In Bloom

by Paul Tremblay

There are always truths submerged within stories, and her job is, if not to dredge them up, then to invite readers onto her own chartered boat, guiding them so that they may uncover those truths from the murky waters for themselves.

traveling within the coded memory of my DNA, back to when our ancestors lived in the primordial oceans and were nothing but nerves and electrical impulses dedicated to environmental observation and reaction, with little bandwidth to spare for a singular, primitive sentience.

Hijacked isn’t quite the right word, though. I was still me, but I was also tethered to a shared signal, a primitive connectedness, and I wasn’t afraid of the creature so much as it was a new element of the surrounding environment of which I was a part.

I want to be made into an antenna again. I want to be connected, or reconnected, to that evolutionary wavelength that’s millions of years old.