Of Toys and Terror

Hi. I'm Simon Peter James. An exceedingly "ordinary" first name followed by an exceedingly ordinary middle name followed by an exceedingly normal last name. Speaking of, why do people choose normal names for their middle and last names? I guess there isn't a really strong naming convention for middle names, but why last names? I guess that might just be a quirk of whoever predestined all this, maybe it has some greater meaning, I don't know though, I never bothered to check.

For context, I'm an imaginative person, so in the case that I've gone insane, it's theoretically possible that I've created this all in the soup of my mind. I'm inclined to believe that's not the case. I live on the outskirts of Seattle, Washington, US, so it's also possible I'm infected enough with like, starbucks and startups culture that I've dehumanized people as either retail workers to be mistreated or customers to exploit or something. Contrary to popular belief, the place you live doesn't have that much to do with your beliefs, I don't really engage with startup culture that much, though I do work retail, which I guess makes that first part a little weird. Something about empathizing with others like you. I dunno tho.

Anyways, I live out in the outskirts, so I'm relatively close to a forest. I used to play in there with my friends (they aren't relevant), but you reach a point in your life where you start playing inside rather than out, and the outside becomes an obstacle to be overcome rather than a fun place to escape. That's definitely changed over the ages, probably around the time computers and wifi started getting fun, but it's still interesting to think about.

Its hard to know if this is an accurate description, but for a "first incident", it was remarkably tame. I spotted what looked like a kid's toy in the hilly woods behind my house during a walk, complete with bright colors and a flower bud, opening up to what looked like the little strand thingies in some flowers. But as soon as my dumb ADHD, I have that by the way, in case you couldn't tell, kicked in and I started fiddling with it, I pricked my finger on the inside, and I quickly dropped it. I ran away back home and washed it and almost forgot about it when I went to bed. A more accurate description of it would probably be "passed out coincidentally in my bed", but it helps to cultivate a sense of normality.

I was in the middle of the road, chained to the sewer grate. Around me were cars, coming dangerously close to hitting me, but never doing so. Every time I recoiled, the chains grew heavier, until I managed to slip out and saw everything else. Stretching in every direction were people, motionless, and all bent backwards looking up at the sky. As I looked on, blood-red vines erupted from their mouths and sprouted upwards, carrying with them dull yellow boils with just a pinprick of orange in the center. I tried to scream, but started to vomit. Only instead of vomit coming out of my mouth, it was pus filled seeds on an artery stem. I knew all too well what this was, this is what the others looked like as they started the transformation. The pain would only grow, until I rooted myself into the ground and used the rest of my body's resources to convert me into whatever the hell everyone else was. Unfortunately, it stopped right there, I grew no extra plates on my scalp, my limbs didn't shrivel and exhume thick, coagulated blood, and I didn't even start to cry thin, watery bile. I was left with a sense of profound wrongness, and a grand canopy above me.

Then I woke up.

It was still dark, so I decided to run back to the woods. Instead of finding a small plastic bud, I found a wand. It was like if the toy from yesterday was a bud and had grown into a proper flower, except made of plastic and almost perfectly sized for my hand. I don't know what I was thinking at the time, maybe I just thought it was an exotic kind of flower that grew particularly fast and was particularly rigid, but I took it into my room for safekeeping.