The Happening | Jacob Austin
Awakened in the night, I could not shake the feeling that the two houseplants beside the bed were watching me with evil intent. This suspicion left me unable to fall back asleep, nor hardly to move. The dim moonglow behind our cheap blinds illuminated the pair’s silhouette, and they did seem united in their hatred, as a pair, though quite differentiated in every other way.
One is a pothos, hanging between the two windows, in a pot suspended from the ceiling with an intricate ropework we purchased from a local artisan. The second is a corn palm, larger and lifted from the floor atop a three-legged stool stuck in the corner of the room: a gangly thing whose first growth had long ago been lopped off, and who now exists entirely as a side spurt off the main trunk.
The palm fronds stand about level with the hanging pot’s central mass, so they seem to meet and there discuss in secret vegetable whispers what they would do to me if only they could. I could hear the straining of twine as the hanging plant spun gently upon its hook. The other side of the window, geckos were chirping.
Unable to move, their hatred seethes, pooling in the air, tainting the entire side of the room, a hatred more vital than that of restless ghosts for it is still alive, and rooted to the very earth, so that everything around me is transformed by it, taking on their cadence, and leaving me the alien in my own bed.
In the morning, I awake feeling groggy and unwell. It had been a cold night and the hardwood floor has retained the worst of it. The wool socks and sweater I thought I had left by the bedside are nowhere to be seen, so I must cross the barren floor to my dresser, shivery and miserable. Over breakfast, I try to make light of my ill-humored dream, telling my wife I awoke to this mischievous pair, who stood silhouetted like Team Rocket’s Koffing and Ekans, one hanging in the air, the other tall and slender upon the earth, but the words get caught up and I choke up some phlegm, yellow and thick, into my cup of coffee, where it floats upon the surface like seafoam, and for a moment I think I see specks of red, but then it breaks up and disappears.
My wife looks at me with disgust, and I try to apologize, explain that I do not know why I did that, but I am suddenly fatigued, and it is all I can do to return to bed.
“Are you feeling okay?” she asks, coming in sometime later, sitting on the mattress edge, and laying the back of her hand across my forehead, just as my mother once did.
“No,” I groan from beneath the covers.
“You do feel a little warm. You should definitely call in sick,” she says.
I nod in agreement, hoping she will climb in bed beside me and offer me comfort, but instead she stands, and the mattress shifts with the depletion of her weight. “I’m sorry,” she says, having already crossed the room, staring at her phone, “but I’ve got to go. I have that meeting this morning. Text me if you start to feel worse, or want me to bring you anything after work. I love you.”
The sudden fever piledrives me into a chasm of sleep so deep that when I awake it is impossible to tell how much time has passed, though it feels like only a moment, and my mouth is caught still murmuring “don’t go” to my wife who is no longer in the doorway, and in fact has had enough time to complete her commute and is sitting far away in a morning meeting, being someone I hardly recognize.
Slowly, I roll to face the plants who are watching me with the same silent malevolence as before. I can feel it buzzing in the air, the spiteful hatred man reserves only for God, directed at me, but unlike God I cannot bear it in silence.
“Why?” I croak. “Because I sometimes forget to water you?”
Though they would not have responded even if that were the truth, I know it is not as simple as that.
Jacob Austin moves boxes in a supermarket distribution center in Texas. His writing has appeared in Every Day Fiction, Flora Fiction, Monday Night Lit, and elsewhere. It is also collected at jacobottoaustin.com