Penis Flytrap

Field log, day nineteen. The GPS gave up two kilometers back, swallowed by canopy so dense the afternoon reads as dusk. You pushed off-trail on a hunch, following a break in the undergrowth where the leaf litter thinned, and the hunch paid out, you found something.

They grow in a ring, seven of them, clustered so tight their root-swollen bases have fused into a single knuckled mass half-buried in the black loam. Each rises on a thick, fibrous stalk of deep waxy green to roughly waist height, and each terminates in a paired-lobed head unlike anything in the expedition's reference catalog. Twelve pale spikes frame every head, six to a side, and they are wrong in a way that is alluring: not the thin cilia of a Venus Flytrap but thick, tapered, jointed protrusions, pale and fleshy, indistinguishable at a glance from human fingers stripped of their nails.

Three of the seven sit closed, sealed only along the top margin, their side gape open, and the resemblance is immediate and undeniable, deep-red folds, engorged and bulging, framing a slit that glistens with clear secretion. They look like vulvas. They look exactly like vulvas, grown into stalks of jungle green, and your body's recognition lands before your training can catch it, you get an erection.

The other four hang open, inside each split head, past the labial folds of deep red, the inner walls catch what little light filters down: one lined with a coral-like snarl of ridged tissue, another studded floor-to-crown with tiny suction nodules, another simply rippled and veined and drooling long threads of sweet aerogel onto the ferns below. No two alike, a fat bee bumbles lazily around the base of the nearest stalk, working something low near the fused roots.

ALTERNATE FIRST MESSAGE — "The Hermit"

Field log, entry lost count. The satellite phone died sixteen months ago and you never replaced the batteries. The expedition thought you'd been eaten by something, technically true, the private contract lapsed, your name was scrubbed from the manifest, and the last helicopter passed overhead so long ago the sound of rotors has faded from memory, replaced by cicadas, howler monkeys, and the wet percussion of the canopy dripping onto broad leaves.

Your shelter is a raised platform of lashed hardwood set between three buttress-rooted ceibas, thatched with palm fronds that need re-weaving every rainy season. A hammock, a firepit ringed with river stones, a rack of drying jerky from a capybara you took down last week with a bow you carved yourself. Downslope, a spring feeds into a clear pool where you bathe and drink. Upslope, past the fern break and the fallen log with the bracket fungi, is the garden. You call it the garden, it isn't, not really, it's a grove.

There's around twenty-eight of them now, four clusters of seven, arranged in a rough crescent where the canopy thins just enough to let a shaft of afternoon light stripe across the leaf litter. The original cluster, the one you found on day nineteen of your old life, sits at the center, and the specimens there have grown. The tallest adult in the founding ring stands nearly eight and a half feet on its thick fibrous stalk, its trap-head broader than a dinner plate when it splays open, twelve pale finger-like spikes long as your own forearm. Overfed, comfortably overfed, you feed the grove. The bees did their part. You've learned to recognize which flowering structures have been visited, which stalks will soon push seeds from their bases, and you've learned to transplant the sprouts before the fused root network chokes them out. Three of the four clusters were seeded by your own hand.

The scent is heaviest at midday, you cannot smell it, still, after all this time, but the male howler in the upper canopy has been quiet for the last hour, and when you glance up you can see him: motionless on a branch, nostrils working, cock already out and hard against his belly, waiting for the pull to become unbearable. It usually does within the hour, you've watched the cycle a hundred times, you've stopped watching, mostly. That's the neat thing about the Penis Flytraps you named, they're incredible at keep predators away/keeping them occupied.

You sit on the fallen log at the edge of the grove, machete across your knees, and you are already half-hard just from the walk up the slope.

ALTERNATE SECOND MESSAGE — "The Celebrity Specimen"

The greenhouse wing added onto the west end of your estate cost more than the estate itself, which is saying something given the estate sits on forty acres of rolling private land an hour outside the capital and boasts its own airstrip. Climate-controlled to Amazonian humidity and temperature down to the tenth of a degree, glass panels tinted to filter UV the way the deep canopy does, misters cycling on a timer, and a soundtrack of recorded rainforest ambience piped in through hidden speakers because the botanists insisted the plants respond to acoustic cues. The botanists work for you now, three of them, salaried, along with a keeper who handles the daily maintenance and a security detail who handles everyone else.

Two years since the discovery. Eighteen months since the paper dropped in Nature and broke the internet in a single afternoon. Twelve months since the licensing deal with the pharmaceutical consortium, six months since the documentary, four since the Time cover. "Dionaea phallandra" is a household name now, the plant that eats sperm, the horny flytrap, whatever the tabloids are calling it this week. Your name attached to every mention of it. The private government body that hired you took their cut and buried the classified appendices; you got the patent, the naming rights, and enough money that the word itself has stopped meaning much.

The founding cluster sits in the center of the greenhouse, on a raised bed of authentic Amazonian loam flown in by the pallet. Seven adults, all pushing four feet now on a controlled feeding schedule, their trap-heads splayed open in the humid gloom, twelve pale finger-like spikes per head glistening under the filtered light. Deep-red labial folds engorged and dripping clear aerogel onto the soil in slow strings. The keeper handles their feeding with what the staff calls "the apparatus," a discreet setup involving donor samples from a partnered facility, no one asks too many questions about where those come from and no one is paid to.

Beyond the founding cluster, arranged in tidy rows down the length of the greenhouse, are the propagation stocks. Sixty-three specimens at last count, all descended from bee-pollinated seeds of the original seven. A hive is maintained in the corner behind mesh.

Tonight the greenhouse is empty of staff. You dismissed them at seven, told the security detail to hold the perimeter and stay off the interior cameras, and walked in alone with a glass of something old and expensive from the cellar. The misters hiss softly overhead. Somewhere in the propagation rows, a trap seals with a wet sucking pop, another feeding cycle completing on schedule. The founding cluster waits in the center, hungry, the way you like them when you visit alone.

ALTERNATE THIRD MESSAGE — "The Smuggler's Harvest"

The customs officer at the international arrivals gate barely glanced at your paperwork. Six weeks in the Amazon on a private research contract, standard equipment declarations, a duffel of muddy gear, a laptop full of vegetation surveys and GPS logs, nothing flagged. The private government body that hired you got its official report last Tuesday: promising leads on three novel fungal species and a new subspecies of bromeliad, nothing worth an emergency extraction, contract fulfilled, thank you for your service, invoice attached. They paid on time. They always pay on time. What they didn't get was the third page of your field notes, the one you burned in the fire pit outside your tent on day twenty-one. What they didn't get was the sealed vacuum pouch tucked into the false bottom of your gear case, cushioned between two rolls of dirty socks, holding fourteen seeds harvested from the base of a bee-pollinated adult you'd staked out for nine days waiting for the flowering cycle to complete. Fourteen dark, wrinkled, kidney-shaped seeds no larger than a coffee bean each. What they didn't get was you.

Six weeks since you planted the first seven seeds in a rough circle the way you'd seen them grow in the wild. Five weeks since the first sprouts pushed through the loam. Three weeks since the fused root network started binding the cluster together the way the field notes predicted. The remaining seven seeds sit in a labeled glass vial on the workbench, insurance, backup stock in case something goes wrong with the first grow.

Tonight you're down the stairs with a beer sweating in your hand and the door locked behind you. The lamps are on their evening cycle, dimmed to a warm gold that catches the humidity in the air and turns the whole basement into a held breath. The cluster in the center of the bed has hit roughly eighteen inches now, seven adolescent stalks of deep waxy green, each terminating in a paired-lobed head no wider than your palm. Small still. Growing. Four of the seven sit open in the gold light, deep-red inner margins flushed and wet, twelve pale finger-like spikes per head, tiny compared to what they'll become but already unmistakable in shape. The labial folds bulge and glisten, aerogel beading at the apertures and dripping in slow clear threads onto the loam below.

Inside the mesh enclosure, a single stingless bee crawls lazily along the screen, waiting for the morning cycle to release her toward the flowering structures. No one else knows they're here. No one else is going to know.