“I got a good look,” the doctor said. She picked a glossy brochure from her display case and gave it to Lucy. It showed pictures of pinhead-sized red spots, and close ups of scaly black crusts surrounded by swollen skin, but none of the pictures looked anything like the green stem that had been on her shoulder only just moments ago.

“It’s non-cancerous,” the doctor said. “But you’re on the radar now. You will have to get checked every six months.” She talked about the importance of skincare and people lacking a complete understanding of the damaging effects of the sun. Then she handed Lucy a thick catalog of her specially designed line of SPF makeup and moisturizers.

“Try these samples,” said the doctor, as she dropped a few miniature tubes in a plastic bag. “If you like them, we can put you on a subscription program. The more you commit, the less you pay.”

“Doctor, I know it sounds strange, but to me, what you plucked out looked like something organic. Maybe you should have a closer look.”

“It’s called a dermatofibroma,” said the doctor. “And it was growing a hair. I guess you could say it looks like a stem. It’s nothing to worry about, though. There’s a fistula under your dermis, and a hair follicle that’s complicating things. I have seen hundreds of these.”

“But it looks like a plant.”

The doctor looked at Tonya.

“I tried to explain it to her,” Tonya said. “I’m a biology teacher.”

The doctor dropped another lotion sample into the plastic bag. “Don’t worry. It’s non-cancerous.”

She wrote a topical prescription, and Lucy and Tonya drove directly to the pharmacy, where they replenished their frozen goods, and filled the prescription.

“You’re putting this on tonight,” Tonya said, dangling the paper bag with the prescription in Lucy’s face.

At home, Tonya fried shrimp and sausage with polenta patties. The smell sickened Lucy who craved only water. She was supposed to prepare for a motion hearing in the morning, but she felt exhausted. She pushed a dollop of the prescription cream onto the tip of her finger, then dabbed it lightly around the crater opening where the follicle – that is what the doctor called it – had already sprung out a new tender, fuzzy shoot.

“Hello, there,” Lucy said to it, rubbing the tip of her finger on the underside bend of the stem. “You picked an odd place to grow, didn’t you?”

It seemed to her that the seedling understood, and that it tried to answer by sending a shiver down her skin. It was not unpleasant.

“Well, then,” said Lucy, removing the cream she’d just dropped on it. “I’d better make it easier for you.”

A vision appeared in her mind’s eye as if some invisible entity had switched on a television set inside her head. The image was clear and vivid, a plexus of sinews and wooded limbs spouting cascades of lush red leaves. It was twisted and beautiful like a close up of a network of veins, or like beach driftwood under the light of a sunset, with the water reflecting back its tortured shapes — only stranger, alien, or… the word came to her — mythical.

Lucy did not remember taking off her clothes, getting into bed, or falling asleep. It was Tonya’s gasp, followed by a “What the hell?” that woke her.  Only then did she realize that she’d been lost in an intense dream. As she woke, Lucy had the impression of disconnecting, as if from cables and wires, the low thrumming that had kept her senses sedated quieting with each of Tonya’s syllables: “I said, what the hell are you doing out here?”

Lucy, rubbing her eyes, had a vague sense of loss, of missing something that nurtured her in a place deep within.

She was naked, and she was standing in the yard, under the sun.

It was a pleasant spring morning on the bluff, and it was early yet, cool and dewy. The sun warmed Lucy through and through, her dermis soft and the fine hair on her arms roused with the breeze. The sun felt glorious on her skin. She did not look into the light, but she could feel everything inside her reaching for it, every follicle of hair drinking it in.

“What were you thinking, coming out here like that?”

Lucy greeted her lover with a smile, memories of their first kisses brushing against her awareness, and the kindnesses of Tonya’s touch and care over the years remembered so vividly that she could see, momentarily, from her lover’s eyes, the strangeness of where she stood, rooted, as it were, in their backyard. Naked.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “Tonya, I wish you could share it with me.”