The Awakening and Courtship of Kelly Karr Green: An Awful Hospital Love Story

By George M. Parkins

Thank Bogleech (Bogleech dot com) if you like this. He owns the characters, the setting, and he could squash me like one of his pet bugs if he wanted to. Please don't hurt me, Jonathan C. Wojcik! – George.

I

The place they'd found themselves in was a welcome change. It was decidedly inorganic at first blush, although the white stone of the walls might just have been bone. The room was rectangular, although the angles were a bit, shall we say, strange. Someone had lived here: there was basic furniture made of keratin and some kind of fiber. The smell was less offensive to the human than anywhere else in the—ahem—world they'd been to so far.

Kelly Green had had a migraine for some time. It was annoying, but barely beginning to worry her: she had about a million other things on her mind. Celia, on the other hand, was beginning to be uncharacteristically concerned. She had been intending to use this creature to get back at the tribe of bandits that had thrown her out, but they were quickly finding themselves quite close. As they began checking the area to make sure it was safe, Kelly suddenly made a painful sound and sat down on a primitive chair, with her head in her hands.

Celia was surprised how quickly her appendages were on Kelly's shoulders. There was a name for this feeling, the feeling that another person has become more important to you than yourself. If only the young mycelium knew the word for it off the top of her head…

"What's wrong?"

"Something's wonky. Like, for instance, it took you forever to say 'what's,' but not long at all to say 'wrong.' And it's weird, because I know we got here a minute ago, but...aaah!" She trailed off, moaning in pain.

"It'll be alright," Celia said, and realized with quiet resignation that that was the kind of thing she never said. Had she ever comforted another being when it was in pain? She couldn't think of any time she had, no…

It had begun: she was losing/is losing/shall then be losing her normal, human perception of time. It was all breaking apart. After making sure she was comfortable, Celia very discretely read her mind. It was in a feverish turmoil—and Celia knew it all too well. Kelly was awakening. Not easy, like a grey-zoner who was ready to graduate to the blue. This was worse. This was unkind.

Celia stopped hiding the fact that she was in Kelly's head.

"What…ahhh!" Kelly said, as the mycelium shouldered some of the mental burden of the awakening. The headache was gone, and the human did something that struck Celia funny. She looked up at the head-equivalent part of the fungus, and actually smiled, a tender, grateful smile.

As Kelly let her guard down, Celia saw a flashback to the human woman's younger years; fragmented, buried behind neural walls twenty through twenty-nine:

"How could you, Kelly? I thought you were mine. You would two-time me? With...! Really?! Get away from me!"

Another voice comes in. It's that of a woman. There's the same hurt in her voice:

"K. K.! I trusted you."

Green answers her:

"Wha—what's this about?"

"Still seeing him?! You were still seeing him? We were… We were…! And you cheated on me with that… (Scoff!)"

Celia saw it all, and she knew. Celia knew bad relationships, whether between vertebrates, conceptual beings or her own fungusapiens, and Celia? She knew enough not to let her relive it. Straining her telepathic powers to the maximum, she wrapped her own mind around the bad memories.

"Celia?! What's happening?"

There came a comforting darkness as they both blacked out.

Time passes, as it flows from all things to all things, defying the attempts of any but the Monad himself to understand it in its fullness. Time flowed over them as they lay there unconscious, for several layers. And they dreamed. They dreamed together. They dreamed such a dream, a dream of holding each other, and floating through the void, safe in the protective radius of their good feelings, safe from the nightmares of the abyss. A distant, inhuman voice was singing a beautiful song, echoing across the darkness. There came a noise only rarely heard by the denizens of the abyss: the fluttering of feathered wings.

They spoke to each other in the dream, in tongues neither of them recognized, but which they seemed, for the moment at least, to understand.

"I love you."

"I…I…"

Then they awoke. It seemed like it was ages before either of them said or thought a word.

Kelly had broken through. She was awake, and her eyes were open to all the nine lower zones. What was a bit more impressive, for a former grey-zoner, was that she understood it all by instinct. She didn't need to be told, and didn't need to sort out all the new facts. Her thoughts were on something else now, though. She was looking at Celia, and Celia was regarding her. For the first time in what seemed like forever, they were both happy.

"What is it, Kelly?"

"Nothing, just…" and she let out a sigh of utter contentment, which Celia somehow reciprocated, despite her lack of lungs.

It was several minutes before they noticed something quite peculiar. Around where they laid, a circle of mycelium sporelings had grown around around them, but rather than the teal color they should have been, they were green. If Celia hadn't been in love with Kelly already, she was now. The sweet human was to be the co-genitor of her children, after all, and what a committed parent she seemed to be already!

They embraced each other. Then they saw it, staring at them from the doorway, its mouth gaping. The one with lungs gasped.

To be continued…