I’ll take you over to the house and give it to you.”

“Thanks,” Helen said.

Muir just kept grinning and staring at his flowers, and at the soil where the seeds had fallen and sunk into.

On either side of the two flowers, he saw two little thin stalks growing.

******************

As soon as the greenhouse was empty of customers, which was a mere twenty minutes after Helen and Mr. Gadd left, Paula walked over to Muir, who was still watching the flowers. He was gazing at them in his usual, grinning daze.

“OK, Muir, what’s with you and those flow–” she began, then froze with widened eyes.

There were now four fully-grown flowers.

“Muir, where did you get that flower, the first one, I mean?”

“I didn’t,” he said, finally looking away from them. “I thought you got it.”

“I thought you got it,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” He stepped back from the flowers, and turned his smile upside-down. “Who gave them to us, or rather, what did?”

“Let’s get away from them,” she said, taking him by the arm and pulling him back. “The smell is awful. That flower–those flowers–are giving me the creeps. How could two new flowers have grown out of nowhere so quickly?”

“Three new flowers. The second grew late last night.”

“My God. I’ve never seen that kind of flower in my life.”

“Nor have I. They’re a gift from heaven.”

“Or a curse from hell. In any case, they’re something completely alien. They’re…scary. Let’s throw them away. Let’s kill them.”

“No!” he shouted, picking up a trowel and aiming it at her heart. He scowled at her like a vicious dog, baring a few teeth like fangs; the hand holding the trowel was shaking.

Her whole body was now shaking.

The whites of almost all her eyeballs, it seemed, were showing as she stared at that trowel, then at his own wild eyes. Her eyes didn’t see her husband anymore, for his eyes weren’t the eyes of her husband–she was sure of that.

“Who…are you?” she almost sobbed, then ran out of the greenhouse and back home.

He looked down at the trowel he’d just threatened his wife with. “Indeed,” he gasped. Tears were soaking his eyes. He ran out after her, wanting to scream out an apology, but too ashamed to speak.

*****************

He’d been lying in bed, shaking, for the rest of the day. He was pale. An itch made him want to go back to the flowers…to see if they were safe and healthy, but he didn’t dare, for he sensed what they were doing to him, and making him like what they were doing.

Paula had been sitting on the sofa all day, rocking back and forth, but relieved that at least he understood he’d flipped his lid, and was staying away from the flowers. By the evening, she was finally starting to calm down.

Then Helen knocked on the front door. Paula answered the door.

“Yes, Helen,” she said with a smile to hide her fear. “Are you finished with my hat?”

“No, not yet,” Helen said. “It’s about those flowers. I know your husband doesn’t want to sell any of them, but I just must have one. I’ll pay you any amount he wants.”

“Well…they’re rather dang–I mean, I have a bad feeling about…” She looked up to the second-floor bedroom and thought about Muir, who, for all she knew, was much better now. “Well, maybe we can spare one flower and see what happens.”

Paula led Helen out to the greenhouse. When they reached the far corner where the new flowers were, they saw eight of them. The smell was overpowering.

“Are you sure you want one?” Paula asked Helen. “They smell awful. Oh!”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Helen said. “If I grow only one, I should be able to tolerate the smell. They’re just so pretty and colourful.”

“OK, but you may find yourself with more than one flower, and sooner than you know. There’s something spooky about…”

“Oh, they’re just flowers. I can kill them if I don’t like them. But I must have one. I’ll give you $20 for one.” Helen held out a $20 bill for Paula, who took it.

“Well, OK,” Paula said. “Pick whichever one you like, not that there’s any variation between–”

Helen had already snatched one and run out of the greenhouse without even saying good night to Paula.

Well, Paula thought, at least we got rid of one of them. Muir won’t miss a flower he never saw grow, surely.

*****************

The next morning, Muir felt unable to stand staying away from his precious flowers anymore, so he ran out to the greenhouse to check up on them.

I saw four seeds fly out of my flowers after I last watered them, he thought as he approached them. I should see eight now. “What?” he shouted. “Only seven?”

He watered the remaining seven with feverish speed, watched seven little black seeds fly out and land in the surrounding soil, then ran back to the house. He found an axe in the basement, then looked up to the ground floor. He was gritting his teeth.

“Paula?” he called up to her. “Come down here.”

“What is it?” she said in a shaky voice as she began descending the stairs. He held the axe behind him as she continued down to the basement. “Are you feeling any better?”

“You sold one of my flowers, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said with a twitch.

“Don’t you lie to me! There should have been at least eight flowers in that corner of the greenhouse, where I reserved all that extra soil for my flowers. There are only seven there now. You sold one. It’s the only explanation.”

“Muir, if you can replace the flowers so easily with new ones, what do you care if you give up one or two? We could make a lot of money with them. Helen gave us twenty dollars for the one I sold her. She was as crazy about them as you are.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks as she presented the money in a trembling hand. “Here, I’ll give you her money. Every one of those flowers that we sell, you can have all the money made from them. I won’t take a cent of it.”

He clenched his bared teeth and brought the axe out front. He started walking towards her.

“Muir…what are you doing?” She stepped back with spastic legs. “I-I think, you’re losing your…you need to see a…doctor. The flowers are doing this to you.”

“You sold my flower,” he growled, raising the axe over his head. “Now I have to get it back from her, and that won’t be easy. It’s your fault.”

“Muir, my God! Don’t! No!”

He brought the axe down on her head, chopping it right down the middle, separating her cerebral hemispheres and spraying her blood everywhere.

****************

After showering and changing his clothes, Muir drove over to Helen’s house down the street. He had a small knife in his jacket pocket.

Her husband was at work, and their kids were all at school. She was at home alone. He rang the doorbell.

“Mr. Cantell,” she said as she approached the door. She opened the screen door and let him in. “Are you here about the flower, or Paula’s hat? I know you didn’t want to part with any of them, but I loved them so much that I just had to have one.” 

“Oh, that’s OK,” he lied. “I’d just like to see it one last time, if you don’t mind.”

She led him to the back of the house, where she had the flower.

“There it is,” he sighed, his heartbeat slowing down.

“Yes,” she said with a grin as wide as his. “It is so beautiful, and if you look…” she stepped in front and pointed at the surrounding soil with a trowel, “…a new flower is beginning to grow. See the thin, green stem?”

“Yes, I do,” he said as he pulled the knife out of his pocket. He slowly brought it over to her neck.

“These flowers are a gift that keeps on giving, aren’t they?” she said, still gawking at the flower with dazed eyes and a toothy smile as his knife reached a centimetre or two from her throat.

“Yes, but only one person can have them,” he said.

“You’re right,” she said. Me!”

She spun around and stabbed him in the gut with the trowel. He’d only managed to slice a shallow, thin red line along the back of her neck.

He fell to the floor with a thud; only the handle of the trowel was sticking out of his stomach. A pool of blood surrounded his body in a growing circle.

She grabbed a nearby tissue and pressed it against her neck to stop the blood. Then she squatted down. “I knew you’d kill your wife for selling me the flower, and that you’d want to kill me for taking it from you,” she said. “Such is the power those flowers have over us. But now that you Cantells are gone, I can take over the greenhouse, and have all the flowers to myself. Oh, don’t worry: I won’t sell any of them.”

She cleaned up the basement, wrapped his body in old, dirty blankets, then took it out to his car, checking to make sure no one was around in the neighbourhood: everyone was either at work or at school, and the only other housewife of their area, a gossipy middle-aged woman named Mrs. Granville, lived far off on the other end of the street, to the far side of the greenhouse; so Helen figured she was safe from being seen.

She had his car keys, put on Paula’s hat, then drove away to a forest out of town to bury the body there. She drove back the Cantells’ house and found Paula’s body in the basement. 

Showing no emotion at the gory sight of the body (for owning those flowers was infinitely more important to her), Helen disposed of it near Muir’s.

Now the greenhouse was hers.

*****************

When the neighbours wondered why Helen was running the Cantells’ greenhouse business, her excuse was that Muir and Paula had suddenly decided to take a vacation, since they’d been stressed lately. The neighbours were suspicious of Helen running the business in place of the Cantells, since she had no experience in gardening or selling flowers. What’s more, Helen was more interested in watching over those new flowers, which by now numbered over thirty, than selling the others, which were dying from neglect. 

When the customers realized Helen had no intention of selling any of the new flowers, which soon became the vast majority of those in the greenhouse, they all left with frowns.

Mr. Gadd stopped by a week after the murders, and found himself concerned not so much from the change from the Cantells’ to Helen’s management, but about how identical her attitude was to Muir’s.

And the smell of that greenhouse, now with only the identical-looking flowers, put him in a staggering daze once he’d entered.

As he walked back to his car, his staggering changing into normal walking after about ten seconds from exiting the greenhouse, he saw Mrs. Granville sitting on her porch, her mouth in a permanent pout and her eyes and ears out like antennae. 

“Good afternoon, Mr. Gadd,” she called out to him.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Granville,” he said, then put a small plastic bag in his glove compartment.

“Why didn’t you buy any flowers today?” she asked.

“None to buy that are of interest to me,” he said.

“What about all those pretty new flowers they have, the ones that all look like clones of each other?”

“You mean the silvery-gold-red ones? That’s all they have now. Over fifty of them, I’d say.”

“Well, why not buy one of those?”

“Nah. I don’t like them.”

“I don’t blame you. They all stink. They’re evil, too.”

“That’s the feeling I’ve always had of them. They have an evil charm.”

“C’mere, Mr. Gadd,” she said with a sly smirk and squinted eyes. “I’ll bet I know something you don’t about what’s going on over there.”

“What’s that?” he asked as he approached her porch.

“Y’know how Helen’s supposed to be watching over the greenhouse while the Cantells are in Florida?”

“Yeah, I heard. There’s no way they can afford a two-week vacation in Miami Beach.”

“Well, I remember seeing Helen buy one of those evil flowers, when none of ‘em were supposed to be for sale. She also borrowed one of Paula’s hats, her purple one, the day before she bought that flower. I saw Helen twice driving the Cantells’ car wearing that hat. She’d dragged something big and heavy into the car from the Cantells’ house. Big and heavy enough to be a body.”

“Are you sure?” Gadd asked.

“Yes. I think Helen killed the Cantells to get at those flowers. They’re supposed to return from their ‘vacation’ at the end of next week. I’ll make a million-dollar bet that Helen will still be running the greenhouse business, saying she doesn’t know what happened to the Cantells, then eventually make us believe they were murdered in Miami Beach instead of here.”

“Could be. There’s something about those flowers. Something in the smell. A smell of…covetousness.”

“I agree. That’s what I smelled, and I recoiled instantly upon smelling it. A smell honest people could never stand. You watch Helen over the next week. I sure will.”

“Yes, we should watch her.”

But Helen was watching them from the greenhouse, noting their scowling looks at her.

*****************

Two days later, Mrs. Granville went over to the greenhouse to see what was going on over there. She stood just outside, looking through the glass to see, but not smell, the goings-on inside. 

She gasped at what she saw.

Helen, pale, was swinging a knife at men and women who were trying to take her flowers; worse, the men and women had knives of their own, and stabbed not only at her, but at each other. Helen would need a larger bandage than the one along the back of her neck to cover the bloody gash along her left forearm.

A woman she’d stabbed in the back was lying dead on the floor between her and the other fighting customers, all of whom had cuts and gashes on their arms or legs. All of them ignored the pain, so focused were they on getting control of all the flowers. Some jealously held flowerpots in the arms that weren’t brandishing knives.

Mrs. Granville backed away from the window of the greenhouse when she saw Helen’s scowling eyes aiming murderously at hers. With a shaky hand, she took her cellphone out of her handbag and tried tapping a phone number, grunting in nervous annoyance whenever she tapped any wrong numbers. Finally, she finished dialling.

“Hello?” Mr. Gadd said.

“This is Mrs. Granville,” she said. “The situation with Helen and the flowers is much worse now.”

“How many are there now? In the hundreds?”

“Yes, but that’s not the worst part. She and several customers are swinging knives at each other, trying to take over the greenhouse and have all the flowers to themselves. One woman’s lying on the floor dead…Oh! I just saw a man stabbed and falling–he must be dead, too. All the others, including Helen, are cut and wounded, but still fighting as if they hadn’t a spot of blood on them.”

“They’re swinging knives at each other in broad daylight?” Gadd asked. “They aren’t worried about cops coming to stop them?”

“Of course not. The flowers have driven them all mad.”

“I’m coming over there.”

“Why? It’s dangerous. I should call the police.”

“No! Not yet. They won’t understand what needs to be done. The flowers must all be destroyed.” He sighed, then continued. “Arresting a few people won’t end this problem. As long as there are flowers, people will fight to have them. I’m on my way. Bye.”

He hung up.

Mrs. Granville watched in helpless horror as the fighting continued. She kept backing up slowly, without noticing the curb as her feet neared it.

A man swung his knife in an arc from right to left, slicing Helen across the guts and tearing them open. Shc buckled and fell to the floor, with parts of her intestines snaking out of the wound, coated in blood.

The man reached for the flowerpot she was holding and caught it before she hit the floor, but a woman stabbed him in the back and snatched the flower from him.

“Aah!” Mrs. Granville screamed not only from the violence, but also from tripping over the curb and hitting the road, hurting her right elbow.

A car raced over and was about to hit her in the face. She screamed, but the car stopped, the bumper just a few inches away from her nose. Mr. Gadd got out of the car and ran over to the greenhouse. He had a container of gasoline. 

He began running around the greenhouse, pouring gasoline all along the perimeter. Once he’d finished his tour around the greenhouse, he flicked a cigarette lighter and reached down to the ground.

“Oh, my God!” she said, moaning in pain as she fought to get back on her feet. She limped back to her house, saying, “Still, if those people are mad enough to kill each other over that devil of a flower, maybe they should all burn in the hell of their greed.”

She reached her porch. By the time she’d sat down, rubbing her elbow, she saw a rectangle of fire surrounding the greenhouse. Gadd raced back to his car and drove off.

One woman, the one who’d stabbed Helen’s killer in the back, was the sole survivor of the knife fight…though she wouldn’t survive much longer. 

The flowers by the glass were bursting into flame. As they burned, they made a chorus of squeals so shrill and ear-piercing, they made the screeching violins of horror movie soundtracks seem soothing.

More and more flowers burned and screamed. The woman joined in the screaming as the flames moved further and further inside, inching closer to her and the three flowerpots she was squeezing to her chest in a futile effort to protect them.

“No!” she screamed. “My flowers! They’re dying!”

By the time a fire truck and police cars had arrived, she and all the flowers had burned to a crisp.

Still on her porch and watching everything, Mrs. Granville called Mr. Gadd on her cellphone again.

“Are all the flowers dead?” he asked her.

“Every last one of them, thank God,” she said. “The last surviving woman in that fight perished, too. So awful.”

“Yeah. I feel bad about having caused such a loss of life, but you know as well as I do that those flowers had to be killed, to stop the cycle of human violence. Sometimes you have to make difficult sacrifices to avoid worse suffering.”

“I agree. She was a killer for those evil flowers, so I don’t feel much sympathy for her. Honest people like you and me would never allow ourselves to covet those flowers. Don’t worry, Mr. Gadd, I won’t tell the police what you did.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Granville,” he said. “Well, I have a few things to do, so if you’ll excuse me, we can discuss the rest of this later, OK?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “We both need a rest from all of this violence. Goodbye, Mr. Gadd.” They hung up.

Mr. Gadd took the little bag out of the glove compartment of his car and went over to his garden.

Now that there aren’t any more of those flowers around elsewhere, I’ll feel safe doing this, he thought. I hated having to kill all of them, but sometimes you have to make great sacrifices to avoid worse violence.

He opened the bag and sprinkled little black seeds on the soil.