“You are so caught up in your certainty that you can’t allow for anything new and beautiful to touch our lives,” Lucy yelled after her.

Moments later, the front door slammed. The old Mazda’s engine roared on, then faded as Tonya drove off.

Lucy waited another half-hour, her toes splashing in the water. She stared at the lovely colors of the vine-like formations under her skin, which seemed violet if she held them close to the light, dark green when she pulled them under the water. “I’m a fucking plant,” she said to the hands. “I’m a beautiful, fucking plant.” She wondered what kind she might turn into; maybe a dogwood, or cherry tree that would turn orange and red in the fall. This was so special. Nothing so special had ever happened to her before. Why couldn’t Tonya believe her? Why couldn’t she just listen to her, or trust her own eyes?

She got out of the tub and filled the mop bucket with water. She set it under her computer desk, dipped her feet in it, oriented the overhead lamp to shine on her shoulder, then clicked away at the keyboard, entering search terms: unusual skin conditions; plant-like skin growths. She browsed photos of a girl whose legs were covered in vast constellations of slightly raised black spots, small and dark like inkblots; a man pebbled with tumors that crowded out his eyes; another man’s blistering red scar swelled over his shoulder in the shape of a shiny red, crab-like tattoo; she studied an endless array of burnt skin, webbed skin, skin scarred with red welts and black crusts, craters of missing flesh edged in yellowed flakes; lips blackened by shiny cherry-sized tumors; bellies covered in corncob rows of pus-filled yellow bulbs; and newborns covered in armors of thick white-plate skin crusts with wide cracks in between – harlequin babies, the caption said. The misery of incurable diseases flashed before her in all its morphing ugliness.

Lucy turned on the video app on her phone and turned the camera to herself. “My partner is a biology teacher in high school. She thinks I’ve lost my mind. I need to record this so people can see. Tell me, does this look like anything you’ve ever seen? Am I not growing a tiny sapling on my shoulder, or does this look like a dermatofibroma to you? Any botanists out there?”

She panned the phone’s camera on zoom over her shoulder, where the new growth had emerged, the tender cotyledons, or seed-leaves, giving way to the first true, wrinkled leaves.

“It’s a stubborn one. My partner tried to pinch it out of me at least twice, and the doctor nearly succeeded in ripping it out, but somehow it grew back. There must have been more than one seed, or else this is the toughest plant I’ve ever seen.” She smiled to the camera, and added, “I’m guessing the plant is a she because… Life, right?”

She took other videos, too, of the veins in her feet surfacing from under the dermis, their strange, wine – color turning green when submerged. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said to the camera. She posted the videos on Snapchat and Instagram, then on Twitter and Facebook. She hesitated, at first, to post on LinkedIn, because she had business contacts there, but whether it was the sugary taste in her mouth, or the lightheadedness that her proximity to the overhead lamp was giving her, the happy feeling in her belly overcame her reticence, and she posted everywhere.