Lucy was not twelve. She hadn’t intended to go viral or to grow a platform. Yet she kept refreshing the screen, waiting for responses, for acknowledgements, for wow, and heart, and many likes, and yes, maybe a little bit of a following. Some connection. Validation. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t a skin disorder. She was a person who somehow could grow a plant on her shoulder and feel the sunlight turn to sugar in her mouth. She was a miracle of nature.

After about fifteen minutes, someone posted Cool tattoos, girl. How’d you get the color to change?

This is really happening, to me, she replied.  I did not mess with the images. I wouldn’t know how to do that.

Another ten minutes went by. One person retweeted her video, and someone on Facebook replied with an image of a man in India holding up hands that looked like tree-roots, the extremities turned thick and woody. Lucy could not tell where the man’s fingers ended, and where the fibrous, woody brown growths began, tangling and stretching out into thick clusters like the root systems of bonsais and banyans. She clicked on the image, hoping to learn more, and an article opened in a new page, calling the man a victim of a rare genetic disease, Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis. There was another name for it: Tree Man Syndrome.

The man, young, clearly not very well-off, looked at the camera with eyes full of fear and uncertainty.

No, no, no, that’s not me, she wrote on the post. I’m not a syndrome. I’m not a disease.

Inside her, there was light. She and the light had become symbiotic. Even where she now sat, cooped up inside a brick structure that shielded her from sunlight and wind, she knew that she breathed out clean air. She felt the possibility of a thousand new life-forms moving inside her, their myriad potentials urging to emerge from every pore of her skin, needing only sunlight and water to live.

She opened the windows and the doors, knowing moments before it happened that her still-human senses would drown in the vibrant murmurs of myriads of plant species exchanging information through a vast network of fungi. She was sure that she was learning to speak the language of trees, detecting lore so ancient and arcane that to attempt to translate it for human understanding would require many more creatures just like herself.

And yet, connected as she was, Lucy had never felt more alone. No one outside of myth had experienced what she was experiencing. The doctor would not acknowledge that the bump was not a hair follicle. No one on the Internet seemed even interested, and those who bothered to respond thought of her as riddled with disease. Even Tonya refused to have a conversation about it, even when she saw how the veins in her hands were turning to vines.

It was already five in the afternoon. Lucy had spent so much time on research that her eyesight was bleary from the computer screen. She had re-read every Greek myth she could remember that involved a human or god turning into a plant. There was Narcissus, falling in love with himself, and Daphne who turned into a laurel tree when Apollo pursued her, Clytie whose face turned into a flower, dryads who lived in trees, and various psychologists who expounded on these as metaphors for a regression into primitive psychic states, like an obsession with chastity, and detachment from human relationships.

In spite of the peace lily’s gentle hum of sated satisfaction, and the cactus’s om-like chant, Lucy was starting to feel diseased. The vine-like formations on her hands had spread to her arms, and her tongue still yielded sweet secretions, but the wilted third leaf on the stem on her shoulder now tempted her to eradicate the problem by pulling the whole growth loose.

Are you coming home? she texted Tonya. She saw Tonya typing something back, the ellipsis moving across the screen, but they disappeared after seconds, and no message from Tonya took their place.

I should definitely see a doctor, she typed. I think I need to get this thing removed.

No ellipses this time. Only silence.

Moments later, headlights illuminated the windows as the Mazda pulled into the driveway. Lucy crawled to a corner of the couch and wrapped herself in a blanket. The television screen was reflecting the computer monitor, where, she now saw, her video had 1,432 hearts and 355 shares. On her shoulder, the sapling had turned another wrinkled leaf, then drooped as the light both inside and outside dimmed.

These things embarrassed her, now that Tonya had the keys in the lock and was turning it open. Lucy managed to reach for the tv remote in time to turn off the screen.

Tonya walked in, silhouetted by the light from outside. Under her arm, the usual briefcase, in the other, from the smell of it, a sack of Chinese takeout.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “About everything. I’m so stupid. I don’t know what I thought. That I was chosen by the vegetable world to be their prophet, or something.” She tried a little laugh. She turned towards the potted plants and tuned out their murmurs in her head. “I must be going crazy. I didn’t take Ambien. I don’t know how I got myself out there this morning. I guess I’m sick. I guess there’s something seriously wrong with me.”