The Flower of One

Florence is an anti-social florist who seeks to grow self-sustaining flowers and thus eliminate the need for her coworkers. The biological difficulties are not easily surmounted. Initially customers don’t want self-sustaining flowers, because caring for the flowers is one of the therapeutic benefits of having them in the first place. Then no one will buy them, largely because they aren’t attractive. Once Florence succeeds, people become impressed by her and they are nicer to her so she wants them around more. But the flowers have grown to view her as a mother figure and will jealously defend her against the threat they perceive in the form of other people’s involvement with her.

Cannibal Mass

Juan is a Catholic boy who totally buys into the whole transubstantiation argument, and decides that the priests need to be brought to trial on charges of cannibalism for eating Jesus. Juan’s family object, but not as strongly as the Catholic church does. Petty though this may be, the last thing the dioses wants to do is publicly deny the legitimacy of transubstantiation. So instead, suspicious and dangerous things begin to happen around Juan. And it turns out that by bizarre chance, the priests he’s accusing are actually cannibals, and they don’t just restrict themselves to crackers. That project to end homelessness… ‘Feed the homeless,’ it says, but it doesn’t specify ‘to who?’ So yeah, once this argument sufficiently consumes Juan, the threat becomes real that the subject of his argument may do so as well.

Connect

An alien entity has hovered outside of Earth’s orbit for millennia. Gifted with the ability of far-sight, the alien has observed Earth Life enviously. It wishes to join us down here, but cannot as the atmosphere would incinerate it, gravity would crush it, and according to War of the Worlds, chicken pox would be problematic. Fortunately, humans eventually develop space travel. The alien attempts to communicate with them, but it’s first several endeavors to gain access to their ships result in catastrophes. Finally, the alien manages to keep one of the humans alive, but she views him as an awful monster and wants nothing to do with him.