Title: Sown a Natural Body
Fandom: These Lifeless Things (novella) - Premee Mohamed
Rating: PG
Length: 500w
Content notes: oblique references to cosmic horror & body horror; depiction of professional instability
Author notes: This book owns me. Please check it out!
Summary: What happens after Emerson returns to campus.

The seed of a plant,—to what affecting analogies in the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed,—"It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

When Emerson gets home, nothing has changed. She should not be surprised by this fact, yet she is. She is different, but the familiar world remains constant.

She drops her luggage just inside her flat before falling facedown on her narrow bed and sleeping for fifteen hours. She has no nightmares. Those, too, like the book, she has left behind. Like her doubt, maybe, like her paranoia. She hopes.

Several days later, she unpacks. Dust rains from her clothes; grit clings to the treads of her hiking boots. Abruptly, she remembers her intention to plant some of Victor's seeds for her window sill. She's never had much luck with kitchen herbs, but surely this will be easier. These are hardy natural seeds, long-used to difficult conditions.

She packs soil into several university-branded shot glasses before adding a few seeds to each one. They're tough little things, sharp between her fingertips as if barbed, though Victor continues to deny that they're in any way different from seeds here.

*

Her complaint to the ethics committee about Darian becomes a shitshow to outsplatter all shitshows, involving in-camera consultations, external auditors and arbitrators, even the invocation of norms of academic freedom with reference to snooping in colleagues' research files.

That is, Darian's legal team accuses her of restricting his freedom: You claim you're in favor of academic, humanistic curiosity, is that not correct, Ms. Emerson?

She laughs, she cries, she's put on probation and loses her bursary, then her grad housing; it's only a matter of time before she's sent down from the institution entirely.

The weekend before she leaves, while she's packing, a shot glass falls off the sill, followed by another, then a third. They shatter on the tile floor, scatter soil that looks more like sand than the dirt she remembers, and then they writhe. Roots that look pixellated, glitched into tiny planes at the knobs and crotches, reach out of the sand inquisitively. They pause, tremble, then turn in her direction.

The slender root tips are capped by eyes, minuscule as grains of sand yet clearly, unmistakably, compound. Thousands of lenses crammed into the points, and they're trained on her, and Emerson no longer breathes.

An answering squirm quivers under her skin and at the back of her mind. As she meets the impossible gaze, she finally (both at last and for the last time) understands the pull. A long, firm, implacable tug pulls her skull apart at the seams, opening her mind, and makes itself at home.

She no longer knows herself. She is sown.