The Mimic in my Plant Pot

I had a set of plant pots in progress. When it came time to fire them, I was practically waiting by the kiln. I kept checking the timer, though that only made it feel longer, until I eventually managed to convince myself to cycle to the beach again. I sketched a crab, but my heart wasn’t in it. My mind was on demons. When did the possession or haunting happen? Was it partway through the firing process or when I took them out? I hadn’t noticed any sign of Kazzifrezz for hours after the ashtray was out and cooled and moved about the house. Likewise, the storm vase was neatly on a shelf for hours before it smashed all my hard work with wind. But the blood mug started making blood while still in the kiln. There was a lot to ponder and not enough data to come to any conclusions. If nothing else, at least my rambling, incoherent theories on the matter would fill part of the next podcast episode. I took out a notebook and flipped to the first blank page. The only writing implement I could find was a chewed-up, blunt pencil, so the notes matched the rest of the pages in that booklet.

Some time later when the plant pots were finally fired, cooled, and arranged on the worktop, there was no sign of anything unusual. I kept coming through to check on them, almost sneaking up as if to catch them unaware. For the first time I was disappointed rather than relieved that things seemed to have come out normally. The next day, I gave up waiting and filled some of the pots with soil and put them outside. I didn’t have any seeds to plant at the time, so it was rather pointless, but it filled some time I might have otherwise spent moping around the house.

The next morning, I stepped into the garden to find a large plant, standing tall over one of the pots. It was a green, leafy tangle of vines - not the prettiest plant - there was too much going on. It was too thick and gnarled in its stem. I crouched down to look at it closer, and jumped back startled as it twisted round in my direction. Bulbous tubers shifted, grew, and shrank, changing shape until they formed into a little green effigy of me. I blinked. It blinked back. There was a tiny plant-Charlotte sitting there in the pot, meeting my gaze.

“I’m Charlotte Ransome,” it said using a voice exactly like mine.

“No, I’m Charlotte Ransome,” I replied, trying my best to sound authoritative.

“Welcome to the Charlotte Ransome Pottery Hour,” it said.

“How do you know about that?”

“I’m your host, Charlotte Ransome.”

“Stop it!” I said. “I’m Charlotte Ransome. You’re a plant. You live in a pot I made.”

It looked down. “Oh. Scott from the post office won’t think I’m hot like this. Even if I wear that low-cut top.”

“Hey! You shouldn’t know my private thoughts, stop it!”

I blushed, even though it was just a plant demon. This wasn’t what I wanted, but at least it was going to make an interesting podcast episode.

“Do you think you could survive as a houseplant?”

Plant-Charlotte told me she could survive anywhere as long as there was enough to drink and a bit of light, so I took her inside and placed the pot near the kitchen window. She shuffled about, and seemed to settle in happily. A tiny mimic that knew my secrets was highly unsettling, but at least she wasn’t yelling at me, proclaiming her wish to devour my soul, or leaving blood stains everywhere.

I tried placing Kazzifrezz’s ashtray next to Plant-Charlotte. If it could know my innermost thoughts, it could probably also have my dreams, right? It almost seemed cruel to bring a plant into my home only to immediately unleash a nightmare spirit upon it, but the dream-eating seemed relatively harmless when it happened to me. It seemed a logical compromise to let Kazz eat plant-dreams on the nights he wasn’t on my bedside table. He was grumpy about it of course, but agreed that it was better than nothing. I enjoyed a quiet dream-filled night. I wrote everything down in my dream journal, then went through to say good morning to Kazz and Plant-Charlotte.

“I’ve heard of plant-based diets, but this is ridiculous!” said Kazzifrezz. He paused expectantly. I gave a polite chuckle, which seemed to satisfy him.

“Did she dream?” I asked.

“Yes but it tasted all leafy and artificial. Human dreams are better than mimic dreams. Take me back to your room.”

“I might alternate where you stay each night. Tonight I dreamed I was out cycling, but there was this big-”

“I know! I just ate the leafy version of it.”

That was good to know. I mean, it was good that I knew a little more about how the mimic worked - it wasn’t good that it was having the same dreams in synchronisation with me. No, that was very creepy. But I couldn’t do much about it. I wasn’t going to get rid of her. She didn’t choose to be a creepy mimic, did she? Or maybe she did, but that’s not the point. Demon or not, I might well have brought them into this world so I had some duty of care. I know how silly it must sound, but that’s how I felt. They may be evil demons and spirits, but they were my evil demons and spirits who entered this world via my pottery. Besides, Kazz turned out to be somewhat endearing, maybe Plant-Charlotte would too. She needed a better name though. Charpotte? No, something simpler. Planty? Mimic? Mimsy. That would do.

Later that day as I passed by Mimsy, she said, “Charlotte, do you want to guest on my podcast?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I replied.

“I know.”

“Welcome to the Charlotte Ransome Pottery Hour. I’m your host, Charlotte Ransome,” said Mimsy after I placed her pot by the microphone and started recording.

“Actually,” I said. “I’m Charlotte Ransome. That was my new creation speaking. She’s a plant that looks and talks like me. She even knows my thoughts and shares my dreams.”

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“On tonight’s episode,” Mimsy continued, seemingly ignoring me, “I’ll be talking to a fleshy monstrosity that claims to be me.”

“And I’ll be talking to a planty monstrosity that claims to be me. Since I’m a regular human being, you can tell it’s me by my regular human skin, while Mimsy here has leaf-matter. Though, of course, you can’t see that, as this is an audio-only medium.”

“So you’ll just have to take my word for it,” said Mimsy.

“We could do a video episode.”

“Yes! Then everyone would know you’re a skin-and-bone cheap imitation of my roots and leaves!”

“You know we’re broadcasting this to people who have known skin-and-bones-Charlotte for my whole life, right?”

“Their plants are listening too!”

The argument went nowhere for a while, so I tried to bring it back round to the original interview idea. Unfortunately, Mimsy had the same idea and spoke first.

“So,” she began. “What’s it like to have thoughts and dreams that aren’t your own?”

“Some philosophers would say that no one’s thoughts are truly their own.”

“Well I studied Zoology so I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, I didn’t know they made graduation gowns in your size.”

“The hat’s the important part.”

“And the diploma,” I added. “Who was your favourite lecturer?”

“Dr. Harper.”

“Not Flora Bunting?”

“Oh just because I’m made of leaves I have to like the person with “flora” in their name?”

“It was a just a joke, sorry”

“No I was overreacting, it was funny, I thought of it too.”

“She was my favourite until she unfairly marked me down on that one essay,” we both said in perfect unison. I know she was literally mimicking my exact thoughts and identity, but it was still nice to have someone agree with me. Everyone at university thought Dr. Bunting couldn’t put a foot wrong. Well they hadn’t seen my essay!

“What’s your favourite thing to make? Pottery-wise, I mean.” I asked her. Perhaps a little mean, making her talk about a hobby she obviously couldn’t do with her tiny fragile plant arms.

“Homes.” she said, simply.

I paused, then understood. Plant pots. “Do you like your home?”

“It’s not my finest work, but it’s nice enough. I reckon it could fetch a decent sale. You know, if I didn’t live in it.”

“Yeah, bad time to get on the property ladder anyway.”

“Don’t talk to me about ladders! You know what happened last time I left a pot balanced on a ladder. Poor cactus.”

“Nice pot too!”

“The poor plant got chucked on the compost heap and you’re concerned about the pot?”

“Well it wasn’t a sentient plant like you, it’s different.”

“What if you fell off a ladder and someone chucked you on a compost heap?”

This went on for several minutes, I’ll spare the details as it was a very repetitive argument. Mimsy was even more argumentative than Kazz sometimes. What did that say about me?

Eventually I managed to steer the conversation back to something more interesting.

“So, plant-Charlotte, do you know much about mugs of infinite blood?”

“I made one a few weeks ago.”

“Yes, me too. I was wondering where all the blood was coming from?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you’re me you don’t know, but I think the true you knows.”

“True You?” said Mimsy, disdainfully. “Is this another one of your philosophy things? I told you I studied zoology!”

“No, I meant it literally and you know it.”

“Now that I think of it, there was a river of blood in hell. But I don’t know why I know that. You should be the one who knows that, you monstrositous fleshy impostor!”

“Is monstrositous a word? Isn’t it just monstrous?”

“It is just monstrous isn’t it, to be forced to think about Hell and Blood when all I want to do is pottery?”

As we devolved into further argument, of which I will again spare you the full transcript, a thought came to me - if it could know my thoughts, maybe I could know its thoughts. I tried to remember this river of blood that Mimsy was talking about. I saw it. Maybe it was my imagination running wild? But no, it didn’t feel like imagination. It felt like a memory. I could taste the blood seeping into my roots, making me grow in the fresh meadows of hell. I shuddered violently, and nearly threw up at knowing the feeling of the nourishment of eternal blood. The shock dragged me out of the memory instantly, but morbid curiosity played on my mind.

Dare I go back to that horrible place and visualise it again? Yes. Stupidly, yes, like one of those experiments where they lock a guy in a room with nothing but an electric buzzer and without fail he eventually shocks himself to see what happens, and then does it again a few minutes later. I tapped into the memory again and in my mind, I was there, growing from the blood-soaked dirt of the floodplains - strange to think that a river of blood was so similar in geography to a real river. Was everything there the same but with blood instead of water? I thought I should know that too, but I was just a plant. Plants don’t know why it rains, they just bask in it. I felt so small. Did plants feel this way all the time? I made a mental note to move my house plants around more so they could enjoy the change in scenery - that uniquely human thought blurred my perception for a moment and nearly derailed my train of thought. I drew the blood in with my roots, refocusing myself on the scene around me. I drank the blood up from the soil as if I could draw information from it. Nothing seemed unusual about it. What did I expect? Some subtle quirk of the blood I absorbed to reveal that yes, indeed, there is in fact a dimensional rift in the river that connects to one specific mug in the mortal realm?

“Flesh-Charlotte?” Mimsy’s voice interrupted my train of thought. “You’ve just been sitting staring at nothing for several minutes. The microphone’s still on. Are you okay?”

“Sorry, yes, fine. Where were we?”

“Right here.”

“In the conversation, I meant.”

“I know. We were talking about the river of blood.”

“Yes, that’s right. Do you miss the feeling of blood in your roots?”

“Of course. That awful ‘water’ you keep giving me just doesn’t taste the same.”

I hated that I knew exactly what she meant.

“I’ve just had an idea,” I told her, but she already knew that.

“Me too. Bury the blood mug under my soil so I have a constant source. You won’t even need to water me. Do you know how degrading it is to depend on a giant fleshy mimicry of yourself for survival?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I said, honestly. I was becoming more and more attuned with her thoughts and feelings as we spoke. It really did feel like we were both mimics of each other.

She wouldn’t talk about anything else until I paused the recording to carry out the plan. I buried the blood mug in the soil, then re-planted Mimsy. She was surprisingly patient while I prepared the pot. But then again, it wasn’t that surprising, since she was me and I knew her thoughts and feelings. We finished recording the podcast after I was done, but not much interesting was said. It was mostly her being uncomfortably over-enthusiastic about the taste of blood in her roots.

This felt like an ideal answer to the blood mug question - but really it was nothing more than an “out of sight, out of mind”-type solution. It felt slightly less ideal when I found out later in the day that if I walked too close to her pot I could vividly feel the sensation of sucking up blood in my roots. I wondered also how much she might grow with such a reliable blood source - I certainly didn’t want a life-size copy of myself around. I walked by her pot and focused on her mind - I sensed that, if she knew her own biology, she would stay roughly the same size. That was a relief. I suppose it made sense in the same way that I wouldn’t triple in height if I had a fridge of endless hummus, though some clothes may cease to fit.

“Stop thinking about hummus!” cried Mimsy. “The taste of it is uncomfortably vivid.”

“One man’s blood is another man’s hummus,” I said.

“Neither of us are men.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“Oh. Sorry, I studied zoology, not literature.”

“I know.”