Overgrowth

by Mira Grant

The sky is a living thing, a void filled with points of slow, deliberate vitality.

Family is where you keep the pieces of yourself that need to be shared with someone else if they’re going to have meaning, the memories that must be seen from three or four different angles at the same time before they find their context.

Cats are better than people. Cats are always better than people.

It would be foolish arrogance to assume every world would follow the Star Trek mode and settle on something with two legs, two arms, eyes to watch the world, hands to reach out and change it. The octopus, the crow, they’re both Earth creatures, and they don’t look much like humans. Why would alien plant people?

It didn’t make sense to me how humans could think of each other as against the law, especially given how often land has changed hands across the countries: no human life is illegal.

The question of who’s being colonized and who’s doing the colonizing has always been a societal one. Individuals can stand to either side of the divide.

Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do: just look at the future racing toward you, and smile, and hope it doesn’t hurt when it arrives.

Humans love having an easy bad guy. Plant people from outer space, that’s hard. Someone who was conspiring with them somehow, but was otherwise entirely human and comprehensible? Now that was a bad guy to believe in.

But I wasn’t human, and that meant hurting me wasn’t wrong. Hurting me was protecting humanity. Of such loopholes are a horrifying number of atrocities born.

“No one’s paying taxes anymore, because of her and people like her,” snapped Agent Brown. “No one’s sending their kids to school. When a house catches fire, the firetrucks don’t show up to save it. The social safety net is gone. Society is on the cusp of following it down.” “So you’re pissed because she’s a better Republican than your guy, is that it?”