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Images and stories; process and progress.

Strange Flowers: Crying Gourd

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Crying Gourd (Cucurbita sapiens)

The experimental gardens of Cartega remain, to this day, closed to all public scrutiny. However, with a certain amount of bribery and boasting of scientific credentials, the author of this manuscript was able to gain access. There, strange tendrils pulse under the flow of bile and blood and lymph, winding ever tighter around the deformed faces that blister through the surface of great fleshy gourds. Although officials may deny it, there is an unmistakable kinship between those eyes, endlessly distorted by tears, and the eyes of the men who tend to the garden.


About this Flower

This piece – a short excerpt from my surrealist botanical field guide – takes its primary source of inspiration from the idea of growing meat in a laboratory. That concept might sound like science fiction (I’m pretty sure there’s a Margret Atwood book about this) but it’s actually very much a real thing. There are a number of companies working to grow animal muscle and fat tissues in laboratories with an eye on producing an ethical alternative to factory farmed meat products. And as much as I’m sympathetic to the idea of producing meat in a more ethical and humane way, I simply can’t get past how creepy that whole concept is.

The story of the Crying Gourd grew out of my efforts to confront my own discomfort around this idea. I took the concept of growing meat and ran with it, ultimately ending up with the idea of Lovecraftian plants with cloned human heads grafted onto them.

In an earlier draft of this piece I gave a lot more backstory about the city of Cartega. My idea was that deforestation and environmental collapse had made farmed meat unattainable, so the people of Cartega, in their ceaseless hunger for flesh, demanded some alternative from their government. And the government scientists, under enormous pressure, learned to grow animal/plant hybrids as a viable meat source. But, as the narrative unfolded, the people of Cartega developed an appetite for increasingly rare and unusual meat items: the liver of a platypus, the heart of an emu, the bile ducts of a prairie vole… That kind of thing. Ultimately, this hunger for flesh and desire for novelty culminates in a mainstreaming of cannibalism which the scientists reluctantly indulge, leading to the climactic reveal of these hybrid human/plants that have been cloned from the very scientists who created them.

I was never quite satisfied with my initial long-form draft of this story and ultimately decided to edit it down to something very tight and concise. This is one of the more straight-up horror themed entries in the magazine and I wanted to follow in the footsteps of writers like Ligotti, who understood that horror is sometimes more horrifying when the key plots points are left vague and open to interpretation by the reader. So that’s how I ended up with this iteration of the story, where the meaning of the strange flower is very much open to the reader.

Strange FlowersNeal Auch