All-Natural

Metal sparked against metal and burned butane. The man held it to chemically impregnated paper and breathed in cancerous smoke, fortified with half a thousand toxins. Cigarettes were his vice. He knew they were unclean, and yet they delivered the synthetic high he craved, had grown to need.

He walked along a stained sidewalk, past a limestone building scarred with chemical rains. It was a dirty industrial neighborhood. Old factories still stood near the river, leaving pools of transparently acidic blue water in which nothing could thrive. A rattling oil-burner roared past with a broken muffler. His walk slowed, the man savoring the ounce of relief his nicotine brought him, blowing smoke through mouth and nostrils.

The additives caught up with him and he coughed, wetly and without covering his mouth. Nobody else was on the street to notice or glare at him. He rubbed a hand across his whiskered mouth, wiping off the phlegm old age brought, and wandered to a corner store.

In the limestone building, a junkie of equal age and greater need slapped his thigh with the back of his hand, feeling the tired flesh prickle in response. A simple guess and a wincing push had the needle in, heroin squirting inside in a sharp burning bloom of relief, skin shot.

The old man paid for another carton of cigarettes and walked out past a handcart loaded with more, cellophane crinkling against itself. Another coughing fit, this time as the wind shifted and burnt-rubber smoke drifted across the river and into the neighborhood. His chest and throat ached, soon, and he dragged on another cigarette to draw relief. A sprouted bit of greenery in the gutter bent and died under his leather shoe.

He paused, looking down at the first unbound plant he’d seen in some time. The man was not an environmentalist, but he appreciated the sight of something natural and green, something untouched by man. It displeased him to see it so trampled. The natural world should have more interface with man and his works, he thought.

Tobacco and opium are, at heart, plants. Plants are living creatures like any other; they can be diseased, poisoned, or reared strangely. They can have parasites, some alien to man, to known life.

Those parasites can have spores.

In that tarnished stone building, the junkie’s hidden veins clogged mottled purple and green, and so on to the tear ducts. The old man stumbled in his tracks, coughed, spat up, and stared at the shoots and cold, writhing filaments at his feet.