Ep 7 - Anemone

I hope you're having a wonderful week.

“I'm excited to share our 7th story of season 1.”

If you believe in supporting great stories and the authors who write them, subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. You can also support us on Patreon and get early access to all episodes and more. Our story today is a NEMONI by J.M.J. Brewer. J.M.J. Brewer is a staunch supporter of Nature Conservation.

His cats are named after lyrics in John Prime, Guy Clark and Little Feet Songs. You can find more of his work at J.M.J. Brewer.com and you can see that in the show notes. And now, let's live this story together. . Chris walked to class and the avowars were erecting beach umbrellas over their tumors, or

palps, or whatever you were supposed to call them now.

Some of the avowars did not own, or perhaps could not afford beach umbrellas.

So they covered their polyps with a range of dowel, towel, and tarp. Two of ours united their polyps under the same cover by way of a robust tree branch. Now they sat on a picnic blanket and chatted, one leaning against her polyps on gelating surface. Chris is skin-crawled.

He thought he recognized the girl.

“She had taken one of his classes last semester, last year.”

She didn't look like an avower, whatever that meant. Something about how, by tending to their polyps, they admitted what happened to them. She caught his eye. Definitely she'd taken his composition class, and he'd seen her at the wolf-hound once, when he'd been shooting pool with Kev.

He remembered telling Kev about how this must be the underage bar on campus, and so they'd staggered for pastures less likely to contain freshmen or sophomores. As Chris continued by, he imagined he could feel the weight of four avowing eyes upon him. Maybe their polyps watched too.

He'd seen a picture of a living scallop, and that thing was all eyes. He passed two more polyps before he made it into the humanities building. The ridges of the larger were translucent, and revealed the intricate tips of ropey red veins. Once in class, he bade his students retrieve their notebooks.

These are statements, he announced. He railed against the unfeeling mass. He couldn't help thinking how surprised he'd been to see that student at the wolf-hound exactly in line with the tip of his pool queue. Usually after class he drank with his cohort at the brick wall tavern.

All were in attendance, and also two women from the cohort below. I'm Chris, he told them. They'd just begun this semester. One a non-fiction writer, and the other, a poet. Kev bought four shots.

And they went back to the booths, Willah and Patty were talking about the polyps. Pollup is even grosser than tumor, said Patty. And what does Kev think asked Willah?

Kev was Patty's longtime girlfriend who never left the house.

“"I just feel like your opinion is, what's the word?”

Worthless?" "Hey," Patty said, and such was the implication that Willah blanched. She touched his shoulder. "Oh, shit, Patty. I'm sorry.

I really didn't." Patty interrupted. "No, I'm kidding." "What?" "This from the new poet," Chris had forgotten her name.

"I don't have a polyp," is what I'm saying, said Patty. But like, what if I did? You'd come across as pretty insensitive. "That isn't funny." "Yeah," said the new non-fiction writer.

"The boy who cried, polyp," said Chris. He shook his head, like, "grow up, Patty." "So, what do you guys write?" asked Patty, Benjamin swirled his gin and tonic. "I feel like polyp conveys the physical structure more precisely," straight up, said TJ. Polyp implies a not necessarily malignant growth, Chris explained, while tumor is the body

gone rogue. The polyp might be seen as the body experimenting with itself. "Well, that's not exactly right," began the new poet. As she went on, Chris couldn't help but reflect on whether the pollination came from space, as some sources alleged, or from dormant seeds, who had been waiting on requisite phenomenon.

"Absolutely," Chris said since she was looking at him, and people are gross about it, you know? They're the subreddits, yeah, bro. Like have you seen IRL, polyp, or Animany Queens?

Will polyp girls, Kev described the top post, a woman, in lingerie, kissing her own reflection

“with a proud purple polyp, looming behind her.”

"Let's get a shot," Chris said to the new poet, "later," she said, "she sucked at the two tiny straws in her drink, and Chris noted how her cheeks flattened. What does that have to do with anything Kev?" asked Willa. "I've heard people are eating them," said Patty. "Everyone's different," said the new poet, "it's their grief.

Don't be defensive," said the new nonfiction writer. "Excuse me? Is it grief? Willa wore a tight sweater-ish dress that Chris admired?" "I mean, what about rage?

Or what if they aren't rooted in emotion at all?" Alien growths, right? The tug implies emotional connection," said the new poet. "Fairpoint," said Willa. The tug asked Kev.

Willa explained. "Yeah, the tug. It's what the purps get.

This irresistible tug to go back."

“"Lots of guys claim it isn't real," Benjamin said.”

It could be psychological. Fairmoans are something, Chris mused. Not necessarily emotional. Willa gave him a look. "Get real, Chris.

Fairmoans are fucking emotional." The new nonfiction writer reappeared. Chris had not noticed her leaving. "Is there another bathroom here?" She asked. "One of the stalls has a polyp," poured a potty's out back, said TJ.

Once they were back at his apartment, Chris learned the new poet's name was Amy. And she wasn't a poet. She was the nonfiction writer. Personal essays mostly, she told him. "Liarickle, you know?"

Chris knew. He asked her to read him some of her stuff. You looked super hot tonight, he told her. She stopped reading. Really?

For sure.

“He pulled her into his lap, and she was laughing with it until she halted.”

"What's that?" His hand encountered a warm liquid, like Sunlit Honey, or a few Mikeer-waved applesauce, Amy danced to the other side of the room. "Groose," she said. Chris got down on his hands and knees and sniffed the spot.

It didn't smell like much. There was no drip from the ceiling. Still, a puddle had collected on one side of the futon. Chris shrugged. Let's go to the bed.

"I'm gonna leave," she said. The futon came with the place, said Chris, but she was already gone. Chris locked the door behind her. He didn't regret her leaving, not really, since she was probably in a vour. This would explain her stance at the bar.

He tried to stop up the mess with a paper towel. It felt wasteful, how much he was using. Once no matter how he soaked or pressed, the liquid would pool again, as if from a limitless source. By the next afternoon, Amy still hadn't returned his texts.

So once he'd finished teaching, he avoided the brick wall and gave into his impulse for a drive. He had some audio books to get through. Just across the state line, larked his undergraduate institution, a mere five-hour trip. He resolved to check out the Shabushava restaurant in town, stroll campus, and hit the

road so he could return by 3am. By the time he arrived on campus, he was no longer hungry. He drove past the places he and his buddies had lived. The dorms, an old milled tenement converted into hovels, a red house, managed by a company operating in the gray area of landlord legality.

But he parked at the apartment he'd lived in his junior year, a sort of half-basement deal. Without a thought, he walked back and tried the knob, locked. Almost around the corner was his former bedroom window. Through it, he could see a polyp hunched next to the headboard in suggestion of say, and now

sobering girl who was having trouble finding a ride, because it was post-bar-time, and because she was crying. The polyp curved in the middle like a silver undulation of a great constrictor. It terminated, or he couldn't see, under the covers. Back home, the liquid on his futon had coalesced into a meaty, sunflower sort of thing.

He sliced it at the root and fed it down his garbage disposal. Another sunflower had grown by the end of an episode of island mansion. So Chris passed to the next few days on a wooden kitchen chair. He canceled his classes, tending to the polyp. It preferred drawn shades, and seemed to enjoy a cup of water poured on its crown a few

times a day. They watched a lot of TV. At its full growth, it was tall, and sleek, and strong looking. A sort of ivory and blue pillar, undercut with vascularity and crimson. There was a naive sway to its back, as if it had only arched once or twice before.

They were watching the second film remake of a jackfinny novel when a knock came at his door.

He checked through his blinds, and behind him, across his walls, stretched the octopus shadow

of a live oak across the street. A guy stood on the stoop.

“He wore a ball cap and worked gloves, and he clutched the long sheath of a sword.”

What do you want? Chris's adrenaline was bumping. Who knocked on a door anymore? "Hey, I used to live here," said the guy. "Get lost."

"No man, I like a vow, I have vowed this place. You got tugged here?" The guy scoffed. "Pel no, fuck no," Chris didn't answer. You've got like a moral duty, it's your ethical responsibility to let me in.

"I don't know," said Chris. What's that you're holding? Next to the door he kept an unloaded shotgun in a box full of shells.

“This is a patent saber, model 1913 World War I cavalry.”

It was my great uncles. There was cavalry in World War I, Chris was interested despite himself. For a minute, until tanks, sure, Chris studied the polyp on his futon.

One second, he told the guy.

He loaded two shells into his shotgun, closed the action, and opened his door. "Whoa, bro," the guy raised his hands. The sword sheath was broad enough that Chris supposed it could hang from a horses flank. "Nah, it's fine," said Chris. He motioned with the gun for the guy to come in.

Then he shuffled around until his own back was to the door. The guy was fixated on the polyp. He was a young 30, maybe. The resemblance between him and the polyp was oblique but evident.

“Lock the door handle when you finish, said Chris.”

"Yeah," said the guy. Chris broke the action, placed the shells in his pocket, and left the shotgun. He hadn't been outside in days, the sun blew him away.

When he'd finally banished all the rosy floaters from his eyes, he watched the guy through

the window. First came the unsheathing of the blade, prolonged and dull, and not curved as he'd expected of a sabre. Then the guy began to pace back and forth, his motion confessed passions beyond rage, since sessions of such timber that Chris felt a vioiristic, he walked off toward campus.

When he spotted two untended polyps near the humanities building, he wondered if the polyps weren't like those colossal mushrooms, which ran from miles and miles underground. Even fairy circles, he was pretty sure, were actually dozens of fruitings of a single plant. One polyp had been desiccated by the elements, but the other polyp had blossomed in the sunlight. It stood ten or more feet tall, and its tentacles were fused into a huge umbrella, the

unmistakable shape of bite marks, marked its stock. And yet, the bites were already healing over, the edges smoothed, the aquamarine body fast repairing. Across the quad, a lance of flame shot skyward, a fluttering woosh came a beat later, as if at the takeoff of a huge bird and Chris departed his canopy to investigate.

It was the two girls who'd covered their polyps together. The one from his composition class stood by with a fire extinguisher. Her polyp was walled in with sand, and spent skins of sandbags lay trapped beneath the stone. Her friends stood next to her own polyp, which burned. The polyp was as tall as she was, and the flame tripled its height, an orange-centered

blue blaze, effusing a sparkling smoke, which dispersed in ribbons, and rings, and slithering jirations. The top of the polyp cracked off and fell into a pile of oak leaves. The leaves had no time to burn before foam covered the spot. His former student was a quick draw with the extinguisher.

Chris watched this ritual, and to the polyp became a sizzling stump. The remaining polyp, protected by its sandwall, appeared not lonely, but solitary, stronger alone. He left the two of them to whatever came next, but he didn't want to go home. Call it, allowing that a vow or some privacy.

Call it, whatever you want. This is a difficult story. The polyps are bizarre and uncomfortable. The characters largely fail to understand one another, and the narrator remains deeply ambiguous throughout.

and continue to challenge us long after we finished listening to them or reading them.

“I think a good place to begin considering the story is with its title, "Anemony."”

When I think of CNemones, I immediately think of their swaying, angelating tentacles, and I think of the clownfish that hides in some species of anemony. They do this because anemony tentacles can sting and even kill fish that might try and attack the clownfish. So right from the title, there is this hint of some kind of symbiosis.

The main character, Chris, does not call what he sees anemones, though. He calls them polyps, which is reminiscent of something internal, possibly cancerous. Now, instead of being graceful and attractive, we are predisposed to think of them as hideous and menacing.

“For me, that's part of what makes these polyps so bizarre and uncomfortable throughout”

the story. They're described in ways that alternate between beautiful and repulsive. Sometimes slimy, sometimes colorful, and often in terms that evoke male and female genitalia. The author tells us that anemony is an exploration of the effects of assault, and the ways it may or may not leave physical scars, but certainly leaves psychological ones.

This piece takes trauma and makes it a physical growth in relation to acts that lead to suffering and decay. In that context, the location where these polyps appear may take on a much darker symbolism. We see them appearing in beds and on futons. They are monstrous forms, perhaps related to the monstrous acts that cause them to appear

in the first place. We also see a variety of different reactions between people and their polyps. Some want to protect those polyps, others want to destroy them. The avowers in this story are especially notable. To a vow is to confess something openly and frankly, often publicly.

In this story, then, the avowers are those who travel to the location of their polyps. And whether they are the perpetrator or the victim, the story leaves them ambiguous. But from the way the polyp continued growing after Chris tried to clean up the group in his own apartment, it seems like the only ones who can do something about a polyp are those who were involved in the act that led to its creation.

The piece ends on a fittingly ambivalent note. One girl destroys her polyp like a cancer, the other girl protects hers. The main character doesn't pass judgment on either of them or their decisions. He does not decide whether the growths are tumors or something more benign.

Instead, in a perfect echo of the first paragraph of this story, he simply urges us to

call it whatever you want. So what did you think of this story? Email me at [email protected], which you can also find in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this story, please take a moment and check out our Patreon link in the

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Thank you for listening to biom with me, your host and narrator, Alex Zubin. Until next time, farewell wherever the days take you.