In the back of his mind he would wonder sometimes how those people on the bus could talk on their phones for extended lengths of time and he would tap his foot impatiently on the grungy carpet of his apartment while the voice on the other end of the line went on about all the various other relatives he had barely heard of. His grandmother was in the hospital again for the fourth time. His father was working through the night.
Jonah sat and stared at the wall, barely conscious that any conversation was taking place beyond that phantom conversation in his head. They were fast approaching the point where the large lie lay. Where she would ask it and he would provide the answer that was expected. He didn't want to, but the truth would never get past the barrier between his mind and his mouth, a barrier that seemed to grow daily.
His eyes felt moist by the time she had finished talking and he pushed his fingers into his temples to maintain some kind of order there. His body slumped ever further down into the soft cushion of his chair and in addition to tapping his foot on the floor, he skittered his fingers on the table next to him.
“Is there anything else?” his mother asked as she took the last breath of the conversation.
She was bored, he had decided during a previous conversation. She was bored talking to her son. He looked around the cramped bachelor's apartment and the messes of his books and clothes. Everyone would be bored by him, and he knew it.
His brain clicked into gear. “I...”
He fought with it for a moment. The feeling of insistency, the feeling of pride, the great eclipse that took place between the two. The dance went on for little more than a second, but it felt like forever.
“No, nothing else.”
There was a brief goodbye on the other end of the phone and then the oblivion of disconnection. Jonah slowly lowered the phone and took a look at the vast emptiness of the tiny apartment around him.
“Everything is... everything is fine.”
Jonah McAllister Argues With the Data
It was past midnight and if he had any brains at all he would have been asleep already. The hour at which he had to get up was fast approaching and if there was anything worse than facing the morning out in the cold of the bus stop it was doing so with only a few hours' sleep. But his brain refused sleep, it had too much thought within it to allow for something as trivial as sleep to interrupt. His tiny apartment had taken on a foreboding atmosphere, as if some forbidden knowledge was beginning to creep into it.
He had checked and double-checked the greenhouse systems, made certain that the exact amount of water and sunlight were getting in that should have, wracking his brains to come up with some other explanation. The feeling that he was about to latch on to an incredibly stupid idea was filling him, but there was little he could do to ignore it. The only difference he could come up with, the only thing that was different between the two greenhouses was that he had been angry when he had done the second, and because he had been angry he had been grumbling. He had heard of plants responding to people speaking to them, but he had always accredited the difference to simple increased carbon dioxide input.
But the plants in the second greenhouse were larger, on average by a whole three millimetres and the ones he had measured last had grown the most. The longer he had been in the greenhouse the more the growth had accelerated, but... He had been in the second greenhouse for twenty minutes less than he had been in the first one. And yet those plants had grown the most.
Restlessly he grasped the small fern that was sitting on his dresser, a present from his grandmother whom (according to her) he never called and placed it on the folding table in the middle of the room.
Tenting his finger he stared at it over the backs of his hands. There was something strange in the air as he catalogued the green fronds of the sun-starved plant. He took in a long breath and exhaled, tightening his vocal chords in a low grumble. The anticipation that hung in the air was almost electric and it hummed within his voice.
Nothing happened.
He frowned and repeated. Still nothing.
There was a moment of clarity and the tension in the room snapped. He looked at the clock on the wall and with the revelation of the time came the revelation of his own stupidity. He blinked once and then twice and then chuckled slightly; grasping the plant and shoving it back to its place on the dresser. He breezed into his bathroom, nearly livid with laughter. He spread a dollop of toothpaste onto his brush and struggled to brush his teeth through fits.
He repeated the mumble with a chuckle through a mouthful of froth.
The movement of the brush stopped suddenly in his mouth.
He ran his tongue over the lump on the side of the brush. At first he was certain that it was merely a crust of toothpaste that tended to form on the side. But, it wasn't softening under his saliva and it wouldn't be moved out of place by his tongue.
Slowly, with an almost paranoid caution
