The Many Deaths of Samish 4.01

Samisch plopped into a peach-colored, yogurty glob the size of a city. A warm, gooey-thick syrup dribbled over his back and puddled around him, gluing him to glob’s surface. He lay there, face down, apathetic. The possibility of smothering didn’t occur to him, as he hadn’t yet realized the possibility of breathing.

A satiny vine slipped around his waist and pulled him out of the shallow suction into which he’d sunk, setting him back down in a sitting position; like a marionette he slumped forward. A strangely-slurring voice above him intoned, “Be a good boy now and stay.” The voice was coquettishly feminine, and it giggled.

Some instinct within Samisch convinced his head to loll back and his eyes to follow. Looming above him was a monstrously-huge, fleshy hybrid of a daffodil and a pitcher plant, but swaying under its own power and drooling. The bell of the flower was a pale purple wrinkled with pulsing pink veins and split across the front by a pair dramatically cabaret, glossy red lips. Behind the bell, pulpy petal-like scales drew back into the daffodil corona, where they quivered. Seven beady black eyes gleamed at the scalloped edge of each of the five petals, and between the eyes thin, wispy tendrils waved without a breeze. The blossom watched him and swayed on a long, corded stalk that that fed into a wider, trunk-like stalk. The stalk wound back into the purpley atmospheric haze; in the distance in joined a huge, leafy bulb that rooted into the horizon of the huge peach glob. Beyond that, more peachy globs floated weightlessly in the ether; Samisch’s head rolled to the side and he saw more globs of all sizes – bigger or smaller, but all vaguely spherical – floating around him. Some seemed almost close enough to touch, if his arms had been answering.

The blossom’s lips parted, and more of the syrupy saliva dribbled, splattering over Samisch’s face. In the dark of the maw behind the lips he could make out not teeth, but rows of worming tentacles writhing in competition for whatever the lips might grab. More saliva pooled around the tentacles and dripped. It fell fell strangely, not accelerated by gravity, but drifting downward at a steady, avoidable velocity. The gooey liquid tingled where it clung to his skin. She – the flower – giggled again.

Next