I Am A Carnivorous Plant

My roots were buried deep.

Like a bird fluffing out its feathers, my foliage unfurled.

Pressed under the weight of gravity, layers of petals and leaves covered my delicate stem.

The sunlight that peeked between the thick canopy filled my trembling green fronds.

The corpse that my seed had been growing in fed me with precious nutrients, like the womb of a mother.

I was growing bigger and stronger.

Finally, I’d grown up enough to have a consciousness.

It’s only now that I realize I have become a plant.

At first my thoughts were only a few basic instincts. The rain would come, and my only impulse was ‘Do my best to catch the rain!’. The sun would wink at me from between the thick trees, and my instincts focused on photosynthesizing as best as I could. A herbivore would pass by, and I would pull in to look as small and unappetizing as I could.

Once I finally grew to a size almost half as small as a basketball, my mind also managed to grow. They weren’t the most complicated, but I could at long last have more complex strings of thought. For instance, the corpse of the (what I considered) beautiful woman that I’d been implanted in and feeding off of was looking almost completely used up. Perhaps in a few days there would be absolutely nothing but bones left. A few carrion eaters had shown up a couple of times over the past two weeks and had picked off a few bits of leftover meat that hung on the body. I had been annoyed that my important first meal was being stolen by others, but at the same time I was also scared that my uninvited guests might just turn their sights on me instead, unlikely though it was. All I could do in the end was try to look as small and inedible as I possibly could so that I wouldn’t attract any attention.

Now that my meal had been mostly eaten, I knew that I’d need to find a new source of sustenance. The soil, rain, and sunshine were all very important to my growth, of course, but there was something even more important that I would desperately need. I was born and nourished from a corpse, and if the fluid sac of digestive enzymes I’d begun to grow inside my steadily widening stem (stomach) was any indication, I was indeed a carnivorous plant. I would need to consume once-living things to sustain me, now that I’d reached this stage. How much easier would it be if I could just keep sitting on whatever corpse I found by the wayside and just live leisurely like that? But I could already feel that that would no longer be enough energy for this increasingly complicated body anymore.

My instincts were telling me that it had become time to leave and begin my journey as a wandering carnivorous plant. Relying on what my body told me, I slowly retracted my roots from the scrap of rotting meat they had dug into, and separated myself from it. It was an odd thing, standing on such small, frail seeming roots, but apparently they were stronger than they looked. Once they were freed from the meat they began to wrap and intertwine together, forming two small pointed feet for me to move around on. I practiced slowly raising one and then the other a few times and tried to get a feel for it. I was very unused to movement after not having moved all of my (well, this current) life. I tentatively leapt down onto the soil, feeling the refreshing dirt against my roots, and looked back upon the corpse that once used to be my home. It was like saying goodbye to a mother. However, that thought quickly stopped once I eyed up the broken bones that I was about to leave behind.

I could feel the digestive sack inside of me gurgling.

What a waste it would be to just leave behind the scraps of my meal! My stomach was telling me that I was about to forget a wonderful snack. Was it the bones? I could tell that they weren’t exactly what I was after from a meal, but I could also feel that they at least had a little of it. What was it that carnivorous plants ate? Was it nitrogen? There was a tiny bit of nitrogen in bones, right?

I (somehow, how can I see?!) looked over the fractured bones in front of me. There was one that seemed like a small enough chunk that I could fit it into my rather miniscule body. But… How was I meant to eat? First of all, where was the entrance to my sac, and secondly, how could I even move the bone to get it in there? I rustled my leaves and petals and looked inwards to trace along from my digestive sac. I followed it up and up, until suddenly I found that it just… stopped. It seemed that I had a small round head-like dome(?) on top of me? Or maybe it’s just a little solid stopper of stem? I could feel that it was only attached to one part and could possibly lift up like a lid. When I gave it a try, it opened up like the lid of a trash can. So this is my… mouth? What an oddly simple mouth that I had.

With the first dilemma solved, I turned to the next. I shook my leaves to test their strength. They didn’t feel like they could lift anything, and if the leaves couldn’t, then my delicate peachy-gold petals definitely had no hope. Maybe my roots? My roots were sturdy enough for me to support my weight with, so wouldn’t they work? I tried to will my roots to separate, wrap around the bone fragment and lift it up to my mouth. The first part succeeded, but it seemed that when my roots weren’t wrapped together like how they were to support me, they didn’t hold very much strength; Even the small bit of bone was too heavy for them. I gave up and instead tried to bend over and scoop up the bone with my mouth alone, but I ended up falling onto the floor since my little root feet couldn’t keep me balanced in that pose.

I felt like a turtle that had been flipped over.

No matter how much I struggled and struggled, I was stuck gently rocking in place.

Was this how I, the plant, would die?

Just a small cute ball of frilly petals and leaves, stuck on the floor, waiting to be eaten.

I must look absolutely delicious to any of the herbivores nearby.

I’m chocked full of nutritious nutrients right now since I only just left my corpse home.

Woe is the little baby plant.

As I thought melodramatically that I wish I could wipe away my (nonexistent) tears, suddenly I felt something on my body wriggle. And then another. And yet another. I could feel several somethings wriggling, starting from my sides. When I paid closer attention, I could feel ten long tendrils that had branched off the stems in the middle of my body elongating out to come brush at my (nonexistent) eyes. Ah. Yes. I see. This body of mine couldn't possibly have been so inconvenient to eat with. Thank you, plant body, for making me realize what I had been missing.

I fiddled with my little vine tendrils for a while, making sure I knew just how to control them. I took inspiration from my little root legs and formed two wrapped arms on either side of me, and used these new appendages to help me lift myself up. These new arms were actually quite strong! Thank you, my little vines, you have saved me! If my mouth was capable of kissing, I would have kissed each and every tendril one by one! Instead I just appreciatively patted them (lightly smacked, really) against each other and then looked towards my original goal.

The bone fragment sat there, completely unmoved.

It almost felt as if it were taunting me.

Well soon it would regret its taunting!

Soon it would be melting away in my digestive sac!

Go go extendo tentacle arms!

My cute little cluster of arms wrapped deftly around the small bit of bone, and quite easily brought it up to my mouth. I opened my lid and dumped the fragment inside, feeling it splash into my juices with a tiny sizzling sound. The small splash felt satisfying, and the feeling of the bone quickly liquifying felt even more so. It’s nice to know that eating as a plant could also be fun, even if I had no sense of taste.

I scanned around, looking for more bite-sized bits of bone. Perhaps it was due to the scavengers, or maybe whatever had planted me inside of this corpse, or it could even have been due to however this body had died, but the body had many differently sized broken bones. Maybe I don’t have real feelings yet. Part of me thought I should be sad because my mom(?) who helped create me had died in such a backwoods place all broken up like this. Or at the very least, even if this wasn’t where she’d died, and the bones weren’t due to what killed her, it was still pitiful that this was what her body had been reduced to. But I guess plants don’t have those kinds of feelings, or at least I don’t really. I was just happy that I was here and had been given plenty of good nutrients. Once again, thank you, my home/mom/meal.

Anyways, whatever could fit in my mouth and down my throat(?) was going to get eaten!

You can’t start on a journey without a good last meal, after all.

Gotta stock up!

Bone after bone after bone, they were all mine to eat! I even managed to eat enough bones that I started to feel a bit full. Ahhh, so many nice nutrients. I’m gonna grow up to be such a pretty plant! I can’t wait to see what kind of plant I’m going to grow up to be. I certainly seem to be something that I’ve never seen existing on earth before. Oh... Am I not on earth anymore? Or maybe I’m in some weird hidden unexplored part of the amazon or something like that? Either way, that’s so exciting! I don’t think I ever did anything this exciting before in my last life.

Ah.

My adventure as a plant.

I can’t wait to see it all.