Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

And when some boats that reported those strange things disappeared, the fishermen figured ghost nets were bad luck. Then they found out some ghost nets had been overgrown with something strange. Jelly. Turns out a polluted, overfished ocean turns into a slime farm—jellyfish, medusas, salps, and so on and so forth are opportunists that thrive in the areas man cleared out and poisoned. That’s what they think is happening. Jellyheads have other ideas.

I printed the story over a faint photograph of Emily on jelly. I called it “Oneirovore”. That’s what I think the jelly needs from the animals it infects. I think it eats our dreams. And isn’t it just too perfect the way jelly uses the mammalian diving reflex? Of course, I’m a fucking jellyhead and that’s the kind of thing we say.

The jelly organisms are colonial mesozoans, parasitic relatives of jellyfish and the other slimes. They aren’t a single animal; they’re a self-contained ecosystem. The stingers, the nematocysts, can’t penetrate human skin. You need to touch them to a mucus membrane.

At first, jelly was like jenkum, another fake drug the news gets panicked about. If you were actually doing it, the first news stories were hilarious. Then they found the way it entrained people’s brains. The mirror cells, the areas of the brain that allow us to understand other people by mimicking their hypothetical behavior, enlarged and became more active. There was talk of using jelly as therapy for sociopaths.

Jelly was too cheap and easy to cultivate to interest the investment class of criminals. And nobody ever got mugged by a jellyhead. After crack and meth and heroin, it was such a fucking relief.

It took a couple of years for the infections to advance to a stage where people started noticing anything was wrong. And let’s be serious. Not everyone was as honest with their doctors as they could have been.

Now I’ll be honest. I talk about jellyhead love, but Jason wasn’t my friend. He was just an asshole I had to put up with because I wanted to be around Brad and Brad’s jelly. Getting high and crawling into the tank is exactly the kind of thing that creepy little moron would do, and it’s different than what Emily and I are doing.

I can hear the noises, the slicks and bubbles as Emily’s jelly draws back in. I don’t like to look. In a few minutes, Emily is going to stand up. Then she’ll get her sun dress off the back of the chair, put on her flip-flops with the daisies on the toe-strap, and we’ll walk down to the beach, walk toward the lighthouse until we’re alone.

Then we’ll wade out into the water. And I know Emily. When the waves hit her, she’ll be scared. She’ll reach for my hand and, when I take it, she’ll hold onto me for protection, and I’ll help her under the waves until we get out far enough to swim. We will dive into the dark, a soft place where noises are all muffled by distance, take our place in the ghost net, and I will go to sleep and never be lonely again.

Arlene J. Yandugwas born in Bukidnon, a region in the southern part of the Philippines. She teaches literature at Xavier University; paints blooms, clouds and stardust. Like her paintings, many of her poems reflect local colour and landscapes. While generally cheery, she sometimes dabbles in surreal writing, especially after reading grim or gothic books, or when she is terribly, terribly upset.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’sstories have appeared in places such as Fantasy Magazine , The Book of Cthulhu , Evolve 2 and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction . She’s even been nominated for a literary award or two…and won some of them. Find her at: silviamoreno-garcia.com.

Paula R. Stileshas sold a heap and a peck of stories in speculative fiction, as well as a horror novel, The Mighty Quinn (due out in 2012 from Dark Continents Publishing) and a cowritten urban fantasy novel, Fraterfamilas (from Innsmouth Free Press). She is also Editor-in-Chief of Innsmouth Free Press. You can find her at: http://thesnowleopard.net