She'd had it. She would have to take the plant indoors.
Lilith wiped an earth-darkened hand across her forehead and glared down at her enemy. It had not flourished in sun; it had not flourished in shade. Neither soil nor water could coax it awake. She'd thumbed through a tower of botanical manuals to no avail. She could not even identify its species. She took its obstinacy as a personal insult.
It's a strange looking thing,
the nursery clerk had said,
never have been able to sell it.
Strange indeed. She supposed, looking at its long tendrils, that it was some kind of succulent. But she'd
grown
succulents (and fruit-bearing trees, and award-winning flowers). And she'd never before faced a horticultural challenge she couldn't tackle.
She threw down her spade and marched inside.
That night, Lilith repotted the plant and dropped it unceremoniously into one corner of her room. It looked almost alien in the dark, with its long, thick vines coiling up toward the ceiling. Like frizzing hair. Like
her
hair. It mocked her. Eventually she could take no more--she shoved the plant into her closet and threw herself into bed.
She'd lay awake only a few minutes when she heard it first: a lewd squelch from behind the closed door. It sounded like...but no, it couldn't be. She blushed at the thought. It was absurd. No, it was
obscene.
She turned over and folded a pillow around her head.
But still, she could hear it.
She sat up. A problem with the pipes? A trapped animal? What on earth could make a noise like that? She wasn't sure she wanted to know. Hesitantly, Lilith approached the closet and pressed her ear to the door.
Oh, but it was vulgar! Wet, squishing
pops
like a plunger ripped from a toilet. The longer she listened, the stranger it became. And stranger still for the gathering dew between her legs. Infuriated by her bizarre excitement, she threw open the door.
The moonlight illuminated the strangest creature Lilith had ever seen. Not an animal, certainly, but neither was it a plant. A pod had swelled in the midst of the tendrils. In its center, a gaping, meat-red maw, slick and soft, pulsing like a muscle. It seemed to gulp the air around it, each contraction producing the hateful sound that tickled her so. The tendrils waved weirdly in the dark. Every second or so one of them would snap, whip-like. Restless. They had taken on the same texture as the cavity. Is this what the plant looked like on the inside? It seemed so. The many vines now dripped with clear syrup, heavy strands accordioning on the floor in the empty space around her shoes. Lilith watched them undulate, watched the cavity's slow, erotic pulse. And it
was
erotic. There was no sense denying it. Surely, anyone would think so?
This is what she told herself as she stood staring, electrically aware of her own answering pulses, of her panties' growing damp.
And then the thought occurred. The inevitable, yet unacceptable, thought. The thought born of months of celibacy. The most perverse of possibilities. The thought that perhaps, perhaps she might try--?
No.
