At first, we didn't know what we were looking at. Five arms, three arms, up to thousands of arms, and tiny bodies, about the size of a dime. They clearly didn't evolve slowly, and they showed it with a volatile array of forms. Some like snowflakes drifting in the water, others more worm-like, and still more that were cube-frames made of legs connected at both ends with apparently no head. But they moved, so they had to be alive.
The first beach closure happened in June 2029. There had been no direct evidence that they were dangerous, but their number and mystery provoked concerned citizenry into action. The morning that they were first spotted, crawling up the arms of a ten-year-old child who had been playing in the waves, calls came out from the terrified parents and escalated quickly in one suburban community beachside after another. It wasn't more than a week before they were found in the lakes and rivers.
Plastic! That was the headline on June 25, 2029—one day later. Of course, those were only the most speculative journals, newspapers thirsty for a full cover story that would enliven readers enough to buy a subscription online instead of just waiting a day for the kicked-down story through social media. Science was deployed in the name of public safety. The usual pundits wasted no time in interpreting the event based on incomplete information, tying it to religious myths, or partisan talking points.
The creatures did not immediately reveal themselves to us in full. It's true that they were not immediately dangerous. It appeared that some animating force had evolved in plastic, the most inorganic substance on the planet was suddenly alive and growing on its own. Rapidly. They had no teeth, no digestive systems. They were not poisonous, yet. However, they were aggressive, in the sense that they multiplied quickly and moved around frequentlystate of non-existence, they had crossed a threshold and appeared. Two weeks later, they were in every bottle of water on the shelf, and they were coming out of taps. More and more clever attempts to find and trap the tiniest particles were devised, but a month later, we were all passing them in our urine.
Now, outbreak populations of corpse flies traverse the land in swarms the size of cities. Jim looks at his wrist, the sensation of something moving inside him. A tiny green starfish wiggles under his skin. He wonders if it's looking at him. There was nowhere anyone could go. The scientists had dubbed it the Poly Bloom, just before most of them died, along with the everyone else whose body had been rejected being colonized by the creatures. Jim was one of the lucky 1%, or so he tries sometimes desperately to remind himself on the loneliest of nights. When the buzzing of the flies follows the setting sun West, he is left in darkness and deadly silence.
Many animals had suffered, not just man. The ones that were left, they looked at you with a kind of knowing. You did this. Dogs, as always, came out on top. This made them dangerous, but Jim managed to figure out how to avoid them for the most part. He'd sit indoors in one of the multitudes of empty buildings and shut the doors at night, listen to the new voices inside his skull, feel the pulse of a new and misunderstood life inside his flesh. He didn't know what they were doing in there, but ididn't matter, the language was foreign to Jim. It drove him batshit crazy, nonetheless. Poor Jim.
Just a year ago, he was surrounded by family, taking long vacations at domestic and international locations. They even managed to...It hurt too much to remember. Sometimes they were able to leave the kids with an au pair. Those trips were fun, full of surprises and secret meetings. rainbow splashes of wiggly plastic snowflakes, Evelyn had been seated next to him at the dinner table with the kids. They didn't sit end to end of the table like their parents had. They didn't need that head of the table bullshit that grandma and grandpa freaked out over. They had a round table. Evelyn turned to Jim, a worried smile crept across her mouth while a loop of pink plastic, like an O-ring, swam through her lens and into the aqueous humor of her pupil. Her eyes teared-up, went bloodshot. Then, she was face down in her mashed Yuca with tinker toys coming out of her ears.
Of course, the kids were both crying horrifically. No one should have had to see that. They didn't even let Sarah and Jonnie, 12 and 13, watch R-rated movies. Anything they might have snuck away to watch at a friend's house couldn't have prepared them to see this happen to their mother. It was all at a pace that moved faster, much faster than Western medicine.
Jim repositions his legs and they shuffle in the dust on the floor of the house he's camped out in for the night. When you haven't seen another person for a month and a half, and the last one you met was in the shape Harold had been in, you keep moving and hope that somewhere out there is a compassionate soul who can witness your death with dignity. Harold had been alive, but barely, and he died two days after Jim found him and tried caring for him. You wouldn't think human skin could stretch so much in such a short time. Harold looked like a fleshy gumball machine.
The kids were the saddest part. Not only were they beyond damaged by watching their mother keel over in her supper and sprout plastic bits out her ears, but they also lived long enough for the horror to set in that they were going to end up the same way. Jonnie, he laid down in his bed with the lights on and refused to open his eyes. He just laid there and listened to the sound of the world devolving around him. The neighbors shouting insanity. Cars crashing in the street out front. The howling of dogs in pain. Jim had been feeding him as much as he would eat, and one day he found him spiked to the bed by these stalactites that had grown from his spine, arched up, mouth open with what looked like a little flower growing between his teeth. Jim backed out of the room and collapsed against the door in tears. When he recovered enough, he nailed the door shut.
Sarah ran away. Rather, she walked out in a fugue state one afternoon before Jonnie bit it. Jim asked her if she was going to the neighbor girl Emily's house and she said, "yeah," with the faintest assurance. He had not been able to find her since, and he dreaded recognizing her corpse among the myriads scattered in open graves along the roadsides. He had no idea why he was still alive, but one of the last news broadcasts he had heard from the national station, before it went dark and everyone there was assumed dead, was that the projected death toll was 99% of all humans on the planet. That meant he wasn't alone. He didn't know what he was becoming or who had already become what he would run into, but he felt a human duty to find a way to survive if he could.
It no longer mattered what water he drank. He just filtered the poly-bloom through his teeth and spit out the big ones. The night closed in on a world which no longer had working electric power plants. Jim was left in silence with thoughts he could not translate, echoing through his squirming mind.
Bill the Cat.
Jim found a swollen clear plastic bottle of water. He opened it with his mouth. The splash of water from the pressure of the growing bloom gushed into his mouth. What was he going to do when these bottles all burst? He would need to find a reservoir and map his travels between bodies of potable water. But drinking water from natural sources would come with its own set of difficulties. He'd have to boil it, but he had no idea what the bloom would do to him if he boiled it. It still looked like a few weeks before the bottles left behind by billions of consumers would pop.
After he strained the water through his teeth, he threw the bottle on the ground. A plethora of multiform colors wriggles about inside the bottle. Jim grabbed his backpack and walking stick. He went outside.
The suburb was drawn like a picture of a town on a tourist map, but overgrown and looking like a hailstorm of living gummy candies had coated everything. They cleared the path in front of him, intelligent enough to not be stepped on. He wondered whose intelligence they were using. It didn't matter why anymore. He could only try and make sense of what had happened, but that was a threshold he hadn't quite reached. Alternately silent and screaming in torment, he lived in a crisis mode of survival day by day, never knowing if he was also a ticking bomb about to blossom into a half-human gibbet from the inside out.
Visions plagued Jim. He often thought he saw one of his children. Whether in a squirming shadow or a sun spark glinting through a pile of marooned jellyfish, these mirages followed him everywhere. There was a breakdown of the boundary between sleeping and waking. How could you sleep when one of these things has found your anus and is doing loop-de-loops in it all night?
So, he just kept going. Food was running low. The bloom was inside all the canned foods, which were swelling. Botulism, Jim thought, and instead searched for bags of flour and sugar, made crude doughs, and fried them over open fires during the day when he could see the dogs coming. He was malnourished but supplemented this diet with whatever he could find. Sometimes he ate grass.
A black triangle wiggled across his forehead. He winced as it passed his temple. He looked up and saw movement in the corner of a side-entrance to an atomic ranch. It looked human. Jim started toward the apparition, and it backed into the house quickly. He kept after it anyway, either it was real or not, and if something was going to kill him it could only end his nightmare. The chance that there was someone else alive here meant more to him than that.
At the doorway he stopped and squinted his eyes into the shaded room beyond. Then he crossed the threshold saying, "Are you there? My name is Jim." Which made about as little sense as anything these days. Why would anyone care that his name was Jim?
He looked around for about thirty minutes. He found some baking supplies and a bag of raisins. No person showed themselves. Jim set to work grilling raisin biscuits. While he was cooking, he felt like he was being watched and turned around to find a young person watching him.
"Hello,” said Jim. A gold sphere obscuring the view in his right eye.
"Who are you?" asked the child. They didn't appear to have any symptoms, which was incredible.
"My name is Jim. I'm looking for my daughter."
"Jim," repeated the child, looking like they were nearly fond of the name.
"What's your name? Do you want a biscuit?"
"Polly,” said the child.
Jim took two biscuits from the pan. He offered one to Polly, who took hold of it like a rock. They watched Jim put the biscuit to his mouth and blow the steam away. They copied him. When Jim took a bite, they did the same. There was something about the way their mouth moved that caught Jim's attention. The jawline was very flexible, as though they weren't chewing so much as contracting. Bits of biscuit and raisin fell out of Polly's mouth while they chewed. Jim felt uneasy but continued to fry up two more biscuits.
"You don't have the infection?"
"Infection?"
Jim pointed to the blue star in his wrist, the black triangle in his temple and the golden orb in his right eye and said, "These."
"No. I don't." Perhaps other things were possible, but they were not going to explain.
"Well, that's amazing." Jim was getting more nervous. He scratched at his arm where a red fruit-loop was oscillating.
Polly looked uncomfortable and asked, "What did we just eat?"
"That was a raisin biscuit. What have you been eating to stay alive?"
"There are plenty of things to eat," Polly said. When Jim offered them another biscuit, they declined. "Too plain," they said. Then, while Jim was still watching, they grabbed a handful of bloom from the tall grass and popped them into their mouth, one by one. Jim stared. "These are good. Why don't you eat these?"
He didn't know what to say. "I... I've never seen anyone eat them before."
Polly shrugged and went back into their atomic ranch. Jim looked at the bloom. Stinking plastic jellyfish lolled about on top of everything. Could you eat these things? Was that why the child had no symptoms? He chewed a dry and greasy biscuit. Felt a raisin smeared across his tongue. It tasted metallic.
The sun was low. The dogs began to howl.
A week later, Jim and Polly were eating bits of bloom in the yard together. A timid dog approached them, hungry, curious. They showed the dog what they were eating. Dog sniffed at the bloom. She didn't want it but took it gingerly between her canines as dogs do when they are trying to be polite. She licked it slowly between her paws. The bloom looked like it enjoyed the massage. It then ran away when she started to gnaw on it. The dog looked up at the man and the child with a confused look. They both laughed. It felt good to laugh.
Jim's infection had started to remit. Polly had been right about the nutritional value of the jellyfish. He could feel his bones soften while they co-digested each other, he, and the bloom. Polly spoke more freely with him now, and they often laughed. They no longer had to hide what they were from him, because he was becoming like them.
David John Baer McNicholas has been on travel in New Mexico for three years. He is the author of the novel Lemons: In an Orchard. He operates the nascent imprint ghostofamerica ltd co (Anarchy, Abolition, Art) and studies for his BFA in Creative Writing and AA in Native Studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Currently, he is working on an array of projects. His work can be found on poets.org, Bending Genres, Panorama Travel Journal, All Existing Lit Mag, and ghostofamerica.net.
