The small crowd was covered in deep green chunks, the color of clorophillic vomit. “It’s never gotten sick before, I swear,” said the small man in the white lab coat as he started to wipe some of the green ooze off the naval officer’s jacket.

“Get off of me you bumbling idiot. I don’t know who or how anyone allowed you to get financing for such a stupid project, but I can assure you for the embarrassment you have caused me, as well as the entire United States Navy, this program’s funding will cease!” the officer shouted as he turned, almost sliding on a giant bubble, instead, popping it like a teenager’s pimple casting a final insult into the face of Rubert who stood nearby. Wiping it off his glasses he said, “Did it even occur to you that that was important?” The scene pulls back, shifts, and comes close up on a giant fern, as nameless and faceless as God. It wiggles. “I needed you to be on your best behavior,” Rubert said as he dug into a drawer, taking out tiny bags of fertizlier. “So, that’s were all those miracle grow sticks went. You’re a bad fern. A very bad fern.” The fern wiggles and

Rupert's eyes stretch as large as his face in a blink designed to swallow the whole world. The sweat rolls down his face and pools below his chest in the obese river formed by the fission of breast and stomach. He needs a glass of water. It has only been two years, he thought. He needs a glass of water. It was only a break. Everything would pull together, he thought. He needs a glass of water. He gets out of bed and farts. He had eaten eggs for all three meals yesterday. Breakfast was an omelet, lunch was scrambled eggs, and dinner was birdie in the nest, his favorite. The room stinks like a funeral for a gangrened paper-mill. Rupert’s face lights up with pride.

“If I throw my entire weight onto the device maybe it could stop the thing?” he says aloud to the empty room holding the cup of water up to the unshaded bulb and saying a prayer to the oblong beaker. Tiny organisms engendered through filth, or should I say lack of cleaniness, begin mating rituals as soon as they realize they were about to be imbibed. A great truth revealed, they fuck despite the potential for viable offspring. “Now if only there was a way to prove the existence of love?” thought Rupert as he drank. “If I could remove the pleasure sensors from them, provide them with foreknowledge of their death as well as that of their offspring, perhaps then, if they mated...” his inner-voice fell away as he reflected on his journal.

“Why had the immaturity of the fern threatened the Naval academy so much? Surly the disrespect of a child, especially one without responsible parents can’t be held accountable for their actions,” Rupert had written knowing that sometimes when he got his nightmares down on paper it caused them to go away. “Puerile actions engender death. The death motif lifts a smile to the mouth of any God fearing man.” Rupert wasn’t afraid of God. Soon, he was back on the bed again, so tired his eyes felt like they were nailed shut.

The room was all wires and tubes, except for the small crib in the corner that was blue for a boy. Actually the fern had both male and female spores and when puberty first hit, it played with itself for hours. Now, Rupert became nervous, not just because of all the masteubatory spores that filled the room, but because of a knock at the door. “Navel intelligence, open up immediately,” said a voice. What was going on? Yesterday wasn’t so horrible. He had proven that a fern could develop a higher range of consciousness and afterall, perhaps the navy could use the technology. The armies of the world were deploying potted plants to jungles all over the world! Vietnam would have been a sure thing back in the day.

Cautiously, Rubert opened the door. Four men entered and one of them was the officer who had been there for demonstration the day before. “Gentlemen,” Rupert said, but they pushed him out of the way.

“Hold him,” said the captain as he walked straight up to the fern’s crib. It began to water itself and shake.

“What are you doing?” asked Rupert, frantically.

“This study if formally cancelled,” he said as he picked up the dripping fern by its stem and showed it the galvanic flicker. How beautiful it spun, endless flashes of light, lambent sun, a vortex to the other side. The fern shook. It wasn’t scared about what was to be done to it, it was scared that it had so fallen in love with the repetitive blade. Was the blade its mother? The captain set the fern on the ground in front of it.

Rupert screamed.

The fern walked directly into the makeshift weedwacker.

The same verdant vomit shot onto the laughing face of the captain.

Rupert broke out into another full sweat only this time the whole bed was a seaweed pool of low thread count sheets. He needed a glass of water. He drank.